Fast Company's Influence Project

 I was looking through my Twitter feed this afternoon and came across a tweet from @prebynski about Fast Company's Influence Project. When I clicked on his link, I was taken to this really cool interface of photos of people from across the country. Some pictures were pretty large, others were smaller and I learned that the size of the photo depends on how influential you are. I tweeted back to @prebynski letting him know I thought it was pretty cool and after a bit more browsing around I decided to sign up. You can check out my profile here: http://fcinf.com/v/bapm.

A bit later @prebynski  thanked me for responding and made a good point: isn't this just a popularity contest? According to Fast Company's website, "influence is not only about having the most friends or followers. Real influence is about being able to affect the behavior of those you interact with, to get others in your social network to act on a suggestion or recommendation." Interestingly, the way you find out how much influence you have is by asking people to click on your personal URL. I don't know but it seems pretty clear to me that if you have thousands of "friends" or "followers" you're either pretty popular or an expert in a particular field or, you have too much time on your hands. Either way, the more people who click your link the more influential you're considered. So if I could get 100 people to donate $100 to a charity (that's $10,000) I think I'd be considered pretty influential. But what if I could only get 10 people to click on my link? What's more important, that I got 100 people to donate to a charity or that I got people to look at some company's experiment?

I'm very curious to see where this goes and what Fast Company does with the data. Oh, did I mention I'll get my picture in the November issue of their magazine...