“Making Long URLs … Conservative” is the way link shortener GOP.am describes its service. Launched on Monday by the Republican National Committee’s tech-advising group Political Media, GOP.am is designed to make it easier for conservative web surfers to share links on services like Twitter while keeping every shared item within the Grand Ole Party’s brand.

Unlike other URL shorteners, GOP.am sticks around after the fact, providing austere top-and-bottom framing, complete with links to visit, join or donate to the Republican Party. For example, if you wanted to share Bill O’Reilly’s latest Talking Point column with your Cheney-esque father-in-law, GOP.am would allow you to create this layer cake of right-wing goodness.

It’s one of the first branded link shorteners ever, rolling out just a Palin-hair faster than both Google’s (goo.gl) and Facebook’s (fb.me).

After the way that pesky Barack Obama used social media to win an election, the Republicans have been scrambling to develop new media strategeries, and, at first, this seemed like a good one.

But literally within hours of its launch, GOP.am was taken down because pranksters began using it to share distinctly unconservative links, such as the American Communist Party, a bondage website and a webpage advertising a sex toy that looks like Obama, Wired reports. And no doubt quite a few more. Here’s one we made specially for the occasion:

Can you say “instant branding backfire”?

Innovative though it seemed at first, Political Media’s concept basically allowed anyone to splice the Republican image over any website in existence. Naturally, this would happen.

So while the people at Political Media watch their job descriptions change from social-media community builders to damage-controlling cyber nannies, perhaps the RNC will be more careful next time it entrusts its brand to everyone on the web.