A great magazine is a fantastic pleasure and wonderful resource. A really great magazine that delivers a consistent intellectual and sensory experience over time is usually a phenomenal collaboration, requiring the coordinated efforts of a large team of people, working together to bring you their shared vision.

While I honor flagship magazines that have delivered unique experiences: National Geographic, Vogue, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Wired, Interview, Low Rider, Highlights, etc—with Little Bird, I can now create—in minutes—an experience that rivals, and in some ways, far surpasses, these greats.

First, I use Little Bird to identify the leading conversants worldwide in any topic: opera, health technologies, street art, open data, social CRM, cheese, globalization—or whatever. These insiders become my stable of authors, publishing high-quality, relevant and smart works on any topic of my choice, and so often that I have a fresh, unread issue of a topical magazine at my side every day, ready for my attention. Little Bird is my editor—my Helen Gurley Brown—making sure I read only the very best.

Then, I bring all the expert content Little Bird discovers into Feedly, which magically transforms the raw content streams of these global experts into a sensual reading experience on my computer—or even better on my phone or tablet—that rivals a fine magazine, automatically and daily. It’s like a new world-class magazine hits my porch every morning, filled with fresh ideas, images, sounds, and insights from my own personal correspondents spread around the world, selected to make sure I only see the best.

For business and for pleasure, I now know I have material worth my attention that can challenge—or change—my thinking, waiting for any free moment I might have. When I’m ready, the casual flip of my wrist brings me early signals and deeper insights that expand my thoughts, clue me in to what I might’ve missed, and keep my own expertise informed.

You may think it sounds like too much, while I wonder why you’d want to bother with anything less. Meanwhile, there’s a new open data stream on cheese opera I need to visit…

Here at Little Bird, we sometimes take for granted that everyone understands the value of finding and engaging with the most influential experts in the world. Bu there’s magic in making things explicit: so here’s a few great reasons to find the leaders in your field and start your engagement with them right away.

Once you’ve identified the world’s most influential experts in your field of interest—what can you get out of that knowledge?

1. Develop relationships so they’ll spread the word about you

This is the one most people come to Little Bird for first, but it’s only the beginning.

The sooner you find out who those people are with all that influence and the more often you can make interesting on-topic conversation among them (check out the Hot News page on your Little Bird report to find things to talk about with experts that will make you smarter too), the more credibly you’ll be able to build relationships and later ask them to talk about you.

Imagine going up to the most popular person at a party and saying “Hi, I’d like to introduce myself and ask you to please tell everyone else at the party about me.”  You’ll be far more likely to get help spreading the word if you’ve invested time into building relationships with influential people and demonstrating that you’re interesting enough to spread the word about.

2. Learn from the best

Why is it important to spend time learning from the most influential experts in your field?  It might be easiest understood in the negative.  Think about those people who have gone before you, climbed to the top of your field, who continue to perform in ways that win ongoing accolades from other leaders—do you really want to be ignorant of the things they are doing? That doesn’t sound like a very good idea.

3. Find out what people at the top of your field are excited about

People at the top of their field get brought all kinds of interesting, valuable opportunities and information more often and more quickly than the rest of us.  The see it first, they do it first.  You can get in on that same action by hanging out with top influencers and seeing what they get excited about.  Most of them are very generous, you just have to know where to look.

Little Bird tip: Check out the Hot News tab on any report and bookmark that page to learn from the leaders in your field every day.

4. Know what top experts have said in the past about important subjects

Many top people online have been producing thoughtful writing and content for years, about all kinds of things.  Some of those things are going to come up again later, in your life and work.  If you ignore all the things top people in your field have written about those things in the past, you’re leaving a lot of knowledge and value on the table, un-utilized.

Little Bird tip: Check out the Search tab on any report to search inside the blog posts and web pages from the leaders in your field for any keyword or phrase.

5. Know who knows whom and who doesn’t

It’s good to know who top people know and who they don’t know.  That’s valuable information if you end up interacting with those people.

For example, if I’m going to have a conversation about Music Tech with Andrew Mager, Hacker Advocate at Spotify (above, photo Creative Commons by Tyler Howarth), it might come in handy to know the following things:

• He’s known Schlomo Rabinowitz for a long time, probably longer than anyone else in the industry.  Schlomo Rabinowitz is a pretty cool cat.
• He probably doesn’t know the very influential Glenn Peoples of Billboard Magazine, but maybe he ought to.  They’re not connected online at least.
• He’s recently connected with Wesley Verhoeve of Family Records, who sometimes contributes to Billboard; in fact the two had a very interesting conversation about helping musicians get started with social media and what kinds of help are appropriate.

