URL shortening services replace a long URL like http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ with a much shorter one like http://bit.ly/fBspqc. When the service sees the code 'eob7ql', it automatically redirects the user to the original URL.

URL shorteners have seen an explosion with the advent of social media. They are great for keeping links clean in an email or minimizing URLs in a Twitter message, where every character is precious.

Some shortener services have built-in metrics. Bit.ly is one of these. Once you register with Bit.ly, you get an overview page showing the links you have shortened, along with the number of times people have clicked on each link and the total number of click-throughs to that item by all people using Bit.ly for that content. These metrics allow you to see whether you are sharing unique content, and how popular your sharing efforts are. IBM's URL shortener As an aid to IBMers becoming socially engaged for the Centennial, we are using Bit.ly to offer an enterprise solution for shortening URLs. This will give all IBMers easy access to pre shortened URLs for the most popular Centennial content, while providing IBM with a consolidated view of the traffic being generated to our content. This solution will also increase our brand visibility by including the IBM name in every URL. The IBM URL shortener has additional benefits for both IBM and the IBMer. It is designed to keep individual IBMer results anonymous at the enterprise level so that only you will know the engagement you generate. The service will allow individual IBMers to keep tabs on where links are surfacing, providing insight into the posts that generate the most attention.

The enterprise solution also provides "end-to-end branding." This means that if someone pastes a link from IBM.com into Bit.ly, they'll be given an IBM-branded short URL. These links can be measured by IBM. This will result in both additional brand mentions for IBM, and greater transparency for end users about link destinations.

The service will allow IBMers already engaged in social media to "associate" their current and future Bit.ly links with the enterprise dashboard, enabling a consolidated view of shortened links. If you already use the Bit.ly service, you can import your existing links. By registering with the enterprise account, your short URLs will be accessible to other IBMers.

In the future, the service will allow IBMers to create individual IBM-branded URLs for content that they find interesting. This feature is for those IBMers focused on social media as a core job function. Next: Social bookmarking