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? Enter the Influence Project from Fast Company. 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. (You can read about the measurement method for yourself.) At the end of the project, the most influential people will be 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). Here is some of what the Internet says about the Influence Project:
- From Courtney Boyd Myers at The Huffington Post, Fast Company's Influence Project Is About to Burst Every "Social Media Guru's" Bubble
- From Danny Brown, People, Numbers and the Fast Company Influence Project
- From Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, Fast Company Creatively Combines Link Baiting With A Pyramid Scheme
- From Paloma Vazquez at psfk, The Influence Project
- From Charlie at This is going to be Big..., Fast Company's Influence Project and Reputation Racketeering
