Earlier this month I wrote a post about Measuring your referral impact using a new service called bit.ly. The excitement around bit.ly is heating up as TechCrunch this morning chronicles the brewing battle between bit.ly and a competing service Digg: Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And their Inevitable Clash with Digg.
If you are in the business of building your online presence, both of these tools matter. Most of your customers don’t wake up in the morning and think about visiting your site. In fact, most of them won’t think about it period unless they hear about it word-of-mouth from one of the sites they already visit. Both digg and bit.ly are avenues for you to get the word out about your site, blog or press release.
I am rooting for bit.ly in this battle, because they help people that produce viral campaigns measure their effectiveness. In my post linked to above I detail just how this works. I have used digg before as well, and it’s a multi-step process I haven’t bothered to repeat in over a year. Maybe this is why digg receives just 20,000 new links each day while bit.ly garners 2-3 million.