Imagine having that level of visibility into the connections of someone influential in your industry.  What could you do with that?  You can have a much more effective, meaningful conversation with that person.

Little Bird tip: Check out the Compare page on any report to see who knows who else and who doesn’t.

See?  Identifying the top leaders in your field is just the first step.  Once you know some influential people, you can start being interesting and helpful with people that can really return the favor, tenfold.

“The best way to build a strategic relationship with someone far more powerful than you,” self-optimization writer Eric Barker says, “[is] merely to ask their advice.”

Eric summarizes academic research each day on his blog and email newsletter Barking Up the Wrong Tree. According to Little Bird’s data, he’s won the attention of leading experts in Neuroscience like Scientific American’s Bora Zivkovic and microexpression analysis trainer Dr. David Matsumoto, leading experts in Learning like George Lucas’s Edutopia and science writer Annie Murphy Paul and even venture capital leaders like Angellist’s Naval Ravikant and Valley startup expert Chris Yeh. Barker’s editorial powers are widely respected.

His email today was super relevant to Little Bird users.

Here’s what he highlights from a recent book by Wharton School Professor Adam Grant called Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

“New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In one experiment, researcher Katie Liljenquist had people negotiate the possible sale of commercial property. When the sellers focused on their goal of getting the highest possible price, only 8 percent reached a successful agreement. When the sellers asked the buyers for advice on how to meet their goals, 42 percent reached a successful agreement.

Asking for advice encouraged greater cooperation and information sharing, turning a potentially contentious negotiation into a win-win deal. Studies demonstrate that across the manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and pharmaceuticals industries, seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates. Advice seeking tends to be significantly more persuasive than the taker’s preferred tactics of pressuring subordinates and ingratiating superiors. Advice seeking is also consistently more influential than the matcher’s default approach of trading favors.”

Sounds like a great way to build your relationships with the world’s leading experts and influencers you discover using Little Bird. Reach out and ask them for advice!

The best part of all this? You’re going to get some great advice, too.

If you like Grant’s take on things, he’s interviewed in Scientific American too. Investor Brad Feld shared that interview early this morning and it was the hottest link of the day among leaders in Venture Capital. Notably, Grant isn’t followed much on Twitter by VCs—Feld doesn’t follow him yet. Of the top 500 VCs we mapped using Little Bird, only the philosopher investor Eghosa Omoigui and James Cham of Trinity Ventures follow the super-smart Adam Grant so far. I guess that means if you’re a VC, you could be one of the first to develop a relationship with him online. Perhaps you could begin by asking for his advice.

Little Bird relies in no small part on data gleaned from Twitter. It’s no surprise then that some of our users are taking that data back into Twitter as part of their targeted advertising campaigns. As impact studies on both business-to-business and consumer examples have shown, audiences who are exposed to brand tweets are more likely to visit brand sites, more likely to consider these brands/products, and overall more likely to purchase or convert. But don’t waste your money haphazardly sending ads to Twitter users at random. Use Little Bird to shape your Twitter ad campaigns to reach the right people.

You know you want your messages to reach specific audiences that will also become your followers on Twitter. Use Little Bird to quickly identify the most relevant influencers in topics related to your market, and then earmark those influencers in your Twitter ad campaigns to put your ads directly in front of people like their followers—the people most likely to engage with you, your products, and your brand.

Need more info?

Just like we do when we want to learn more about any topic, we turn to Little Bird to learn more about the debate on the future of digital advertising. Now we’re following online ad leaders that Little Bird tells us command the attention of their peers like Interactive Ad Bureau CEO @r2rothenberg, Rubicon Project CEO @FrankAddante, Adap.tv CMO @karaweber, AppNexus CEO @bokelley, and Bazaarvoice SVP @aripap.

Diving deeper, we use our own custom search engine of leading digital advertising influencer blogs to uncover articles like @ajcohn’s provocative post where he claims: “Twitter will steal Facebook’s bacon and become the most powerful brand advertising platform on the planet.”

Ready to get started?

Below is our step-by-step guide on how you can use Little Bird to target contextually relevant Twitter users around any given topic, as some of our customers—like performance storage startup Whiptail—have done, to help deliver your ads to the most relevant people.

Step 1

Determine the topical community you’d like to advertise to and build a Little Bird report on that topic (e.g. “data storage”).

Step 2

Go to Twitter Advertising, if you’ve never advertised with Twitter before you may have to request access.

Step 3

If you have a geographic focus, start off by setting the area you’d like to target with your ads.

