This week, The Sunday Times launched The Sunday Times Social List at http://www.the-social-list.com, a definitive and ever evolving list of who’s who in the world of social networking.
Drawing information from the four biggest social networks – Foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – The Sunday Times Social List system adds up your social networking activity and measures how much interest it generates amongst your friends and colleagues in order to work out how well you score.
Says Gordon Thomson, Online Editor of The Sunday Times, “The Sunday Times has a strong tradition of publishing great guides and lists – and The Social List is our latest innovation, a dynamic, interactive chart which shows you where you fit into the new world of social media. As social media continues to change the way people find information and interact online, so The Sunday Times Social List reflects the growing influence of bloggers and Tweeters on mainstream publishing and gives everyone the opportunity to pit themselves against their peers and climb the rankings of the most socially influential.”
Jody Vogelaar, Head of News International Digital Marketing, says, “We are very proud of how engaged customers are with our journalists and content in the social space. We have more than one million followers across our Twitter feeds — a number that continues to grow each week. The social space is inherently competitive and we are taking full advantage of this by creating a fun and engaging piece of social entertainment that is very simple to get involved in.”
Free to join, participants will simply need to link up whichever social networks they use and want to be included. Every morning The Sunday Times Social List will make its calculations.
People’s results will change daily as new people join and scores are updated.
On the results page you can see a list of the top 2000 most socially wealthy people at any given time. You can also see how you compare with friends and colleagues who have also signed up.
To help people see where they are in the grand scheme of things, they are allocated a rank when they join and a badge that goes with it. This could change from ‘Fledgling’ through to the top spot, ‘Titan’, over time, depending on how well they are doing.
Created by VCCP, The Sunday Times Social List was designed so that “Anyone can join in and take their place on the List – no matter how active or idle they are on social networks like Facebook and Twitter,” says Colin Byrne, Creative Director. “We wanted to build on The Sunday Times’ history of publishing definitive lists that become part of popular culture, but create a list that’s not only useful, but something everybody can be a part of. It finally puts to rest the debate about which friends are the most active on Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook, and turns the everyday activity of updating your status and sending tweets into something far more competitive.”