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!

Ogilvy’s Approach to Digital

Internal stuff stolen from this presentation:

Structure for social:

Via

2010 Digital Trends by David Carr

Have a look at these Digital Trends for 2010 based around 4 themes including: Real-time, Won’t believe the hype, Good cause/Cause Good and Developing a Playful Side.

by David J Carr, Digital Strategy Director, Chemistry Communications

What Qualities Make a Good Planner?

Perspective, experience, vision, popularity, “consensus building”, interest & interestingnesss, method, madness, magic, simplicity, passion and I guess the list can go on..

Via

Google Internet Stats

Every planner’s dream!

Here’s some random useful stuff that i found on Google Internet Stats:

20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

YouTube, May 2009

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

HarvardBusiness.org, June 2009

There are 1.5 million business searches daily on YouTube, making it the second-most-visited destination for business searches, behind Google.

Google, Forbes, BtoB, June 2009, June 2009

According to a study done by OTX, 33% of young people (12 – 24 year olds) globally (UK, US, Germany, India and Japan) are contactable at all times, even in their sleep.

OTX Research, March 2009

Users are 1.5 times more attentive when browsing YouTube than when watching TV.

Motorola (with Mindshare) and GM, partnered with YouTube, December 2008

5% of all time online is spent on Facebook.

Comscore, April 2009

Planning is like rolling a joint..

..there are may ways to do it, sais Leon :)

The following presentation is a must read for all juniors or those aspiring to be planners and not only.. (Personally, it helped me remember in these shitty difficult times what my job should be all about ).

Enjoy:

Planner Survey Results 2009

Finally Heather succeeded in putting together the results of this year’s survey among planners from all over the world.

Interesting findings:

• Very few people identify themselves as connection planners or context planners.
• BBH, CPB and WK seem to have the best planning departments worldwide
• Female planners and senior planners aren’t having kids as soon as
  their male colleagues ;)
• And last, but not least: only 3% of planners are out of work, half in the US and half overseas. (Hurray for that!)

Unfortunately, the 14 Romanian planners who completed the survey were not interesting enough to also generate a salary analysis, like those from some other countries.. Maybe next year?

the Planner Collective

“The planner collective” is a one-page RSS aggregator of resources for account planning/brand strategy, currently in beta but with great potential.

Check-it out here

Via BrandTao

Developing your own planning style

Check out some good advice from Richard Huntington (United London), Malcolm White (Krow), Guy Murphy (JWT), Neil Goodlad (CHI), David Bain (BMB), Charlie Snow (DLKW) and Giles Hedger (Leo Burnett):

Anatomia unui planner ideal

As mai fi adaugat un set (maricel) de ‘oaie, caci fara ele restul nu e prea util.

Via