Most likely you know bitly for their URL shortening services. The company says they shorten around 80 million URLs a day and track 8 billion clicks a month.
The company announced yesterday they’ve been working on real-time search powered by bitly data for quite awhile. Their first launch is “reputation monitoring”, which will help brands track trending news about their company, as well as social engagement.
The first, launching today, is called “reputation monitoring.” What it lacks in catchy naming, it makes up for in awesomeness: given a search term, it will alert you when there is a sudden change in engagement and/or sentiment around content involving that term. Because these alerts are built on bitly’s realtime social data, you can find this content long before you see it on a search engine based on crawling web pages, and probably long before you see it on a news site.
bitly created a few interesting topics for you to monitor if you would like to do so. They live off the real-time data, which they say “on average lead major search engines by 12 hours or more.”
In order to monitor any term you would like, you need a bitly Enterprise account for $995 a month.
Let me leave you with this quote from Andrew Cohen, bitly’s general manager: “What we’ve built is a conversation search. 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.”
Thoughts? Can bitly see the future?
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