Step 4

Using key influencers identified from your Little Bird report, enter their Twitter handles into the text field next to the “Browse Categories” button. By identifying people with contextual influence around a given topic, you can reach people with the same interests as the followers of that influencer (like the similar audiences feature from AdWords). Note that users like your own followers are also targeted by default.

Step 5: Optional

Limit targeting by gender or to specific devices and platforms. Choose whether you want to target women, men, or both. For those of you hooked on the “mommy blogger” demographic, don’t skip this step! You can also target desktops and laptops, phones and tablets, or even specific operating systems.

Step 6

Decide whether you want to promote a specific tweet, or just want to publicize your Twitter account to gain more followers to fuel your engagement. Then set your daily budget, as well as a bid “per engagement” or “per follow” depending on whether you choose to promote a specific tweet or a specific account. If you choose to promote a tweet, an “engagement” occurs when a user clicks on, retweets, @replies to, or favorites your Promoted Tweet.

Step 7

Last but not least, pay Twitter for your ad campaign by entering your credit card info and hitting continue. You’re now on your way to a highly targeted social media advertising campaign. Be sure to check your advertiser analytics to measure your performance and adjust as necessary!

I joined Little Bird after working diligently for a long time to build my social capital the old-fashioned way: making connections in my chosen field organically over years. It’s the same process people have been using to raise their stature forever: around the campfire, on the village green, at cocktail parties, or in social media. Now I’m starting a new chapter in life and career with new focuses: will I start all over again?

Thanks to the science of Little Bird (that feels a lot like magic), I’m starting my new journey waaay farther down the path.

For starters, the first Little Bird report I created put all my prior work and my new, looming need to broaden my horizons in dramatic perspective. In one fell swoop, Little Bird demonstrated its accuracy, encapsulated my history, underscored that authentic engagement pays off, and gave me a dramatic head start in building my new career.

Sakai

It was simple: I created a Little Bird report on the topic of my previous focus, the Sakai open source learning and collaboration project. In mere minutes, right before my eyes, Little Bird showed me Sakai’s social network: no one missing, everyone ordered aright based on the effort they had put into building social capital in the Sakai community online. And lo and behold, who did Little Bird identify as the most interconnected person online? Me.

I’m not highlighting my place as giant blue dot in Little Bird’s report on Sakai to toot my own horn. Many in Sakai have contributed far more valuable efforts to that community than I. What’s important is that without ever knowing about me, or Sakai, or any other person or organization in the Sakai community, Little Bird was able to produce an entirely reliable portrait of a community, based on the effort each member had made to engage authentically in social media.

With one look at that report I was convinced that:

1. The effort I had put into connecting to and engaging with the broadest possible range of Sakai community members built my knowledge, influence, and career in that community dramatically.
2. Little Bird’s science (or magic) was flawless.
3. I could use Little Bird to engage in new communities—using exactly the same authentic practices I developed in Sakai—but with the dramatic head start of knowing in advance how a new community was shaped and who I should engage with first to learn and connect.

Doing New Business

When we printed our first business cards at Little Bird, we established the practice that each of us would pick three communities that we belonged to or aspired to join and put them alongside our contact information. I picked education (a community I already belong to and a topic which I care deeply about), critical theory (a discipline that has organized my thinking life), and growth hacking (a practice that I must master in my new position).

Our cards are not just a gimmick: I now use Little Bird reports on each of these topics to learn more, engage directly with leading insiders, and thereby raise my own stature and further my knowledge, interests, and career—just like I did with Sakai, but thanks to Little Bird, starting at the top rather than from scratch.

Just today, my Little Bird reports on these three topics led me to Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells talking about how urban space and cyberspace combine in modern political movements, @FailedArch‘s compelling post on the poetry of architectural decay,  @monk51295‘s multimedia tour of thinking on how learning has evolved over the ages, and @andrewchen‘s post on why startups should focus on the quickest path to product-market fit. And that was just today.

I’m just a small dot in these communities right now. But with Little Bird’s guidance, every day, with a single click, I’m able to sit at the feet of the big blue dots in each of these communities: learning, establishing new relationships, and growing my own experience and social stature.

Since when do dots have feet, you ask? When they help you climb mountains.

Find out who anyone has impacted online – and who they’re smart enough to be reading. Little Bird Compare is like X-Ray vision into anyone’s social capital online.

Here are 3 situations where this can prove useful, perhaps they’ll inspire even more in your work.

