Comments on: Amazon.com Gets Social Media, Too

By: TheGrok’s Not-To-Miss Links for the Week 6/12/09 | FutureNow's GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:56:43 +0000

[...] 5. A great example of why Amazon is one of the smartest online retailers. They get Social Media, Too. [...]

By: Chris Fox

Chris Fox — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:17:24 +0000

Matt,
Agreed – great conversation – thanks for sparking it off.
I use Tweetdeck and Bit.ly quite a lot – both shorten the URL before you post.

By: Matt McGee

Matt McGee — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:32:10 +0000

Great conversation, thx gang.

@Chris — I dare say the number of people who know what a bookmarklet is and actually use them is tiny. Certainly a small fraction of Amazon shoppers, less than 1%. I love bookmarklets and use them all the time, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking they have mass usage in a scenario like this. I doubt Amazon is doing this to appeal to power users who know what bookmarklets are. But the average Amazon shopper who wants to put a URL on Facebook or Twitter and say something about it, too? This is great for that person.

@Mandy — the desktop clients do have built-in shorteners, but you still have to put the long URL on your Tweet before you post, don’t you? That leaves you with less room to say something about the link you’re sharing. (Or maybe there are clients that shorten the URL before you post? I don’t know of any, but would love to hear which ones do.)

@Jean-Paul – thanks.

By: Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:19:50 +0000

Hi Matt,

It is my first time to be on your blog.It is awesome!
your post is very valuable for me and it is so nice to see that Amazon can be so creative with their marketing strategy

By: Mandy Bee

Mandy Bee — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:44:32 +0000

I have to agree with Chris. If people are using Twitter.com and not some kind of desktop app to tweet, Amazon’s new shortened URLs are great. Most Twitter apps have built-in URL shorteners though, so it’s easier to just copy the whole URL from the browser and throw it in the app.

If Amazon had these URLs right on the product pages to copy + paste from the site then I would rather use their shortened URLs vs another site’s.

By: Glen Allsopp

Glen Allsopp — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:29:30 +0000

Yeah, the first option is definitely easier, I think this is a good move on their part. Still a slight hassle, but nothing people would moan about.

I can see a lot of other retailers wanting to adopt this method now.