Posted: February 19th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: interactive, planning, presentations, research, resources, tools | 2 Comments »
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!
