The crazy SOB’s over at Mekanism teamed up with Fast Company on a social experiment that is pissing off social media experts everywhere. The Influence Project is basically an online popularity contest that measures a person’s digital influence by monitoring how many times you can get your friends to click on a unique URL (and whether or not they’re intrigued enough to sign up themselves). The person who influences the most people to click and sign up gets their picture printed in an issue of Fast Company.

NBD, right? So you would think.

Merriam Webster’s online dictionary defines the word Influence as: an ethereal fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of humans. I’m pretty sure that this literal translation was the driving force behind all of Mekanism’s actions.

Social Media prom kings and queens are outraged at the mere notion that their “hard work and time spent investing in their 100,000 Twitter followers” is shot to shit because of this EXPERIMENT. I’ve scoured some of the most popular social-marketing-industry blogs in search of reactions. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

In my Facebook social graph, 34 people have signed up for this in an attempt to quantify their popularity. I won’t call them out here because they’ve already called themselves out enough. If you’re cool, you don’t need to tell anyone you’re cool or have anyone tell you that you’re cool.
– Damian Basile, via Brian Solis’ssss blog , Communication strategist. Digital Something. Connector. Entrepreneur. Anime & SciFi lover.

Why this quote is awesome – He basically just dissed a bunch of his friends; 34 of them to be exact. What an asshole.

I clicked this morning on a tweet from Tac Anderson, someone I like and respect a great deal. I even uploaded my picture, all that stuff that I was supposed to do, hoping that there was something really interesting that would happen at the end, something I was supposed to do.
– Amber Naslund, Director of Community for @Radian6. Constructive heretic. Pragmatist. Musician. Intellectual adventurer. Bibliophile. Word nerd.

Why this quote is awesome - She just admitted to being INFLUENCED and is trying to place the blame elsewhere.

Therefore, the person who not only has the most time to waste and can also waste the most collective time of others gets to be featured in their magazine. (…) we’re probably going to wind up with Julia Roy, Richie “I bought Bebo” Hecker, or even worse, an iPad DJ.  Perhaps Soraya will seek to add another magazine cover to her mantle.  With nearly 500k followers, it wouldn’t be so hard for her if she wanted—but does that make her the most influential when it comes to changing minds, spreading ideas?  Or is it just about retweets and clicks? (…) Or, if you’re dying to do something data-driven, how about actually measuring influence through a service like Klout, or running someone’s top 50 blog posts, tweets, etc., through some kind of algorithm?
- Charlie O’Donnel, I’m an ordinary guy with nothing to lose. NYC guy for First Round Capital (his Twitter user name is @ceonyc lmao)

Why this quote is awesome - Because its assumed that “Some kind of Algorithm” can determine a person’s ability to pressure others into doing things. IE: some kind of algorithm to decide whether or not drunk bitches are more susceptible to being date raped. Because Klout is totally fool proof? And I have no idea who any of the people he listed are, so they’re obviously not influential.

‘The Influence Project’ seems to have influenced its critics more than the readers it was hoping to rope into a viral campaign to expand its readership. While FC’s senior editor Mark Borden touts a milestone of 6,000 people signing up for the project in less than 24 hours, the critics from SF Weekly, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land have been cyberventillating in a rush to undermine the project’s premise and intent.
-Ron Calrri, Social Media Scientist who tempers real-time search with a touch of digital Zen!

Why this quote is awesome - The Huff-po? TechCrunch? Priceless promo.

Yes, this is a contest to see who can send the most traffic to Fast Company. And the winner gets to have a big picture in the November print issue. I’m guessing the most influential person will also be on the cover. (…) And join us next week at TechCrunch when we’ll hold a contest to see who can click the most ad units on our site. Winner gets called “The Most Awesome Person Online” and we’ll put their picture on our home page for a day! And a free tshirt!
-Techcrunch

Why this quote is awesome - Because its true and I’m sure that thousands of people would enter The Most Awesome Person Online contest and it would probably generate a lot of buzz. Well, maybe not anymore because everyone hates the idea of clicking for popularity.

Will you spam your friends, tweet your followers, and update your status incessantly to be considered “influential?”(…) What happened to the days when having influence meant producing thought provoking ideas and reactions?(…) The idea was pitched as “The Cover Project” to Fast Company in February 2010by Mekanism, a creative production studio located in New York and San Francisco. (I purposefully did not hyperlink to their studio because their website’s music is that abrasive.)
- Courtney Boyd Myers, Technology & Music Journalist. Robot Girl. Humanist. Life Enthusiast.

