Best Online Planning Tools

Best Resources for Desk Research using online sites, tools and applications:

• Professional Insight - the big “traditional” resources that cost a *lot* of money

Mintel – Big, hefty market intelligence reports

TGI – Market Research surveys and analysis

Forrester – More editorial reports on specific pertinent topics

WARC – the bible of marketing and advertising specific insight

Datamonitor - business specific insight and intelligence

LexisNexis – news aggregation service

Nielsen – the mecca of insight. Tools, papers, resources, everything

eConsultancy – digital marketing specific insight

• If your agency does not have access to these expensive resources, you can access them via:

RoyalMail Infobank – A great resource in Holborn where you can use these resources for FREE

IPA Information Centre – the lovely people here can do searches for you if you are an IPA affiliated agency

• Industry Information - the “obvious” trade rags and blogs and their wealth of news, articles and commentary

BrandRepublic – Central news resource for advertising and media

AdAge – Global news resource

Creativity – creative led news and opinion

Adverblog – great aggregator of great ads

Adrants – more advertising stuff from around the World

This is an ad – blatant plug for mine and Toby’s “alternative” advertising aggregator

Planners Blogs – the Plannersphere wiki of all the planner’s blogs (not all are active anymore)

• Ideas Conferences - source of inspirational presentations

TED – the ultimate video resource of truly inspirational speakers

GEL Conference – more brilliant presentations from the Good Experience Live Conferences

Interesting – Tons of stuff from Russell’s Interesting conferences from around the world is online

• Business Insight - the kind of planning resource that makes you credible to the big cheeses

Economist – don’t underestimate the amount of cleverness hidden here. CEO’s and Marketing Directors adore it when planners quote economist articles.

• Digital Marketing Insight - for when you have to justify that increasing digital spend

IAB – Brilliant resource for internet stats and case studies

User Experience Insight - understanding the experience of your brand as well as the message

Boxes and Arrows – great Information Architecture insight

Good Experience – Mark Hurst’s brilliant user experience resources

• Marketing Trends - seeing where the market, consumer and brands are heading

Springwise – new business ideas from around the world

Trendwatching – consumer trends, with brilliant monthly trend briefings

PSFK – daily news, ideas and trends aggregator from the lovely Piers Fawkes

Contagious – Quarterly intelligence briefing

• Advertising resources - when you need to look at what the competitors are up to

Visit4info – quite cheap and thorough resource for ATL ads

Lurzer’s Archive – global ad resource

Nielsen AdRelevance – advertising aggregator and analyser

Xtreme Information - competitor media monitoring

• Web trends - getting a wider view of activity on the web

Google Trends – track any online trends you fancy and plot them on pretty graphs

Google Alerts – push delivery via email of every new piece of content around a specified keyword

Alexa – slightly flaky competitor website traffic monitoring

• Professional Buzz tracking - the essential paid-for tools for any social activity

Buzzmetrics – The daddy of buzz metrics tools from Neilsen

Onalytica – a tasty alternative

Integrasco – more “grown up” tracker

• Free Buzz tracking – the free but slightly dodgy suite of buzz trackers. Good for indicative measures.

Trendrr – comprehensive real-time buzz tracking tools

Serph – realtime buzz tracking

Omgili - Find out what people are saying

Trendpedia – buzz tracking powered by Attentio

How Sociable? – understanding how well a brand fares in social media

Addict-o-matic – brilliant visual social buzz aggregator, using an automated NetVibes-type interface

• Search Insight - researching keywords to see what people are searching for

Google AdWords – understand search terms around your product and brand

• Social Bookmarks research - see what people think is important content around a brand or product as opposed to an “engine”

Del.icio.us – The daddy of social bookmarks

StumbleUpon – recommendation driven bookmarking

Digg – news and content with a tech leaning

• Facebook analysis - Seeing how people act on Facebook

Adonomics – bespoke Facebook application tracking (see how crap most of them are)

• Blog research - for understanding what real people are saying specifically on their blogs

Technorati – the Google of Blogs

• Board Trackers - see what the topics for discussion on forums is around key words

BoardReader – Message Board and Forum reader

Board Tracker – and another one

Google Groups – searching groups with Google

• Twitter Research - getting under the skin of what’s happening on Twitter

Twitter Analyzer – A bunch of insightful ways to look at a Twitter account

Tweitgeist – Twitter Zeitgeist

#hashtags – real time monitoring and analysis of topics on Twitter

Twitt(url)y – tracking URLs inserted into Tweets

Twitrratr – automated Twitter analysis tool that sorts Tweets around a term into positive, negative and neutral

Twilert – Like Google Alerts, but for Twitter…

Tweetbeep – …as is this

Xefer – Pretty way to represent Twitter account usage stats

• Researching Video content - understanding what people are watching online

Truveo – online video content aggregator (with great top 10’s)

Viral Video Chart – keeping track of what’s hot, with great trend graphs and tools

Many thanks an please add this great (re)source to the list above!