SXSW 2013 was nothing short of a marketing bonanza. Big name companies like Doritos, Chevrolet and Yahoo were all vying for the attention of beer drinking music lovers in the Capitol city of Austin, Tejas. However, there was one company that got my attention by doing guerilla marketing the old-fashioned way. What did they do? The gave me a business card, a handshake and a bottle of cold water! Meet ItsMyUrls:
How does Itsmyurls work?
ItsMyURLs was created when we realized that as time goes on you have more and more sites that you are always adding to your online presence. With no easy way to just say “here, you can connect with me on any site I have a profile on at this one link”. So, it’s basically the easiest way for people to find you on all of your profiles online. It’s also a free service with some paid upgrades including a “branded QR code” and a “Pro Version” profile.
Are users able to add all of their urls or just the big names like Facebook and Twitter?
Users can add url/link to any profile that they have from any website to their ItsMyURLs profile. There is no limit. You can also add non-social profile links as well. For example, I will add the link to this interview once it goes live to ItsMyURLs.com/Hustle247.
This is the first business that I have seen like this. Do you have any competition directly or indirectly?
We do have competitors, but I don’t consider them competition! Not mentioning any names to give them exposure, but our competition are usually companies that try to copy our concept but don’t really understand the core business model of what we are trying to accomplish. They usually self destruct after a while because they just don’t get it.
For example, ItsMyURLs is considered “the bridge” between all of your social profiles, so when you go to ItsMyURLs.com/Hustle247 from there you can choose to go to my twitter, LinkedIn, Spotify, etc, and when you make your choice, you are taken DIRECTLY to my profile on the site chosen.
With our competitors, you would get to a profile on their service, then click on a link (say twitter for example), then it actually imports twitter info into a small window on our competitors site. You never actually get to the final destination. You get a little window that you aren’t familiar with, and all kinds of issues come up with this approach because you don’t control the data, twitter does. So we know our lane, and our core business model, which is “One Link to All Your Profiles”.
How were you able to pick up big name users like Lil Kim, Pitbull and Akon?
We were able to get a lot of influential users to use ItsMyURLs really out of necessity. I know it sounds funny, but basically, we had no budget, and were targeting one user at a time to use our service and it wasn’t a productive approach. So we decided to reach out to a few influential users, and from there it was easier to get one after the other. The first one that we got to try the service was (now my friend) Faizon Love, after that we got Coco, Kid Capri, Chopper City, and it just snowballed. One of the key attractions for public figures and celebrities to use ItsMyURLs is our “verified user” feature. Similar to twitter, we offer a feature to people that may have issues with imitators and fake profiles.
A lot of online marketers think that QR Codes don’t execute well. What are your thoughts on that?
I think that in the way that most marketers use QR codes, I can understand why they say that.
ItsMyURLs uses them in a unique way, and our user’s QR codes get scanned hundreds of thousands of times per month. The way marketers use QR codes is by slapping them on every piece of marketing material they can.
The way ItsMyURLs uses QR codes is, we supply each profile on our service with a QR code, when someone scans this QR code they are taken to the mobile view of your ItsMyURLs profile that shows all of your links, so we consider it to be a sort of “social identity QR code”. People can access all of your links by simply scanning this QR code.
The coolest and most innovative thing that separates our use of QR codes is our “Branded QR Code” upgrade. You purchase the upgrade, send us an image that you would like embedded in your QR. We take 24 hours to design and test your QR code on multiple operating systems and devices, and we email you a fully branded social identity QR code.
What is the long-term vision of for Itsmyurls?
Our vision is to be thought of as that one place where you can always send people, no matter how expansive your online presence gets, that they can easily connect with you on all of your online profiles.
I think we are doing a great job at it, and one of our goals is to become a more household name. When you see someone posting links to all of their profiles, we want others to think “oh this person could use ItsMyURLs.”
