TinyURL shortens a long Web address into something smaller, memorable, usable, and marketable. Along with the imitators that followed, the concept is a killer and TinyURL.com is a good place to start.

Practical applications

1. Twitter gives you 140 characters.

Twitter makes each character precious. On Twitter you’d use up your entire update with a long URL.

Go to TinyURL, insert the looong URL, and out pops a 24-character one. Makes a big difference when you want to set up the reason why your follower should click on the hyperlink you post.

2. Easier to customize and remember.

If you ask me to help you with marketing, I ask you to read The First Three Questions first. The article features the first three questions I’m going to ask you before we get started. To hyperlink to the story (before TinyURL) I would have to:

* Come to my website

* Use the search feature on the top right hand corner

* Type in “the first three”

* Get all the results (including the ones where the story is linked to)

* Scroll down

* Select the URL

* Copy http://blog.joehageonline.com/2008/05/03/marketing-strategy-the-first-three-questions/

* Paste it into my communication

Eight steps. Tonight I realized that I could go to TinyURL and create a small, memorable string. So I went in and created http://tinyurl.com/First3.

I’ll never forget it. I’ll never have to look it up again. Heck, you may even remember it and recommend it to a friend.

3. No more broken links

I recently did some fundraising for the Seattle Heart Walk, benefiting the American Heart Association.

Here is the string for my donation page: http://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=260789&lis=0&kntae260789=7555D15BA0FB4E269DF03E92C448DD09&supId=184963211

Not all browsers are savvy enough to recognize that the link extends that far. The string is so long that it wraps (as it did here) from one line to the next.

Frustrating.

With TinyURL, that problem goes away.

4. Free Marketing

Back to our fund raising example. Cardiac Science ran a promotion: sponsor any Cardiac Science employee and be eligible to win a free AED defibrillator (click here to learn more about why your child’s school needs one).

So I created a URL to market the benefit:  http://tinyURL.com/WinAED

Which one is a better marketing communication?

Win an AED at http://tinyurl.com/WinAED

- or -

Win an AED at http://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=260789&lis=0&kntae260789=7555D15BA0FB4E269DF03E92C448DD09&supId=184963211

P.S. Sorry, Elizabeth, someone else won.

In a future post, I’ll talk about a TinyURL imitator that, as far as I can tell, has a distinct advantage versus TinyURL.

Are you already using this or a similar application? If so, share with my readers what you use and why.

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