Posted Under: Announcement, Marketing, Social Media

Many of you may have heard, Fast Company is looking for 2010’s Most Influential Person Online, and the project is called – The Influence Project. Basically, anyone and everyone can sign up on the Influence Project site, they get a unique URL (link) and then they are supposed to promote that link and collect clicks and signups via their unique link. As you may have guessed by now, the more clicks you receive, the higher you climb on this Influence ladder. Fast Company plans on closing this contest on August 15th, 2010 and promises that the most influential people will have their pictures in the November 2010 issue. Before I dive deeper into this post, take a look at what does Fast Company have to say about this project – Welcome to The Influence Project!

While participants include some big names like Guy Kawasaki, Gurbaksh Chahal and the likes, still the project has got quite a few negative reviews than positive. Now, I am not the most tech-savvy person and when it comes to the whole algorithm of measuring clicks and impressions, forget about it. So I did what I always do – ‘Ask’. I asked a question on linkedin, participated in a Facebook discussion and talked about this project to a recently made connection who is in the SEO and Viral Marketing domain as well as participating in this project.

Simon Hamer a Social Media Professional, doesn’t find a few thousand signups on this project as the true representation of millions of social media users and when I followed up with him over email he said – “I see internet influencers as having mastered my 7 key factors – Offline 1. Known, 2. Liked, 3. Trusted and On-Line 4. Reach (number of sites, and spread inside sites), 5. Visibility (consistency and weight of their presence), 6. Rememberability (are they remembered, or not). Then there is the cement that both clarifies, perfects and holds all these together – 7. Management of their OWN on line perception. You can add an 8th – Their offline influence naturally affects their online presence e.g. Branson, Jobs, Gates.”

Somehow, a lot of folks I have come across have a very discouraging outlook for this this project, for example, Kevin Richardson, a celebrity personal trainer in NYC said – “I honestly don’t see any reason why it would hurt, but it does look like a big time sink as I also don’t see any reason why it would help your bottom line, which is always more sales. For the most part social networks like Facebook, Twitter and such offer real opportunities to interact with and in a very subtle way passively market your expertise in a way that does tangibly increase sales in the long term but I see no real benefit from this particular project other than giving them a huge platform with which they can collect your personal information and either sell it or use it for marketing purposes so, I would pass.“

Unbearably long loading time of the website, a marketing ploy only to work for Fast Company, a 90’s way of measuring influence via clicks, an approach that is more prone to undue influence building by campaigning your friends and family to click on your link, a project that would unnecessarily over-inflate the egos of many self acclaimed influencers and wannabes, and that results would be biased towards early adapters since they got more time to promote their link, etc were amongst the many issues that have been raised… Here’s a detailed response from Fast Company – Popularity, Ego And Influence.

Arikka Greene a Global Marketing Executive, saw the same problems and suggested a very practical solution – “I think it would be much more effective if the link were a code you could place BEHIND your own personal content such as photos, emails, other links within social media, etc. so that it measures your influence blindly instead of coming across as an annoying piece of spam that your friends want to block or ignore.”

I personally, am enjoying this project because I signed up a few weeks ago and since then I only mentioned it on my Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin status a few times. As of writing this post, I’m enjoying the 99th percentile which of course may or may not go down by Aug 15th which is when the contest closes however, I don’t really care because I subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s philosophy of “My attitude is, if I win, I’m going to say this was relevant research. If I lose I will say it’s a dumb-ass test (laughs).“

So how influential are you? Check it out – http://fcinf.com/v/cv7g “You’re More Influential Than You Think”.

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