There were so many rich gems from this conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird on last week’s CXDNow, that I’ve rewritten the headline almost 10x and have struggled with how to best synthesize our one hour show for you. Marshall and his team are rightly excited about “Contextualized Segmentation”, I am personally a fan of “Market Engagement Optimization” which I’ve been thinking about for a few years and “Holistic Business Strategy” which I have been touting for over 15 years. But after listening to this whole conversation a second time and reviewing my notes, I think what best encompasses what Little Bird does, especially as it impacts our ability to design great customer experiences, social intelligence is the clear winner.

Why? While Marshall shares that the first thing most people do with Little Bird is to find who are the influencers a company should talk to about a new product launch, as they start to understand the capabilities more fully, they quickly are able to create value across their entire business strategy. From marketing, to recruiting, to trend watching, to content curation and especially for learning from the market to inform their product strategies, Little Bird is able to best identify the truly influential people and the conversations that really matter to your market.

How do they do this? As you will learn in this episode, their key metric is based on the relationships and connections between those who are regularly engaged in conversations about key aspects of your market. It’s not only about who has the most ‘potential reach’, but about how many other connections a given influencer has within a given network. Going further, Little Bird helps you to see the clusters of the types of influencers engaged in the conversation – are they high volume self promoters or are they true influencers? What potential sub-communities exist? And now with the latest release, what are the phrases and language being used within those sub-communities that may be salient but not obvious.

I think the reason I am biased towards thinking of Little Bird as a Social Intelligence tool is best summarized by this quote from Marshall in the podcast when I asked him what is different about his product. He said his best customers are “Leveraging influencers not just for what they will tell the world about you, but for what they will tell you about the world.”

This post only scratches on the applicable insights we uncover in this conversation. To get the most from it, find yourself an hour on your commute or in the evening and listen to our conversation between Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Gray and myself as soon as you can.

Sponsored by XPLANE:

XPLANE is a strategic design consultancy focused on addressing complex challenges on the inside of organizations. We leverage visual thinking, people-centered design, and co-creation to design solutions that accelerate the way our clients envision, explain, and realize their goals.

About CXDNow:

CXDNow is back for season 2 of our series focused on understanding and successfully executing on customer experience design so that your organization may better serve, and ultimately win your market. In season 1, we focused on the fundamentals of CX Design through conversations with CX leaders such as Brian Solis, Risto Lahdesmaki and Tom Illmensee among others. As we move into 2016, we will be bringing you stories from more leaders around who will share their deep insights and practical advice in pursuit of advancing the field for the benefit of all.

If you are interested in being a guest on the show or sponsoring us, please contact us.