Why this quote is awesome – Because she refused to link to Mekanism’s website on the sole reason that she thinks the music is abrasive. Yes, I will rely on my FRIENDS to help me in my mission to be considered the most influential person online. How come no one gets pissed when shitty American Idol candidates ask for support? How come people don’t have more shit to talk about the idiot cast of The Jersey Shore? Also, she needs to re-read the definition of ‘Influence’ up top cause it has nothing to do with ideas and reactions, it has everything to do with stars and drugs and rain.

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…
- Laurel Papworth, Online Communities Strategist, Goddess of the Social Media workshop, MMORPG player: World of Warcraft.

Why this quote is awesome – Because I still want to win after reading it, because a spammer probably won’t win it (if you twitter search ‘influence project’ majority of the spam in relation to this topic are blog posts written in utter disgust, because asking your FRIENDS to click a link in support of you isn’t spamming, and because the Rick Roll is illegal and violated a ton of copyrights.

It’s easily the most poorly designed design and implementation of this concept to date. A few points:

The UI is gratuitous and meaningless. It’s a cluttered collection of profile pictures, each sized to indicate the owner’s “influence.”  It leaves one begging for TouchGraph.

The site takes a full 1:20 to load, if it loads at all. The balk rate will be phenomenal. Moreover, if someone clicks on a participant’s unique URL and decides not to wait for the Flash monstrosity to load, the click is lost (I tested this a few times). This effectively weeds out anyone with a job or a life, which makes one wonder if the project will ultimately reveal the most influential single unemployed people online (in attracting this audience, The Influence Project may actually cause a brief drop in traffic to icanhascheezburger.com).
- Charles Wilson, Entrepreneur, investor, marketer, accidental technologist, recovering philologist.

Why this quote is awesome – This is all true, but its funny because this man is not an interaction designer nor is he a flash developer…. Which totally makes him the authority in the world of design and UI. Also one of his companies got acquired by Apple, automatically making him a flash hater. And everyone knows, if you hate flash, you hate Adobe.

Help me influence by influencing me and I will boycott their cover and all their efforts. We can all take about being against this “people” experiment. But talk is cheap. This is not a selfish ploy on my part. This is where I stand. And I would appreciate it if you could help out in my social media protest.  How bitter sweet it would be to see everyone influence a individual so that individual would say “no” to show this experiment is wrong. To say “I don’t want to be on your cover” even after all the influence.

Help me influence my boycott by clicking on my link!
- Josip Petrusa, idea creationist. marketing strategist. conversationalist. blogger. Gen-Y. Millennials. social media. marketing. brands.

Why this quote is awesome – Because this dude really wants to win but doesn’t want to piss people off so he’s trying to play it off like he’s on the hater’s side. You know that if this guy got a call from Fast Company he would shit his pants with joy. If he really wanted to boycott, he’d just stfu.

“Ultimately, it’s an attention-getting, easy to participate in viral stunt that will result in lots of coverage and get Fast Company the attention it deserves. And, Fast Company will forever be known to as the magazine that put me on its cover.”
- Mekanism

Why this quote is awesome - Plain. Honest. Simple. Straight.

So what’s a girl to do?

All in all, Mekanism and Fast Company accomplished what they set out to do. Make. Something. Viral. There is a reason why this is coined an experiment. They weren’t trying to hide anything or define you as a person so stop acting like a little bitch. Once again, this community of professional-social-media-marketers is rearing their heads as a bunch of whiny babies who are just upset because they could never pull something like this off. YOU’RE. JUST. JEALOUS.

On another note, I want to be on the cover of Fast Company so I’ve already registered. You can click on my link to help me out.

It would also be cool if people like Brian Solis and Amber Naslund (who don’t want to be included in this experiment) un-registered or were banned from the site, so that I could win. Thanks in advance, love you.

oh and if you haven’t realized by now that the actual genius behind this campaign is not to actually find ‘the most influential person online’ but to prove that mekanism does a good job at getting you guys to talk about stuff, then you’re retarded. oh also, whats the difference between this, tracking your bit.ly links, asking for RTs, or putting a fucking SHARE button on your blog? if you think about it, there is no difference.