• Prep for a sales call can include a quick snapshot of not just how influential the person you’re going to talk to is among leaders in their field, but also how savvy they are in knowing about market leaders to follow on Twitter. You can learn about where the people you’re going to talk to came from by seeing who the first leaders in their field were to follow them – and you can learn about what kinds of connections they are making most recently, too.

• Vetting someone to hire, invest in or do business with can benefit greatly by comparing that person’s online presence with a list of leaders in their field. The fastest sale Little Bird ever made was to a startup that had spent weeks vetting a hire that we were able to demonstrate in five minutes was in fact super-connected in her field. Likewise, investors considering engagement with startups may appreciate seeing just how closely the people they’re looking at are paying attention to the state of the art leaders in their fields.
• Considering attending an industry conference? Check out just how influential the speakers really are among leaders in their field.

I liked their thoughtful take on things in their post, but thought that anyone interested in the top trends they identified could use some help figuring out where to start learning more about these technologies. So I ran a Little Bird report on each trend and shared 1 of the top 500 most peer-connected experts in each topic and 1 of the 500 most emergent, in a comment on Jeremiah’s blog.

That’s the kind of information that Little Bird surfaces, if you’re learning about something new – we’ll help you cut right to the heart of the conversations and engage with the most influential experts in that field.

So here are the 5 technologies that Altimeter said they saw get traction and that they advised their readers in corporate marketing to consider watching or investing in, followed by one leading and one emerging influencer in that field that you can check out if you want to learn more about these topics.

Gesture Based Interfaces

Altimeter: “They key to this disruption taking hold is developer support.”

Check out Evoluce and GestureDB.org (GestureDB is emerging now and looks awesome!).

Near Field Communications (NFC)

Altimeter: “Companies with NFC-enabled products hawked them hard – see Samsung entry below – but users’ have yet to process the idea that, beyond payments, using NFC as an event control point or trigger can usher in instrumented environments. This is a key Android differentiator that we’d like to see more manufacturers support.”

Top sources in NFC include the publications NFC World, Practical NFC and Pierre Metivier.

Android

Altimeter: “Not investing in Android as an app player or a hardware concern is no longer an option.”

I wasn’t familiar with the forum modaco.com or the media watchers at @evleaks, but the world of Android experts are.

Collaborative Economy

Altimeter: “We’ll see many, many more of these services before the market shakes out.”

This is a big research area for Owyang and it’s something we’re really intrigued about here at Little Bird, too. The top person in that field, according to our social graph research so far, is Rachel Botsman and an important organization emerging is the lobbyist group Collaborative Economy Coalition.

Augmented Reality

Altimeter: “We’re bullish on Google Glass and, while we’ve not yet received our Explorer units to demo, we think the market will be very receptive to technology that augments daily tasks and does it in a lightweight way. We see a market emerging for AR-centric content and interactions and brands should be ready to play.”

Finally, in Augmented Reality, the person to watch has for years been Raouli at @Augmented but the newest up and comer is Nicoleta Notova.

I hope that’s a valuable addition to Altimeter’s great round-up of technology emerging at SXSW. Make sure to read their whole post.

With Big Fish, we’re going to use our community mapping data and Waggener’s huge and savvy promotional muscle to slice the best on-topic people and content out of the overwhelming deluge of information overload at SXSW.

It’s called Hey Big Fish, it’s live at heybigfish.com and what it does is two things:

* Big Fish tells you how you rank among now more than 70K people talking about SXSW on Twitter. We rank people by how much interaction they are receiving from other people participating in conversation about SXSW and especially by the world’s leading experts in 30 topics of interest at the event. We recalculate your score every 6 hours. Right now I’m ranked #2403, for example. That might not sound so high, but I’ve had 58 people in the SXSW community interacting with me in the past few days and it’s in the top 3% of 70K. I hope to grow that much higher, but I’m going to have to add a lot of value to community discussion to do it!

* Second, Big Fish shows you a leader board not just of all the participants in the set of 70K (IFC, BuzzFeed, Pure Volume and Taco Bell are leading brands right now – top individuals are people like Dave McClure, Hugh McCleod, designer Kevin Mullet (@kmullett) and entrepreneur Lena West (@lenawest) — but we also break out the top influencers participating in SXSW around 30 different topics – from space to web design to content strategy to community management.

You might only be interested in Health Tech, for example, and so if you visit our Health Tech page you’ll see which experts in that field are getting the most traction at SXSW and see what that community is most excited about (like a “Techmeme for Health Tech or Topic X at SXSW” type thing.)

