If you’re a fan of good design and of Apple products in particular, you might well have heard of Daring Fireball. Even if you haven’t, you’ll want to find someone like DF’s proprietor, John Gruber, and get them in your corner.

Today’s example of Gruber’s outsize influence on his tribe of readers is a Kickstarter project creating an iPhone tripod mount and stand: it took about an hour (according to Eric Hastings on the project comments page) to go from $6000 needed to fully funded once Gruber posted

Count me in for this Kickstarter project: Dan “The Russians Used a Pencil” Provost and Thomas Gerhardt have designed a combination stand/tripod mount for the iPhone 4.

That was it: no “go buy it”, no “get them funded”, just bringing an interesting project to his readers’ attention. The project is now $8000 $12,000 overfunded, and I fully expect the meter to keep running upward the rest of the day and beyond.

What gave Gruber such influence?

• His audience knows they’ll like the things he likes. He’s been blogging for a long time. He points people to multiple interesting things a day. He has a track record. He’s a perfectionist about design, so anything with his seal of approval is likely to be good.
• People enjoy supporting the little guy. Kickstarter is all about getting funding to do the project you always wanted to do. People like funding the projects whose authors are passionate about them. Something customized for a small audience will gain raving fans within that audience. And the Internet has made it easy to run small-scale, highly targeted projects.

Where do you find a Gruber to point people to your own project?

That’s both the easy and the hard part. Easy, because if they already exist, you find them, and your project is exciting to them, they’ll happily point people your way. Hard, because the commitment needed to build a following like Gruber’s is very high – it takes a lot of time and energy – and not many people have invested so much in their audience. And hard because your project has to be pretty exciting to deserve their attention.

So think carefully as you design your project about who’s going to care about it. Who’s going to care enough to talk about you to all the people they know? If you don’t know, then your project needs to be more awesome. Aim higher.

Should you follow the (small and passionate) crowd?

I supported the Kickstarter project. It looks like a great product – and if it’s not, I spent $20 encouraging people trying to build innovative new toys. If that’s something you want to see more of, go ante up and join me.

World Cup - USA (and England) Gooooooal!

I’ve gotten my news mostly in real time since 1997, thanks to MIT’s zephyr instant message system, and one of the wonderful things about Twitter is expanding that to more people and more kinds of news. Now I get overwhelming celebration (as above) as well as overwhelming mourning, and if there’s news I would care about and I’m watching the stream, I’ll almost certainly see it.

I’ve started reading newspapers and blogs even more for analysis, not just what happened but what it means, since what happened is pretty easy to fit into 140 characters but why is not. And now I think many newspaper articles are too short. I suspect this is one reason Newsweek’s makeover failed and the magazine is being sold off.

Every time I give a talk about social media, someone in the audience says, “How can I convince my manager to let me use this stuff? She thinks I’ll get the company in trouble.” The answer I use, and the one I’ve heard others use, is “Well, does she trust you to use the telephone?” Invariably gets a laugh, as well as people nodding and taking notes.

You can create problems for your organization pretty easily, whether with a recorded customer service conversation, a forwarded email, or an update on Twitter. The solution isn’t to restrict the channels the organization uses to communicate, it’s to hire people with good judgment and provide communication guidelines. Good judgment shouldn’t be a special requirement just for spokespeople.

This is why I worry about the Pizza Hut Twintern. Sure, she’s great PR (NYTimes on the job posting, Slate’s The Big Money on her experience). But Alexa Robinson is one person, new to the company, out there at the sharp end of the stick. Pizza Hut could disavow her as the traditional “low-level staffer,” so she can’t build trust in the brand the way a broader-based presence could.

Centralizing an organization’s social media efforts in one person, however awesome (and carefully vetted) they may be, isn’t the right answer. Give a real picture of your work: look at the IBMers’ blogs list or at Zappos’s Twitter aggregator, for example. Your staff are your organization. Hire with that in mind, and trust the people building your organization to represent it as well.

The short version:

1. Shel Holtz: I don’t know how you establish a long-term community around a movie.
2. Shireen Mitchell: Watching on TV is different from being there in person, and social media can fill some (but not all) of the gaps.
3. Shireen Mitchell: The way Congress responds to advocates who use social media will determine how it’s used.
4. Scott Monty: Your network is a social media monitoring tool.
5. Scott Monty: Social media can serve different purposes for different departments and in different regions.
6. Liz Strauss: As soon as you’re hired, you’re no longer a customer: learn to listen.
7. Amber Naslund: Using company resources but only building your own brand means both the company and you suffer when you leave.
8. Scott Monty (yet again): Have a social media succession plan.
9. Shashi Bellamkonda: Reach out to other internal evangelists.
10. Doug Meacham: Invite your community to spend downtime with you.

Go read on Advocacy Avenue to find out what they all mean.

If you want to read what I learned from speakers including Senator Claire McCaskill and Obama campaign Director of New Media Joe Rospars, my posts on Amplify’s Advocacy Avenue blog (oh yeah, we changed the blog name) are:

• POLC: How We Did It – the role of money in the Obama and McCain campaigns
• POLC: Reaching Congress, according to Congress and according to advocates
• POLC: The Visual Frontier
• POLC: Social Media Platforms and Directing Traffic to Your Real Campaign