Tuesday night, I attended a Stanford Small Business Entrepreneurs Club event. The guest speaker was Carlos R. Hernandez and his topic was “Social Media for the Uncomfortable.”
Carlos began his talk by explaining that five years ago the most technical thing that he knew how to do, as it related to the web, was send and receive email. Today, Carlos has established a powerful digital presence for himself across several social networks, and he skillfully uses social media to strengthen his personal and professional relationships. Today, he is invited to speak at events and educate others about how they too can leverage social media to improve their businesses and personal brand.
I thoroughly enjoyed Carlos’s talk; he is an engaging presenter, and I learned a lot. I would like to share with you one particular tip that Carlos taught us about how to shorten links using bitly, (http://www.bit.ly) — Carlos showed us how a link can be shortened and customized to provide additional information and reinforce one’s personal brand.
Carlos explained that the advantage of using a service like bitly is that it allows you to take a link that may be many characters long and shorten it so that there are fewer characters. This is advantageous when you are using a program like Twitter that limits your message (tweet) to 140 characters (and every character counts.)
For example, the normal URL (or Permalink) for this blog post would be: http://brianrobertmohr.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/how-to-customize-a-link-using-bit-ly
Using bitly the link was shortened and customized: http://bit.ly/MohrBitlyHowTo
Below is a screen shot of the bitly website. I encourage you to try it out and create your own shortened links.
I was really excited that Carlos showed us this “trick.” I hope that you too will find it useful. Please feel free to write to me if you have any questions.
