Link baiting, pyramid scheme, marketing genius?  Yes.  Fast Company’s  Influence Project is a little bit of everything.  The Influence Project is promoted by Fast Company as finding the most influential person.

Essentially, the person that drives the most traffic to www.fastcompany.com  before August 15 will have the largest picture in the November issue of the magazine.   My guess is that person will also appear on the cover.  To date over 18,000 people have signed onto the project.  It’s unclear if everyone will have their picture in the magazine (size of picture based on influence)  or if only the top influencers will appear.

Bubbly Scottish-Canadian Mari Smith is the current leader and she was wise to start influencing early since your photo grows as the people you invite get others to join (i.e., pyramid in action). Leading up to the November issue, Fast Company is conducting spotlight articles on some of the top influencers like Smith and Scott Monty (Ford).

Mari Smith is currently in the lead/top influencer

In the nature of full disclosure Smith and Monty are also friends of mine.  Also the links in this article will give me influence, but I’ll never surpass Mari since she influenced me.

Whatever you think of the project, it has certainly produced a lot of free PR for Fast Company and will increase traffic for a few months.  Jason Fell at foliomag.com reports that because of the link-clicking aspect associated with the project, Fast Company has seen its traffic spike about 20 percent this month.  Fell also noted that Fast Company Executive Digital Editor Noah Robischon who at the time disclosed “Over 13,000 people have registered so far,” says executive digital editor Noah Robischon, “and it’s growing daily.”  Now over 18,000 have joined and it continues to grow.

Free PR and opinions include:

PCMag.com | Dan Costa

“The Fast Company story turns influence into a ponzi scheme, a Flash-enabled popularity contest, and a high tech version of Narcissus’s reflection.”

The New York Times

Fast Company seems to have caught onto the fact that probably a good 50 percent of social networking is ego related and used it to formulate a cracker of a business plan: “The influence project,” is (almost) unapologetically a link baiting pyramid scheme.

Brass Tact Thinking | Amber Nalund

“I really think they missed the mark with The Influence Project, in a big way, and confused the idea of “influence” with ego.

To me, influence isn’t about popularity. Or even reach. It’s about the trust, authority, and presence to drive relevantactions within your community that create something of substance. That last bit is key.”

TechCrunch | Michael Arrington

“We’ve got links to click. Join me in my quest to put Chevy Chase, with an afro, on the cover of Fast Company Magazine. My work will then be done here.

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!”

While there are great arguments on each side of the debate, we do need to credit a traditional magazine for thinking progressively in an attempt to grow traffic and their subscriber base.

Note – the links in this post are to my profile in the project, and as such “add influence”. If you’d like to check the project out from scratch, use this link.

The Old Spice Guy has taken social media by storm. If you haven’t been exposed [no pun intended] to any of this yet, below is a quick summary of what you have been missing.

Old Spice Guy Quick Facts:

• Wieden & Kennedy created the spots for Proctor & Gamble

• Role is played by former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa

• 2 of the :30 videos have over 25,000,000 combined views

• @oldspice Twitter account has over 90,000 followers

• Old Spice guy was responding to tweets with personalized video messages [see @NHLBlackhawks Response below]; creating over 180 unique videos

• Old Spice YouTube Channel was the most viewed this month

Parodies quickly started propagating YouTube and where encouraged. One of the better ones is this spot from the Harold B. Lee Library Multimedia Production Crew. This production crew consists of two full time employees and ten student employees. View the video below and click here for behind the scenes video of this parody.

Old Spice Guy Answers Tweet from Blackhawks

Love the response in the above video to what he would do with the Stanley Cup for a day [note to non-sports enthusiasts, the Blackhawks won the NHL Stanley Cup this year and the tradition is that each player from the team gets the giant silver cup for one day]. Response was:

“I would fill the cup portion with a health smoothy drink, consisting of explosive missile bits, the spirit of a mountain ram and the tail rotor of an Apache helicopter.”

