Reid Dossinger

I took a little time to browse through the AddThis documentation to see if there was any feature I was missing, and it turns out there was something that I had just been wondering about: adding in Google Analytics code to the end of the URL when someone uses AddThis to share a page on your site. There's documentation on the AddThis site for adding URL parameters , but here's how I modified it to incorporate the Analytics code. In the AddThis code where you call javascript that powers the widget (s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js), add this in: <script type="text/javascript"> var addthis_share = { url_transforms : { add: { utm_campaign: 'AddThis', utm_source: '{{code}}', utm_medium: 'share' } } } <script> The {{code}} will add in the service that was used to share (ie "delicious", "googlereader", etc) in a single word and in all lowercase letters. You're just adding in the st...

You know, headlines like that one really put me on the fence, balancing between "Ooh! Metrics!" and "Wow, no wonder people think it's boring and geeky." ANYWAY...today I'm definitely in the former camp, in the sense that it's exciting because it's a philosophical puzzle: how can you solve a problem that can never really be solved? Yesterday, I commented on Avinash Kaushik's post where he asked, "If you were to measure the success of a company’s social media efforts how would you do it?" My answer: For social media, the obvious metrics still hold: referrals and conversions from referrals. But being from a nonprofit background, where the higher-ups are often skeptical of social media, the real metrics are the words. There’s nothing more valuable than the tweet that says "I love that {your org} is on Twitter" or the time you respond to a comment on Facebook addressing a wide concern about your organization or when you comment ...