Social discovery engine Little Bird snags Google and Adobe award-winning marketer Carmen Hill

Carmen Hill, an award-winning expert in content marketing, is joining Marshall Kirkpatrick’s social discovery engine Little Bird as director of marketing.

“If you know Carmen Hill, you know this is incredible,” Kirkpatrick told VentureBeat, adding, “that’s what we do at Little Bird, figure out who is super respected by their peers.”

She certainly seems to have the right stuff.

Above: Carmen Hill

Image Credit: Little Bird

Last year at the Content Marketing World conference, Hill won a silver medal in Google’s Think Digital campaign for content project of the year. She also won a silver in Adobe’s best landing page of the year contest, and then made it a trifecta of argent in Jive’s highest response rate contest for marketing campaigns.

Little Bird helps companies and individuals find those who are most respected and most influential in their fields. It lets you research any topic online and find the key thought leaders in the space. The tool works on just about every social media network that matters, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

Clearly, that’s a valuable thing for content marketers, who can then target leaders with their marketing, hopefully amplifying their messages through those leaders’ networks.

“Marshall and team have already built a solid foundation for growth,” Hill said in a statement. “I’m ready to put those big ideas into action from beginning to end.”

Kirkpatrick says the world is now ready for “serious social business,” explicitly calling out semi-competitor Klout as the opposite. Klout had been widely derided as a simple popularity contest, but has made significant steps in the past year to address bigger issues.

Above: Little Bird helps you find influencers across the social web

Image Credit: John Koetsier

“Carmen is going to help articulate the story in a way that helps even more companies get on board with Little Bird’s data driven tools for discovery for Influencer Marketing, Content Marketing, and Social Sales,” he said.

Hill is a former journalist — her Twitter bio says “recovering” — who until now has led content and social media for the agency BabcockJenkins.