Learning is Change

Use a Single Click to Add Your Name, Email Address, and Twitter Handle to a Google Spreadsheet

Alright, you can probably file this under “why on earth would I want to do that”, but I am super excited about this capability and here is why:

  1. Imagine that you are leading a PD session and you want to capture everyone’s info (twitter account, email, and names) without having folks put that info into a form or doc (many clicks and some typing).
  2. Imagine that you wanted to create a contact list for an event, and you wanted to use their Twitter accounts as well as their emails.
  3. Imagine that you wanted to get a list of folks who all needed individual access to a google doc, and you wanted to collect their emails quickly so that you could share directly with them.
  4. Imagine that you wanted to build a coalition/community of folks who were going to engage in a twitter chat or a series of online activism tasks and you needed a quick way of gathering their info and allowing folks to “opt-in”.
  5. Imagine you were running an EdCamp (or a similar unconference model) and wanted to capture everyone’s twitter handles by simply having them click on a link you send them.

For all of those reasons and a few more that I’m sure you can come up with on your own, I was excited about this possibility. Essentially, it breaks down to using a “Lead Generation Card” on Twitter and then hooking it up to a Google Spreadsheet. If you make that spreadsheet public, you are creating an open list for others. The “single click” is when folks who are logged into Twitter click on the call to action from the “Card”. Their info then automatically populates into the spreadsheet, which is kind of awesome.

This is the result of about an hour of work:

If you want to know more about how to do this yourself, here are the things that I used:

  1. I used this page for the instructions to set up the spreadsheet and twitter card that makes this magic happen.
  2. One instruction that was missing from the blog was to make sure you ran the doPost script (in the script editor) to ensure you have enabled all permissions of the script.
  3. Another instruction that I think is valuable is to create two tweets with your card. The first is the tweet you will promote for collecting your info into the spreadsheet, and the second is the tweet that will become your “fallback URL” that tells folks to login to twitter if they don’t see the “card.”
  4. I highly recommend not keeping your list private, as it can be such an amazing collaboration tool. So, once you have your spreadsheet set up, make the link to your spreadsheet the “Desitination URL” for the card. That way, anyone who clicked the “add me” button (or whatever you are calling it in your card) will be able to see the rest of the list.

If none of this makes sense, that is okay. Here is the spreadsheet we are curating for Teachers and Leaders who are interested in Personalized Professional Learning. If you want to add your name to the list, simply click the link in the above tweet!