| News Letter [Home] |     |
| November, 2009 | |
Using Micro URLs to Communicate with your Customer Community Micro URL Overview and its Relevance to Live Chat As a live chat practitioner who not only uses short and terse Hemingway style journalistic prose to communicate with your customers via chat so that more can be accomplished in a lesser amount of time, The need to refrain from verbosity does not warrant an explanation. After all, brevity is indeed the soul of wit. WE can adapt this approach on yet another dimension when it comes to the world of the web. Very often, your chat operators will feel a need to send a web address, also known as a uniform resource locator or URL, to one of your clients or business associates. You can use the Push URL feature of your live chat application to introduce the web page to your customer. However, making the URL available to the customer via chat transcripts is also a worthwhile proposition since this allows customers to return to that web page at their convenience. Also, there will be situations when you will feel the need to share an external link with your customers. URL Shortening Services to the Rescue For a variety of reasons which are all technical in nature and well beyond the scope of this report, URLs can tend to be extremely long. These “long-winding” URLs pose particular problems when you need to transmit it to your followers on Twitter owing to the 140 character micro blogging restriction. Also, long URLs tend to break when they wrap around a line thus causing access difficulties when you click on them.. There are a number of free URL shortening services on the Internet today that can help you reduce the length of the URL of one of your web pages for prompt transmission and easy retention. Although these services have been around for many years, their real need has been felt only recently in a big way because of the length restriction Twitter imposes when communicating through micro blog posts of 140 characters each or less. There are other chat-related applications as well which we will explore presently. Tiny URL Tiny URL located on the web at www.tinyurl.com is among the first to offer this service. The service is free although some premium services cost a small fee. In order to generate a shorter version of the address of one of your web pages, simply copy paste the URL from your address bar into the edit box on the website and click the “Make Tiny URL Button.” The system generates a shorter version of the URL you have submitted and you are good to go. You can start using the Tiny URL generated for you immediately. Download the Tiny URL tool bar if you happen to find yourself using this service very frequently. The Tiny URL tool bar lets you shorten the URL of the web pate you are visiting at that time. Once you are on the website, you can explore their other related services so that you can use them whenever you feel the need to do so. Bit.Ly Top 10 URL Shortening Websites Plus 10 More Where as the Top 10 list on this website’s blog post features the preferred services, several additional online URL shortening services are listed in the comments section that are equally potent and offer many attractive attributes. So the next time one of your chat operators needs to forward a product page from your website to a customer, use a URL shortening service to make it more convenient for your customer community. Better still, activate the tracking feature to watch how this data is used by your customers either to obtain more information or to make a purchase.
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