Kudos to @NHLBlackhawks for submitting such a creative question and garnering more exposure for their franchise. Sadly it appears Old Spice guy will no longer be doing video responses based on the below video:

By Erik Qualman

The newest flavor from Ben & Jerry’s is Social Media Mango-Tango.  In an e-mail last week to their UK subscriber base Ben & Jerry’s indicated they would be focusing more on communication via social media.  Instead of multiple e-mails to communicate with their ice cream lovers, they are focusing their efforts on the 1.3 million fans they have on Facebook & Twitter [@cherrygarcia has over 11,000 followers].

This has risen eyebrows across the marketing industry as Ben & Jerry’s is one of the first major brands to reduce e-mail in favor social media.  Time will tell if this is a good move and if their US operations decide to take a similar tact.  Speculation for the move centers on:

• Loyalists indicated they were tired of e-mails from B & J; hurting the brand vs. helping
• B & J needed to focus internal resources/reduce costs
• B & J wants all loyalists less digitally fragmented
• Gen Y & Z find e-mail passe
• Social Media success for B & J made this move possible
• Let the loyalists tell the story via social media rather than corporate

I don’t see this [aggressively limiting e-mail] becoming a trend in the foreseeable future for most brands, but for a select few they may follow Ben & Jerry’s UK lead.  Below is the original e-mail and also a clarifying note from the PR Team in Vermont [don't jump off buildings we aren't getting rid of e-mail completely around the world!].  On a related note, if you haven’t tried the 7-layer coconut brownie ice cream, it is amazing.  Oh, look at that, World of Mouth in action.

Sean Greenwood,  B&J’s PR Director released this to help clear up any misunderstanding  from the HubSpot post and any subsequent speculation [see above]:

“In general, I think it’s a bit of a misunderstanding.  The announcement came from our UK team, who was basically sharing that they planned to reach out to their fans via social media moving forward.  I think they wanted to alleviate any fears from fans who previously received a newsletter style email to think that they had somehow fallen off the list.  I believe they’re still keeping email as a venue for special events/opportunities as they mentioned they might still reach out via email.

Again, this was a note from our UK team.  I believe the rest of the Ben & Jerry’s folks around the globe (including us here at the HQ in Vermont who support the U.S. and the globe) are planning to continue to use: email, social media, text messaging, augmented reality, snail mail, vanilla guerrilla marketing, grassroots Social Mission endeavors, sky writers, deep-sea divers and of course… scoop trucks on the road.”

- Sean Greenwood, Ben & Jerry’s
[Source for Sean's comments are from Jim Ducharme's theemailguide.com]

It will be certainly interesting to see how this all plays out, in the meantime it’s definitely given us food for thought.

Three articles that go more in-depth on this:

SCOOP: Ben & Jerry’s responds to claims that they will drop email marketing by Jim Ducharme

Ben and Jerry’s Abandon Email, and their Fans by Charles Nicholls

HubSpot: Ben & Jerry’s Drops Email Marketing in Favor of Social Media by Brian Whalley

A Nielsen Study on Under-Aged Text Messaging in the U.S. reveals the following:

+ American teenagers are using 3,146 text messages a month
+ Teenagers send more than 10 text messages per hour [not sleeping or in school]
+ Under 12 segment sends 1,146 text messages per month
+ Under 12 segment sends more than 4 text messages per hour [not sleeping or in school]

The increase usage may correlate to price.  It was found due to “all-you-can-eat” data plans that wireless customers are actually paying roughly 1 penny per message.  Depending how Nielsen reports, in the future, texting may decline as teens update via social media platforms like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.  Nielsen may roll these into one, but it’s  nice to see them separated.

Twitter Founder Biz Stone at Aspen Ideas Festival announced that Twitter now has over 800 million search queries per day.

Twitter's monthly searches now surpass Yahoo and Bing combined

This is up 33% from April, where at Twitter’s Chirp conference Stone said Twitter was serving 600 million search queries per day. This roughly equates to 24 billion searches per month which is more than Bing (4.1) and Yahoo (9.4) combined.

We have indicated all along that Twitter & Facebook would be bigger search competition for Google than Yahoo and Bing. The fact that this is coming to fruition so soon is astounding. Social search and social commerce are becoming reality and it’s a great thing to see. Keep in mind we haven’t even mention YouTube and its social search activity.

