Last week Fast Company launched the Influencer Project. A simple concept, add your picture, send the link to your page out to your network, see how many people click the link. Apparently this offended many of the Social Media glitterati. With posts a plenty telling Fast Company how their project was flawed, how getting people to click a link is no indication of influence. How they were measuring Ego, how they weren’t measuring anything. How the real influencers wouldn’t even bother with their stupid game and so the results would be pointless.

Of course they did all this by doing what? Oh yes that’s right, posting links to their posts and asking people to click on it! Where do they think their influence came from? Did they just wake up one morning with all these fans and readers and subscribers, nope they produced good content (definitely key) but then they had to do the donkey work of promoting that content. Which online means putting the link out there and telling people why they should click on it.

Every time a popularity contest comes around, be it the Mashable awards, the Shorties, or whatever a whole section of the Glitterati get their undies in a bunch over it. It so happens I have a theory on this, it’s called… Low Self Esteem. You see the people that get most concerned about this are the ones that can’t fathom why they are already popular. They suffer from fragile ego’s and a certain amount of paranoia and worry that it will all just disappear if someone else becomes popular.

I know this sounds very condemning of me. The reason I can take this stance is quite simple. I suffer from the same concerns as well. I understand that we all get a little paranoid sometimes and worry that our good fortune might just evaporate, that someone somewhere is smarter, better, sharper than us (actually I know for a fact that they are).  However, telling a company like Fast Company, you got it wrong is not the right solution. See the opportunity in this project. I’m already discovering people who I had no idea existed before that have got some good things to say. The blogosphere is too big for us to know everyone. We find a “jerk circle” (thanks to Jason Falls for that term) and we stay in it. We know the people we know and we stick with them.

So instead of simply writing the Influence Project off as lame, why not take a second look and see what you can actually get out of it.

Oh and my Influence Project link is fcinf.com/v/byxg