3 Surefire Ways to Win The Fastcompany Influence Project

ByLaurel Papworth

Fastcompany give you a URL and you upload a foto. You then ask friends, family and random stranger serial killers to click on your link. Prove how loved and popular you are. Here’s some tips: this article is not what you think it is.

Fastcompany give you a URL and you upload a foto. You then ask friends, family and random stranger serial killers to click on your link. Prove how loved and popular you are. Here’s some tips: this article is not what you think it is.

3 Ways to Win FastCompany’s The InfluenceProject:

  • Spam the link they give you to everyone in your email address book, your Facebook friends, join random Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups, Tweet, auto tweet and DM to your little heart’s content
  • Tell them it’s a cute picture, the worst thing you’ve ever seen in your life, very funny, or important to you. Bait and switch.
  • Lose sleep at night as you pump out links upon links.

The title of this article is kinda catchy doncha think? How do you feel about a bit more bait-and-switch this morning?

3 Reasons Why You Don’t Want to Win FastCompany’sThe InfluenceProject

  • This project doesn’t show the Most Influential, it shows the Most Spammy. Given that they could’ve combined this exercise with fundraising and ever-so-worthy causes, it’s pretty hard to justify spamming me-me-me links.
  • Affiliate Marketers rejoice! And anyone who takes their status/livelihood and wellbeing from having strangers prove they “love” them. The rest of us just groan.
  • RickRolling was done with a sense of humour. This is rickrolling without the funny bone. The cool kids won’t play – you’ll be on your own with a bunch of losers*.

*losers: technical social media term. You wouldn’t understand…

Influence is one thing, Trust is something entirely else. Trust comes in on a tortoise and leaves on a galloping stallion. Old Chinese/Arabic/Whatever saying.

See what other people are saying: Ambercadabra, Deanna Zandt, Estaban Kolsky,

3 Reasons Why Fastcompany will excuse doing this

  • Their advertisers only understand pageviews not sentiment. They got the twitosphere ranting, links coming in, so hey, it’s all good.
  • It’s a joke (should’ve left it til April 1st then it would’ve been win-win-win)
  • Viral is anything non-nutritious (superficial, timewasting and 3-minutes-of my life-I will-never-get-back). A gift is anything that makes other people’s life more interesting, fulfilled and pleasant. This is an exercise in playing with viral.

And if they are smart, they have phase two – all the “anti tools”. Such as a site called AutoUnfollowInfluenceSpammers.com

What do you think? SocialSpamRUs or a fun little game with the community? By the way, different types of social media expert influencers might be interesting? Or The Role of Leaderboards in Online Communities (that is what Fastcompany are building)

Last Word/Last Line: For those who retweet this as if it’s a real “how to win” article. READ BEFORE YOU ASSUME, LOSER. Heh.  Those who are outraged need not comment…

26 Comments

  4. I think it’s ridiculous. This doesn’t prove how much influence someone has, just how desperate for approval most people are. It’s like those “best blogs” lists where you move to the #1 spot if you get the most people to “vote” for you. What does that prove exactly?

  5. Excellent, well done! In line with mine, but won’t spam you with links to my post.

    Similar concept, they are doing it out of sheer stupidity, and they are going to excuse it with pageviews and free publicity. Always interesting how clueleness wins by sheer magnitude over clued-in.

    Thanks for the nice psot.

  6. *hangs head in shame* ok, I got the email from Fast Company, I logged in, I twittered it etc. But it really is a big nothing. Reminds me of that site Gleamd. Remember that one? I expected something more substantial than a get out the vote contest.

    Your post makes me feel silly, which means it’s spot-on.

  8. Who would be outraged by this? It’s common sense (and a sense of style as well). I didn’t know that *loser was a social media term but it seems to be a transparent one. 🙂

  13. Wondering how many took the bait earlier??.. If not read this first.. we need to start thinking more about 'authentic'…http://lnkd.in/iQf4Fk

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