One of the great marketing challenges facing businesses today lies in analyzing information gleaned from social networks to identify trends that are strongly influencing public perceptions and affecting consumer behavior… The growing number and size of social networking sites contain valuable marketing information which, if properly mined, is worth its weight in gold.
Little Bird’s value is in being able to function as a kind of virtual librarian purposed to help marketers mine that information and organize it in an actionable form. Little Bird is able to sort through Twitter streams, blog posts and LinkedIn to identify the most influential people, companies and content based on a given set of parameters.
Former Techcrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick came up with the concept for Little Bird while conducting social network research for his PR clients. It’s through that experience that he perceived a need for a software platform that could quantify marketing data contained in the social networks.
Topics to be mined include social network trends in fashion, politics, business- you name it and Little Bird can identify the current trends shaping that topic. By identifying trends, companies can gauge what is consuming public interest and identify developing trends.
Little Bird takes the manual labor out of the equation. Officially named Plexus Engine, Little Bird is similar in function to Google’s Page Rank. The platform is able to identify connections among web pages and determines the contents’ relevancy. It can flag items such as how people are connected, what they are reading and listening to, what personalities are active and who is most influencing the social network.
Kirkpatrick has generated a good deal of interest with Little Bird, having raised over one million dollars in seed money. The service is expected to offer unlimited access for anywhere from $50 to $2,500, depending on usage.
