Note: This piece is from the Everything-PR archive (2010). It examined Fast Company's Influence Project — a self-selecting, click-tracking measurement of "influence" that ran ahead of the modern influencer economy and drew immediate criticism as a link-baiting exercise. Content preserved for the historical record.
Influence — it's what we all want. It's why we hire actors, sports figures, and other celebrities to endorse products and services. If someone with influence recommends something, people will respond.
Plus, let's face it. Those television and radio endorsements by famous folk don't come cheap. Those stars are usually getting paid. Influence is also worth money. Since influence is so valuable, there must be a way to measure and study it, right?
Basically, the Influence Project assigns each person a unique link that they are responsible for promoting. To measure influence, the site tracks how many times each unique link is clicked. At the end of the project, the most influential people are profiled on the Fast Company site.
Whether or not you agree with the premise of the Influence Project, Fast Company has proved one thing — they can influence others.
Though the project has only been running for just over a week, it has already spawned a number of posts on other blogs (many of them critical). Some of what the internet has said about the Influence Project:
Courtney Boyd Myers at The Huffington Post: "Fast Company's Influence Project Is About to Burst Every Social Media Guru's Bubble"
Danny Brown: "People, Numbers and the Fast Company Influence Project"
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch: "Fast Company Creatively Combines Link Baiting With A Pyramid Scheme"
Paloma Vazquez at PSFK: "The Influence Project"
Charlie O'Donnell at This Is Going to Be Big: "Fast Company's Influence Project and Reputation Racketeering"
And there are more.
Much of the criticism is valid. This is not a scientifically designed study. All of the participants are self-selected. Most people with true influence are too busy to take part, which leaves mostly those who are curious or hopeful about their own influence.
The study also fails to consider that a person's influence is domain-specific. For example, an accountant is influential when it comes to tax advice — his clients follow his advice because he pretty much knows his stuff. If he starts giving dietary advice, that's a different question. Influence is not portable across categories.
With all its flaws, the project — really little more than an attempt to engage Fast Company's audience — is mildly interesting. And judging from the participation numbers, plenty of people agree.
The Retrospective — What This Case File Predicted
Everything-PR editorial note, 2026:
The Fast Company Influence Project ran a decade before the modern influencer economy became a $250 billion category. The critique the original piece flagged — self-selection, domain-specificity of influence, click-tracking as a proxy for authority — proved out. Every subsequent generation of "influence ranking" projects (Klout, PeerIndex, Kred, and the modern engagement-metric dashboards inside every creator platform) has hit the same structural walls this piece named in 2010.
The lesson that has aged into permanence: authority is domain-specific, and the measurement systems that ignore that will always overstate breadth at the expense of depth. The Fast Company Influence Project measured link clicks. The modern retrieval layer — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — measures something closer to what influence actually is: whose name gets returned when the buyer asks the category question. Citation Share is domain-specific by construction. That is the through-line from the 2010 Influence Project to the 2026 AI Communications discipline.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
