This thread between the BBC’s Dave Lee & online journalism lecturer Andy Dickinson is but one example of how just doing something simple, like monitoring Twitter, can make you smarter about the influencers you work with…and, in turn, make their lives a bit easier.

What looks like a fun exchange about headline character count is, to the insightful PR pro, a deeper education in how the BBC and Dave work. Armed with this newfound knowledge, a smart flack will tailor any story idea he pitches to Dave (or other BBC journalist) to the BBC’s 30-4-16-40 rule.

So, sure, some may call me a professional influencer stalker. I’m okay with that, especially when it means I’m giving myself a leg up on my competition and doing my part to stop the spread of PR spam still running rampant in the industry.

For those who aren’t familiar with Mobile Monday, it is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials whose goal is to foster innovation and facilitate networking across the mobile ecosystem. I got my first taste of Mobile Monday when I participated in its 10th anniversary summit in Helsinki, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia, which is where I met Mobile Monday’s chairman, Jari Tammisto, and Tokyo kingpin, Lars CoshIshii. Following Helsinki, I was invited to moderate a panel on mobile developer ecosystems co-hosted by MoMoMa and RCR Wireless.

Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic was founded in 2007 and has grown to more than 2,000 members — making it one of the fastest growing technology networking and educational organizations in the Greater Philadelphia region.  According to the 2011 Philadelphia Business Journal, we are the 7th largest regional networking group.

If you are involved in the mobile industry and are interested in what’s going on in the greater-Philadelphia community, give me a shout.

For the non-geeks who read the blog, Inferno is an outgrowth of a distributed operating system I helped launch in the 1990s. It was called Plan 9 (yes, that Plan 9…Paul Fillinich was the marketing lead who made that magic happen) and was created by members of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs — the same group that created UNIX: Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto, Phil Winterbottom and Dennis Ritchie.

I’ve been pretty vocal about my views on how Google is blowing a huge, industry-shifting opportunity with Google+. Most of those views are centered around the company’s inability to know when to let professional marketers take the handoff from the engineers (and accept that it’s ok).

This morning, my friend and fellow corporate misfit, Greg Lowe, posted his views on why he’s abandoning the Google+ party until it figures out how to make its various systems work together. Greg’s not alone. And that’s when it hit me: What would I do if I was running Google+’s marketing today?

Would I allocate gobs of cash from my search business to promote this new product that — according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — has the potential to replace search as the backbone of the company? I could. It’s not like Google doesn’t have the money to make Google+ a household name like Facebook or Twitter.

Would I pay a bunch of celebrities and brands bucketloads of moolah to make my new product look cool to people not immediately related to Robert Scoble? I could. Twitter has shown that tactic works pretty well.

Would I initiate basic political and competitive campaign tactics to reshape how press, analysts and other influencers define the market? I could and would.

No, what I’d do is much simpler.

The biggest problem with Google+ right now isn’t that it’s UI is ugly or that people like Greg can’t log in from their different Google accounts. Google+’s biggest problem is that it’s marketing team isn’t harnessing the power of its most passionate customer base: those who take the time to complain about the product’s current shortcomings (early adopters who are core to the growth of the product).

My fix? Have a strike team scour Google+, Twitter and the web for any and all complaints about the product. Capture them. Catalog them. Categorize them. Communicate them. And then turn the engineers lose fixing them. As each issue is addressed, check it off. Keep the list public. There’s a built-in, passionate product marketing department already built into Google: its customers.

People want Google to be successful with Google+. The meteoric sign-ups show many are looking for something that builds on the early foundations laid by Facebook and Twitter. But unless Google gets some basic marketing religion — and gets it fast — their constant drumbeat of “It had potential…” flops will increasingly erode confidence in the company’s core geek foundation.

Last week, Redmonk’s Michael Cote interviewed me on the topic of how I stay on top of what’s happening in the tech industry. We discussed the tools I use, some of the ways I use those tools, and a number of other topics that address the shifting role of the PR pro (listen to the podcast).