You’d be surprised what uses of social media seem so obvious to some of us with just a few years of experience that they don’t seem worth articulating – but that aren’t intuitive to other people. Maybe they just aren’t obvious at all and it’s a sign of immature communication skills when we (I) think they are.

For example, our fabulous mentor Vidya Spandana asked me last week why one of our customers ran reports in Little Bird on their target markets and I said, “well, because when the most influential people in an industry are thinking about you and talking about you, they are more likely to spend money with you or recommend that other people do!” I thought that was obvious but she said it was not and that I should write it down and use it like marketing gold. Many other people I’ve mentioned it to since then have agreed. Vidya guided me through a number of use cases of our software, articulating the ultimate goal of the customer even if it seemed obvious to me, then making it more and more simple, general, comprehensible and easy for our next customers to relate to. It was a fascinating revalation.

It turns out that when working to help people adopt technologies that are new to them but not to you, an inability to describe the forest but for the trees comes at a real cost in terms of effectiveness. Articulating the fundamentals isn’t always easy, though. I suspect like many things, it takes practice and experience.

Readers, if you have other examples of qualities of social software that seemed to go without saying to you, but that you found out weren’t obvious to other people, I’d love to read about them in comments below.

I finally wrote my first post on our company’s new blog yesterday, The true value of online influencers: It’s not about parroting your messages. I hope you’ll check it out, find it valuable, share it and join us for discussion in comments.

The post is a response to my frustration about the limited imaginations I see too often with regard to so-called “online influencers.” What do you do with them? Not just spam them and hope they’ll retweet you! But learn from them, build relationships and capture value over the long term. I know that in agency life, it’s hard to do that though. Clients pay the bills and they don’t pay for the long-term. Hopefully agencies can invest in the long term in a way that drives more business value in each short-term engagement. For example, you can charge more and land more business because you’ve developed long-term knowledge and connections in a field. That sounds more viable than charging a client for you to build those long-term assets.

One counterpoint that I think is really useful though is this, from Enterprise collaboration thought leader Greg Lowe on Google+

I think it all comes down to the industry to define the measurements that translate into $$$. Marketing has been promoting for 75+ years, these behaviors won’t change without incentive.

Something to ponder!

I’m concerned that it’s going to be very hard to define the measurements that translate value captured from learning and relationship building into money, though. Please, someone, tell me I’m wrong about that!

I’m excited to announce this morning the unveiling of the startup I co-founded, left journalism to do and have spent the last year working with my team to build. It’s called Little Bird.

Little Bird automates the discovery of community-trusted topic influencers and experts on any topic. You can find the best sources of information online in minutes using Little Bird. Once you find them, we’ve got a whole bunch of very cool tools you can use to leverage their collective knowledge.

Yesterday my co-founders Mikalina Kirkpatrick, Tyler Gillies and I closed a $1 million round of funding, with the participation of an All Star team of social media innovators, engineers and practitioners. The round was led by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who been a great lead investor to work with through our private beta period. Our other investors are Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage, Wieden + Kennedy, Hubspot and OnStartups.com founder Dharmesh Shah, leading marketing consultant Jay Baer, Henry Copeland, Jonathan Siegel, Matt Haughey and Blaine Cook. If you’re familiar with the last 10 years of social media history, you’ll probably recognize these as some incredibly experienced and innovative people.

If you spend time online doing research to figure out who the best people to connect with are on Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Google+ or elsewhere – you’re going to love Little Bird. If you believe, as we do, that connecting with the right sources of information and engaging with them using the right tools can move mountains for your career, business and worldview – then I really hope you’ll dig in to what we’re building.

Sometimes I describe it as a robot librarian, swooping down out of the sky with arms full of power tools to augment human perception and memory.

I’ll write more later, but I’ve got to focus on getting ready to pitch the company at the demo day for the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). PIE has been a great experience and there are five other companies pitching today. You can check out the live streaming video at 2:00 PM PST today at http://livestream.com/piepdx

You can read more at the following coverage: AdWeek, Techcrunch, The Next Web, All Things D, Venturebeat, Betakit, Digital Trends and GigaOm and Wired! That’s most of the coverage, but my favorite so far has been Lora Kolodny’s write-up on the WSJ. (Yay!)

I keep reading articles about how to build influence online, because they get a lot of traction on social networks. Most recently, 35 experts weigh-in: How we create influence on Facebook, an article I thought I’d read just to see if there was anything unique about the Facebook angle. There didn’t seem to be.

Most of these articles can be summed up like this: be consistently useful, generous and interesting. That’s good advice!

I think it’s possible to discuss some more tactical methods, though. Here’s what I’ve thought for some time are some good ways to add value and thus strengthen your position, make new things possible, win friends, influence people etc.

Be first – If you’re the first place that someone finds out about something, they’ll likely notice that. Do it again and they’ll start paying attention to almost everything you do in the future. Everybody likes the feeling of learning new things early – the sources of that kind of learning are highly valued.

Be the best at articulating common things – If you ever look at the tech news aggregation site Techmeme, you know for example that there are often developments in the tech news world that everyone writes about – but some people write about them much better than others. That’s a great way to build influence, to create more compelling content than other people about issues of general interest. Maybe the things I’m writing here are really no different than what everyone else is saying – but some of you will like the way I say them, you’ll find them uniquely clear, compelling, inspiring, intelligent, funny, charming, whatever the case may be. Perhaps then you’ll follow me on Twitter so you can read more like this in the future. (Or use aarh-ess-ess)

Aggregate – Compiling high quality content well from other sources, curation, is a skill and a good way to build influence and add value yourself. It’s easier said than done though! Robots can be very good at it – are you smarter and more creative than a robot? You probably know about Brainpickings and BoingBoing, but how about OpenCulture.com, Dan Cohen and Kate Theimer?

