It’s no secret that most likely everyone in your office has (at least) a Facebook account. You’ll find a handful of them who even have twitter accounts. The last two companies I have worked with have been (and still are) very vocal about having their employees retweet (RT:) things they wanted viral. I guess that’s cool. I mean if you’re comfortable becoming a non-paid billboard, then yeah, it is cool.

Far be it for me to tell you how to run your office, I won’t. But we all know that putting a carrot at the end of the stick makes people do more and work harder. Especially when it’s money at the end of the stick. So lets say you have a campaign that needs to go viral. You have a handful of uber-popular (facebook/twitter) profiles at your disposal and really want to motivate them.

Why not incentivize them to help make your message viral? Why not run a contest and see who drives the most traffic to your page/campaign. In our office we run these contests regularly. We have two levels of winners:

• 1st prize (generally $100) for most traffic directed to the page/campaign.
• 2nd prize (generally $50) for either longest (average) time on site or highest (average) page view.

It’s actually very simple and for the sake of this tutorial, I’m using Google Analytics. I am certain this can also be accomplished with Omniture and I think WebTrends but don’t quote me on that one.

Google will allow you to URL encode variables into your URL. Specific variables that they You need to follow their format as far as variables (see below) they even supply an online tool that will help automate this process Google Analytics URL Builder. But the end results are fantastic.

• Campaign Source (utm_source) – Required – Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source. Example: utm_source=facebook
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium) – Required – Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click.  Example: utm_medium=viral || utm_medium=ppc
• Campaign Term (utm_term) – NOT Required -  Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad.  Example: utm_term=Long+Island+News
• Campaign Content (utm_content) – NOT Required – Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.  Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
• Campaign Name (utm_campaign) – Required – Used for keyword analysis. If you notice from the screen shot (above), this is the variable that I use to track employee names/initials.

As I mentioned though, they have a fantastic tool:

Once you “Generate URL” (Step 3) the new URL is generated:

http://www.somewebsite.com/thatpage.php?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=viral&utm_campaign=joeg

This URL will now allow you to track all incoming traffic from each of your employees.

Viewing the traffic is easy:

• Log in to your Google Analytics account
• On the left side click Traffic Sources to expand the sub-menu.
• Select Campaigns from the list.

That’s it! Your information should be right there. Remember though, Google Analytics are not real time. I normally finalize my reports and numbers between 11am and 12am.

TIP: Click “Add to Dashboard” at the top of the page to add this to your dashboard.

Hope this was helpful to you and your campaigns are successful. Best of luck!

- Joe

I bet you’re saying right now that nobody is as busy as you, right? That you just don’t have the time to read every email, when the sender sends it. I know that during the work day, I can barely fit in lunch let alone click on a link that you think I might like, find helpful, is porn or is sure signs of the next big affiliate/money making craze.  I personally do most of my responding between 8-10pm. This is the time the kids are in bed, I’m on my recliner and I have the time to read about what you think I should know or might find interesting.

If you’re a Twitter user you should be very familiar with seeing (redirect) links from bit.ly. Back in May of 2008 Twitter parted ways with tinyurl.com and introduced bit.ly to the community. In your “tweets”, twitter will automatically convert your link to a bit.ly (masked/redirect) link once your URI reaches 31 characters. If you have exactly 30 characters in your URI, the tweet will be delivered to your followers/list as you designed it, with your URI in tact. Once you reach character 31, truncation occurs and the URI gets trimmed to 27 visible characters and an ellipse (…)  30 total. For affiliate marketers trying to pass off their links, this is a dream.

Sure, it’s another redirect service that will mask your links. But there is soooo much more to it. For example, you can track if your links where clicked, how many times, if they went viral, etc.

How do I create an account with bit.ly?

Let’s start from their main page (of www.bit.ly), yes you do need to create an account. The service is free and registering requires you to enter your email address, a desired user name and password. You can also use the site without registering first, but then you will lose the ability to track and monitor your links.

Now take the URL you’d like to convert, copy and paste into the main input text field on the page.

It’s really self explanatory and I’ll leave it to you to play some more. What I really wanted to share was a technique on how to track if your link was opened.

Earlier this week I had to send a link out to a few V.I.P. people. I also wanted to re-distribute the link to my facebook  and twitter profiles. Because the landing page I was sending people to was not my page/URL and encoding some variables in the URL (for tracking) was not possible. So I recreated the redirect a total of five times, using bit.ly.

You may have noticed when you pressed the “Shorten” button that you were presented with a new area, that looked like this:

I created a “slug” that is rather easy to decipher “000rs-111209″ was it’s name. To me this told me that Roy Smith </fictitious name> received this link on 11/12/2009. Of course you can encrypt these links how ever you’d like. For this post, I wanted to keep it simple.

Within an hour of sending all the emails I was able to see that all five of my links were clicked on. Within that same hour I received one response/confirmation. It wasn’t until later that night that I had heard from three of the four remaining. I was able to start all of those conversations with “I see you read the article I sent you, what did you think”? It is a little presumptuous, but it gets the job done and even makes for good conversation when asked “how did you know?”