TIME's Most Influential Person Is...This Guy?

image from extraface

You're looking at Christopher Poole, better known as "moot" on 4chan, and now the #1 most influential person in the world, according to *cough* readers of TIME magazine and TIME online. He "beat out" Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Miley Cyrus by a landslide in terms of total votes and influence score. How did this happen? I must admit, he did start the website that was the home for Rick Rolling and LOLcats, so that did have to count for something. TIME says it was a clean vote, but even the 4chan community says otherwise.

In TIME's article about the victory, they say:

Moot denies knowing about any concerted plan by his followers to influence the poll, though TIME.com's technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote.

But then how do you explain this?

Image from Paul Lamere

First of all, the discrepancy in scores and votes should raise alarms right off the bat. But then look at the secret message: "Marblecake Also The Game". It's not a coincidence. They even documented how TIME tried to break this and ultimately failed at stopping it.

I'm not surprised that something like this happened. I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long for TIME's list to get punk'd by a bunch of hackers. The Internet community beats the large media corporation yet again, to hilarious results.

What does irk me though is TIME trying to put on a brave face and act like nothing wrong ever happened. You know it, we know it and nobody is really surprised by it. Why not just fess up?

In any case, moot stands as TIME's most influential person in the world. Based on the work his community has done in the past, and their work in beating the system here, maybe it was truly deserved after all.

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The Groundswell: Social Technographics Profile Tool

image from web-strategist.com

I've been reading this book called "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies" for school and for future career purposes. Within my internship, this book will be a critical asset to me in putting together a solution that works. A lot of the book centres around the idea that social media success isn't about using every social media platform available. It's about using the right tools based on the audience you want to talk to.

The book is full of Social Technographics profiles (like the one pictured above), and I kind of hoped there would be a free solution to getting a hold of some profiles myself.

Well, there is. And I'd love to share it with you.

With the tool, you can make Social Technographic profiles based on age, country and gender. While the tool doesn't dig too deep, it's a great free starting point to putting together a plan that makes sense.

For anybody interested in working with social media, the book is well worth a read. Thankfully for me, I got mine for free after attending their Ad Week presentation in New York last year. However, knowing what I do know now about the book, I would buy the book if I didn't already own it.

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