Mark Cuban lead VC in online-influentials startup Little Bird

A new service aiming to help media and PR companies determine which influencers can best amplify their messages launched today, with Mark Cuban as lead investor.

Known as Little Bird, the San Francisco startup was founded by former ReadWriteWeb reporter Marshall Kirkpatrick. Cuban led the $1 million round, along with additional investment from the Social Leverage Group, Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, and former Twitter engineer Blaine Cook.

For now, Little Bird is in private beta. In an e-mail to CNET, Kirkpatrick explained that the service is mainly used to help companies with their social-media or content-creation strategy. "For example, a large telecom company uses it to map out the communications online around each of their target markets," Kirkpatrick explained, "then they send those reports to the product marketing managers of the departments looking to build a marketing campaign."

At the same time, he added, advertising companies can use the service to figure out who the most credible people online are "around the themes of their advertisements, so they can read their content and create more credibly informed advertising content."