Little Bird: Find & Connect with Influencers

Somebody may have finally figured out the social influence issue. My social influence issue, at least. My issue is that the typical “influencers” — or the ones with all the “Klout” —  are often either inaccessible or not the real audience I am trying to reach. Many influencers have a cast of people who they get their information from, and tapping into that cast isn’t easy.

Sometimes it’s a curator (or aggregator) vs. influencer discussion. Curators have tons of influence because they can take an idea and bring it to a wide audience, but they’re often not the authors of the idea. In fact, the authors of great ideas are often far too wrapped up in — wait for it — authoring great ideas to make a consistent effort in building “influence.” These authors, however, are often the folks we want to engage, listen to and share with.

Enter Little Bird.

“Like a robot librarian” for Influencers

The Little Bird Website makes their purpose clear: “Use Little Bird to engage experts that other experts trust.”

It’s clear CEO Marshall Kirkpatrick (previously from ReadWriteWeb) gets story telling. All it takes is two sentences and a 70-second video on the homepage to make a compelling argument for the product. (I actually converted prior to watching the video).

First Look – Sample Reports

Little Bird gives a generic test account to people who signup for the beta, which is a brilliant way to avoid drop-off (whatever happened to unroll.me? I digress). You can sign up yourself to get the test account ;).

The test account is seeded with some sample reports, including one on data visualization which we’re keenly aware of since the ZingChart JavaScript charting library came out of our product development team. Here are a couple snapshots of what’s currently available:

The individuals that popped up in the dataviz report include many of the people our team has interacted with over the past couple of years (our product @ZingChart is also listed – w00t). As Marshall’s intro video states, it takes a long time to find the individuals and conversations relevant to any industry or business niche. Little Bird has seemed to bring all of these individuals into one place with its approach to influencer discovery. I’m excited to see what’s to come.

Robot Librarians, FTW.