Find a unique perspective – Have you read Monday Note? A good example of a site that creates high quality content from a unique perspective and thus has made itself influential. In order to pull this off, you’ve got to have a genuinely unique perspective on things and it’s got to be interesting to other people.

Be funny – If you’re funny, people will come back for more.

See, it’s not so hard. You just have to be consistently useful, articulate, generous, uniquely interesting, smart, fast and funny! In reality, any single one of these is likely to be enough to take you far.

Finally, if you really want to rock the social web, you should sign up to get more info about the startup we’re going to be unveiling very, very soon.

I’ll confess, I’m a regular user of Google+ but I haven’t played around with a lot of the features to really figure it out that much yet. This week I’ve been experimenting with a paradigm I’ve used with RSS and with Twitter, but in Google+ and I’m seeing some awesome results. It’s this: set yourself up to be disproportionately likely to see content from the most high-priority people in your network so that you’re more likely to engage with them.

I didn’t know you could do this with Google+, but if you look at the screenshot below – I’ve got a Circle I call “Key Peeps” – which is made up of a select few high-priority contacts on Google+. People like O’Reilly’s Julie Steele and Abraham Williams, now building Addvocate with Marcus Nelson, and probably the web’s leading Human Computer Interaction specialist (according to our company Plexus), Ed Chi of Google. These are all super-smart, really awesome people who happen to use Google+ a lot. Now that I get an email and a red square notification whenever they post anything, I jump right on their high quality content, engage with it and them, reshare it with others, etc. If I can do so in a way that adds value to them, well then that helps me move from wannabe to friend of Heavy Hitters to a Heavy Hitter myself.

So that’s the Google+ Power-Up Button, “send alerts for this circle.” It’s pretty awesome.

Think “nobody’s using Google Plus?” This alert system is making it sing to me like crazy. In the interest of full disclosure, Google put me on the Suggested User List of Google+ so I have 2m followers there and see plenty of activity, but I know not everyone does. Check out the big, deep thread of comments on a post I put up about Occam’s Razor the other day though. That kind of conversation may not be available to everyone without loads of followers, but you Google+’s Circle Alerts feature means you can develop a solid online relationship with just a handful of Heavy Hitters yourself too, no matter how many followers you have on the network.

Apple’s promised stand-alone app for Podcasts went live in the iTunes store today. I thought I’d post a quick review of it, because I love podcasts. They are an incredible example of the opportunity for new voices to self-publish and distribute multi-media content; they are a core part of the Web 2.0/social media revolution. Podcasts were also my introduction to this world, years ago.

I’ll never forget the day I was at my University work study job, reading Newsweek and came across a profile of The Dawn and Drew Show. I had no idea there was technology available that made it easy for anyone to publish and distribute serialized audio content. It was like the clouds opened up, beams of sunlight shone down into my eyes and Dawn Miceli was riding on one of them. I was in love, with the technology and its potential. That was how I started learning about all this social media stuff: blogging, wikis, RSS, etc.

Apple’s App

Now Apple has an app dedicated to helping other people discover and enjoy this beautiful world of podcasting. Have they risen to the occasion? It’s a visually attractive app on most but not all pages, no surprise there. That’s what I think, apparently not everyone agrees. UK Mac developer Dan Counsell says, “Not sure why people are hating on the new Apple Podcast App so much, it actually has some rather lovely UI and UX in it.” I agree but can see why some parts of the app are being criticized, too. The live streaming page is cool but weird to use. Maybe I just need to get used to it.

Functionally, there are two things I hoped for. The first is discovery. The app has a cool Top Stations interface that appears to use your existing subscriptions to come up with suggested categories and shows inside of them. I have no idea how it works and I haven’t gotten used to it yet, but it seems ok. Better than nothing, but not as good as HuffDuffer, the social network for podcast bookmarking and discovery.

The other thing I was hoping for in the new Podcasting app is episode-level text visible that describes each audio file. Apple did it! On at least some episodes of the shows you’re looking at, there’s now a little i button that opens up a full page of info. That way you can learn about, for example, the guests on an interview show, their backgrounds and the topics they discussed. That makes it much easier to peruse a new series and pick out just the episodes you want to listen to. This was my biggest complaint about the iTunes podcast interface and now it’s resolved!

The podcasting world doesn’t seem to have had a lot to say about the app yet. As Daniel J Lewis said today, “Hopefully this is preinstalled with iOS 6!”

There’s a lot more that could have been done, but this is simple, utilitarian and supports some discovery. Works for me.

Long live podcasting! If you’re interested in plugging-in to the community of podcasters online, here’s 500 of them on Twitter.

Data geek Soren Macbeth (now at Yieldbot) and I met over tea several months ago and he said something to me that I have thought of many times since. He said that though data science is getting all the hype, great designers might be even harder to hire. I was just thinking about that again this morning and thought I’d ask on the Twitter. Below you’ll find the interesting conversation that emerged in response. I’d love to know what your thoughts on this are.

Of course the best of both worlds are those magical people who are strong in both. People like Nathan Yau, Andrew Vande Moere, Benjamin Wiederkehr, Ben Fry, Jer Thorp and Martin Wattenberg. Then there’s emergent voices online like Cole Nussbaumer, Enrico Bertini and Bryan Connor. See also the new podcast Data Stories. I don’t know all of these people personally, I just discovered them as part of the output of our startup Plexus Engine. Speaking of Plexus, if you’re into data and design – and if you’d like to live in beautiful Portland, Oregon – you should send me an email so we can talk. If you don’t want to move but are interested in rocking the future of the internet with us, you should still get in touch. We’re building something incredible and we’re looking for people who want to build it with us.