Fast Company Confuses Network Marketing with Influence

Fast Company has set up a contest, The Influence Project, to find out who the most influential people on the Internet are. You would think this would involve fancy math and algorithms to measure the size of the competitors’ networks, track the reach of their voice across those networks, and figuring out if they can really move a crowd. Instead, Fast Company has simply set up a multi-level marketing scheme that drives traffic to their website.

The clicks and networking and connectivity (out to six degrees!) collected in this experiment will provide a compass for where real influence lies on the Internet. It’s something I’m sure every business is curious to know more about. I also think it’s a powerful bit of awareness for anyone who wants to know who in their network is fully engaged with them.

It’s actually a pretty smart way to get traffic to your website, but not something you would expect from a popular and respected publication like Fast Company. It follows the basic principles of network/affiliate marketing:

• You sign up by uploading a photo of yourself
• This gets you a unique referral link
• Your “influence” increases as you refer people to Fast Company via your link
• When people join The Influence Project using your link, you get a piece of their “influence”

This is a seriously flawed method for measuring real influence. Anyone who has ever used a traffic exchange or purchased social networking contacts could tell you this. Think about all the Twitter accounts you’ve seen from no-name spammers who have around 10-50k followers. Those followers have no interest in what that person has to say. The only thing being influencing is perception based on a single metric.

The definition of a pyramid scheme, a derogatory term for network/mlm marketing, is a network with no product. In this case, Fast Company is offering to put the winner’s face in an upcoming issue of the magazine. Doesn’t sound like much of a product to me. For some, this is worth the effort, but Fast Company will be the one making out like a bandit in ad revenues.

I’m not really sure what the folks at Fast Company were thinking here. This is a blatant attempt to drive traffic to their site, the type of contest you might see a new blogger run to boost their visitor numbers. The results won’t be useful because they only take one metric into account: how many people you can get to click your junk. Definitely not a good look for Fast Company.

See Also:

• Fast Company Creatively Combines Link Baiting With A Pyramid Scheme.
• How Fast Company Confused Ego with Influence