During and after the compilation of the 100 top marketers list, we’ve received many inquiries, especially from the top marketers themselves, wondering how we were going to make the decision.

It’s tough to decide who should make the list because there are literally hundreds of deserving people. But we have only 100 spots on our list.

We had decided on specific criteria that each marketer should have in order to make our list before approaching the project, however, we quickly found that a lot more than 100 individuals would fall into the criteria we had laid out. So we wanted to let the nominees/marketers nominate amongst themselves. This is how we did it:

It all started a couple of months ago (6 weeks to be exact) when we e-mailed a select few, highly regarded marketers about our idea to create a list of the top 100 marketers of 2008.

We asked these select few for nominations of marketers they felt should make our list. Each marketer had to nominate up to 3 that they felt deserved to be on the list (some nominated more). As the nominations came in, nominees were quickly screened by our team, and if approved, nominees were then contacted to nominate 3 more of their top marketers. The list grew, the buzz grew, and we had hit a gold mine.

Over the span of the next few weeks our list reached more than 1,000 nominations. We scanned the nominations to see how many marketers were nominated REPEATEDLY. Some nominees received 20, 30 or 40 nominations. Based on the number of nominations, we were able to hone in on our top 100.

This process, although it may seem daunting, did relieve us to a great extent. Giving the power to marketers themselves proved to be an excellent approach. Were all of our nominees contacted? Most were and some were not. And not every marketer responded to our inquiry. In most cases we removed marketers who did not respond to our inquiry in order to reduce the number of nominees on our list. Some marketers were not interested in being a part of it, and we removed them as well (just in case you’re wondering why some popular names are not on the list).

After weeks of deciphering through the names, we had the list and the marketers with the most votes of course made it to the top 10. Chris Hughes stood out to us from the very beginning. Who can forget one of the most historic marketing campaigns, perhaps, in our lifetime?

Each marketer on this list is very deserving. We felt a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction by the end of this process. We hope you enjoyed the list and look forward to providing you with excellent articles and lists in the near future.

Happy Holidays everyone!