The folks at onlineschools.org are at it again with another great infographic. Social media drives mobile and mobile drives social media consumption. With the iPhone 4 and iPad recent launches it got me wondering… Steve Jobs and Apple own the music space and are trying to own the eBook publishing space…is the next frontier for him to own the social space? Will this be added to the infographic in the coming years? What do you think: crazy or true?

Via: Online Schools

Hats off to Ellie Koning for a great infographic design.

A reporter asked me 3 digital questions about the BP oil spill. Here are my quick and cryptic thoughts. More importantly, what do you think?

What actions should BP have taken digitally within the first 24 hours of the spill?

BP should have immediately posted the HD video images and indicated how they were deriving their flow estimates. We live in a fully transparent world and it’s always better to point the finger at yourself rather than wait a few days to have someone else point the finger at you (e.g., Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, Enron, Lehman Brothers, Eliot Spitzer). This is counter intuitive to how we’ve done business for the past centuries with the legal mindset of trying to keep the bodies buried. However with social media you have to assume the bodies will be exhumed quickly.

What should BP be doing digitally now?

Attempt to humanize BP. They should have flip cameras with their employees down on the Gulf showing what they are doing to help the region. People that work for BP are human, try to humanize BP rather than continuing to be simply a hated logo by so many. Not everyone that works for BP is evil. They should showcase, via video, real people accessing claims to give a sense for the process.  Also, ask for feedback, listen and react accordingly.

Rate BP’s online strategy on a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best)

[Score: 4] One good thing BP did was to not overreact and go hard after parody accounts like BPGlobalPR on Twitter that posted tweets like “50% off blackened shrimp today” and “Hey, if you see any oil in the Gulf it’s ours, please return it.” Going hard after parody accounts right away would have been adding fuel to the fire as people would have been upset that BP wasn’t focusing on the important task of capping the well.

Another positive is they have many resources posted on www.bp.com and you can also drill down (no pun intended) to specific regions (e.g., Alabama, Florida).

They needed to do a better job of listening to how “big” politically this was becoming and adjust their PR and spokesman accordingly.   It’s also not easy to find their social presence (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) on www.bp.com

What do you think?

Image: Greenpeace Flickr by Russell Apotheker

Apple is an incredible story and company. Recently they had an issue with a live Demo (below).

This helps reiterate that no person or company is perfect. So, when it comes to social media we need to be “human” as a company and be comfortable in our own skin, warts and all. We can take comfort in the fact that even the best of the best (Apple) occasionally stumbles. It’s comforting for Apple to know that their market cap is still higher than Microsoft.

Paul Hughes of onlinemba.com sent this incredible Facebook infographic my way (below). I hope you enjoy Paul’s work as much as I do!

Via: Online MBA

Please feel free to share your comments and thoughts on the above infographic. Anything you love about it? Disagree with?

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Top 20 Websites in the World {source: Google

Google  released a list of the top 1,000 sites in the world. This list is a result of new

features that Google has enabled for its AdWords clients, specifically allowing advertisers to  only show their  ads on these top 1,000 sites.

Facebook secures the top ranking globally with 570,000,000,000 page views and 540,000,000 unique visitors. This is interesting as Facebook self reports just over 400 million profiles, so at a “dirty math” level Facebook influences 35% more people that don’t even have a profile on Facebook [note: very dirty math].

It particularly piqued my interest, because when we were researching data for the Social Media Revolution 2 video (below) we only indicated Facebook topped Google in the U.S. for unique visitors (Hitwise). This now appears possibly a bit conservative – perhaps Facebook has achieved the top spot globally.

This list from Google will be updated monthly and does not include adult sites, ad networks, or Google. The fact that Google doesn’t include themselves is interesting to say the least and leads one to ask the question…do they not list themselves because they are no longer #1?

Google says the data is aggregated from Google Toolbar data, Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Google can see first hand that their fiercest competition is coming from the likes of Facebook, QQ, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.  As consumers it’s fun to see this intense battle of the big boys as it only makes our Internet offerings better.