Bitly releases reputation 'smoke detector'

URL-shortening service Bitly has released a real-time reputation-monitoring tool to help companies keep tabs of sentiments about them in social media. The reputation-monitoring product sends out alerts when there is a swing in sentiment or number of social-media mentions around a selected keyword or brand name. "It's meant to be a smoke detector. You may not hear from it very often, but when you do, it's important," Bitly general manager Andrew Cohen said in an interview with marketing news site Advertising Age. While the three-year-old firm enters a crowded field, it has a distinct advantage: it sits on a trove of social-sharing data due to its being one of the most popular URL shorteners. Cohen said Bitly shortens 80 million URLs a day and tracks eight billion clicks a month. "(Sentiment analysis) is a very hard problem until you get to scale," Cohen said. Cohen said the product is different from the clipping services "that tell you what incredibly damaging thing was said yesterday on Facebook." "Amid all the noise out there, our product gives you a ranked list of stories and says, here's the thing that will go viral over the next 24 or 48 hours. That's what you should be looking at as a brand. We want to tell you about this before it ends up on the front page of CNN," he said. Demo in NY Bitly platform manager Matt LeMay hinted at the new products at the monthly NY Tech Meetup in New York City this week. At the demo, LeMay showed a dashboard that included a chart tracking the sentiment of "Abercrombie" over a period of time, with the chart showing a peak in positive sentiment in mid-August. The chart also showed links to related content that had gone viral during the time. In Abercrombie's case, the mid-August peak was traced to news stories about the company's announcement that it would pay The Situation from MTV's "Jersey Shore" to stop wearing its clothing on the show. Social search tool LeMay also gave a sneak peek of the company's new social-search tool meant to fill in the holes of traditional search engines. Cohen said this is a "conversation search," where for any given topic, "it returns the most viral and engaging content being shared on social media." "And we're seeing breaking news -- protest videos from Iran and Tunisia, corporate controversies, political scoops -- being shared on Bitly long before it is pointed to by major news organizations or indexed by large search engines," he said. — TJD, GMA News