Incidentally, people say that Space is going to be a hot topic this year because of Elon Musk’s keynoting – the space geeks making the biggest waves leading up to SXSW are: NASA’s Peter Edmonds (@peterdedmonds), Raytheon’s Stephanie L. Schierholz @schierholz and astronomer Nicole Gugliucci. (@NoisyAstronomer)

Community managers are super-represented at the event, we can see that from the data already. The Community Management specialist getting the most traction in the past few days among SXSW community members is Jillian Jackson (@oneJillian) followed by HuffPo’s Tim McDonald (@tamcdonald) then the fabulous Jeremiah Owyang rounds out the top 3.

The app looks great on any mobile device, so we hope you’ll check it out throughout the week in Austin.

The primary things O’Reilly’s optimistic about are the social web and the distribution capabilities it’s making available to content producers. That’s something I think people in any industry could benefit from finding inspiration in.

O’Reilly’s primary example was Vidcon, an online video industry event that he said saw thousands of young people screaming for their favorite YouTube stars like teenagers at a Beatles concert in the 60′s.

Started by video blogging brothers Hank and John Green, the conference is just one of many different media outlets the brothers work in. John is a best-selling young adult fiction author, riding a wave of popularity on YouTube and GoodReads to sell huge numbers of books to thousands of loyal fans.

The brothers sold out Carnegie Hall last month, (“one hell of an author’s tour,” O’Reilly said) and John Green shared the following thoughts with the New York Times, which O’Reilly then quoted in his opening address to Tools of Change:  “For me there is no bright line between publishing and making stuff on the Internet. They are both about collaborating with others to make something new.”

That sentiment and the Green brothers’ whole experience resonated with O’Reilly. “If you’re a publisher and you’re only thinking about books and ebooks, you may be missing out,” he said. “You need a bigger footprint online.” The whole conference is shaping up to be an optimistic look at a future of knowledge sharing that’s multi-media and multi-platform.

“Readers and authors are doing fine,” O’Reilly concluded his talk to his fellow publishers. “And when platforms are vibrant, it’s because ideas matter. If you make that the heart of your practice, you will succeed. Work on stuff that matters.”

Other fun from Tools of Change:

Cory Doctorow: “The 21st century novel presumes easy access to a search engine; you can drop concepts and trust readers to look them up for themselves.”

Who do members of the ePublishing community pay the most attention to? According to Little Bird’s community analysis: publications like Digital Book World and The Future Book, and individuals like Idealog’s Mike Shatzkin and VP of Engineering at Safari Books Online Liza Daly.

See you in the future, fellow readers and learners!

Austin-based social business thought leader Susan Scrupski announced today that she has left her position with agency 7Summits and is going independent. Scrupski’s job change is particularly notable because she is the world’s leading expert in the exploding field of Social Business, according to the automated analysis of the social business community on Twitter performed by the community-mapping technology of Little Bird. Little Bird maps existing community connections around any topic and helps businesses discover and engage with key topic influencers and experts.

Whenever a key thought leader in a red-hot industry sector makes a job change, it’s newsworthy. When it’s the #1 person in what’s arguably the hottest field in business right now, that’s big news.

Scrupski cited Little Bird’s analysis in her announcement of the move, writing that “the good news is I can rest on a big data set of evidence that supports my ability to influence the conversation on what is happening in Social Business.”

“According to [Little Bird's analysis], I occupy the #1 position among the top 500 insiders on Social Business. Now, before everyone unfollows me on Twitter, I’ll qualify that by saying, what Little Bird does is something analogous to Google page rank. It’s not that I’m the brainiest or most knowledgeable person in Social Business, it means that the most knowledgeable and brainy experts in Social Business are connected to me. And there are a lot of them! I celebrate every expert in this category and wish only for continued success of everyone in the space. That actually includes the vendors. Hence, you can see why I feel the need to maintain an independent voice in the market.”

Scrupski says her aim is to do something next that truly changes the world. She knows that the relationships she’s built online are a key enabler in making those dreams a reality. Susan already has those connections; other participants online use Little Bird to identify targets for relationship building, for scaling their social efforts and for assessing the connections they already have.

We would like to encourage (perhaps only a little tongue-in-cheek) the world’s leading experts in other fields to consider their options as well. Merv Adrian in Big Data? Chris Paton in Health Informatics. Linda Bustos in eCommerce. These people have options, of course, but day in and day out they’re working with the networks they’ve built to do their work with power. Finding, building and leveraging professional connections is an incredible source of power that can be amassed in new ways thanks to social media, networks and business. Susan Scrupski is a very high-profile, leading example of a growing trend that will touch almost every business in the world.

We wish you the greatest success leveraging that incredible social network you’ve built to change the world, Susan!  The social business web is cheering for you.