I was asked by the IPA to come and present to the nice people on the Stage 2 course up in Northampton. The topic was the less-than-initially-inspiring "Desk Research - Inspiration and Insights from the Internet".
Once I had slapped myself back into conciousness and got on with prepping for this, I suddenly realised the huge amount of online resources that I rely on when planning for campaigns. Some are bleeding obvious, some are "traditional", and lots are teeny, tiny, obscure and interesting. I've included all the ones that I presented, but there are loads more. Feel free to contribute extra ones and I'll add to the list.
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
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
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
Buzz tracking
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
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
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
As I said in the presentation, it is easy to get carried away with all of these resources in your hands and start churning out reams of deckage on any topic. Good planning is not about gathering every last shred of information. It is about selectively searching for the interesting bits and then turning that from information into insight. That's the magic of planning.
awesome list
I use probably about 80% of those but some really good added examples as well
thanks
Posted by: Mikej | February 23, 2009 at 04:52 PM
yes really nice list! I have a good 70% of it but I'm happy to broaden my ressources. cheers.
Posted by: karine | February 23, 2009 at 06:18 PM
Fabulous list, thanks Nick.
Posted by: Angus | February 23, 2009 at 10:40 PM
Chuffed it is proving useful. It has reached the heady heights of being a featured preso on the front page of Slideshare today. Ooooh, the glamour.
Posted by: Ewarwoowar | February 24, 2009 at 08:40 AM
Brilliant compilation mister! I have shared this with "some" friends:)
Microsoft has released a free Excel plug-in that gives you access to the search history/trends on LiveSearch (http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising/adcenter_addin). It is currently US only, understand in that that the information pulled from the US search engine, but there is a UK-version coming soon...
This is initially a media planning tool, but it also enables you to have your own little Zeitgeist at home: drill down in the consumer mindset using their search behaviour as a proxy of their intent/interest. A brilliant resource, and free:)
Posted by: cedric | March 04, 2009 at 02:34 PM
http://www.guuui.com/
The feed from this site is quite good for some UX updates (not too many so doesn't kill your inbox).
Posted by: mark | March 05, 2009 at 10:46 AM
I was just looking around for material on internet marketing and stumbled on your post. Nice post. I’m still looking for materials for my research.
Posted by: Jeff Paul Internet Business | March 13, 2009 at 05:11 AM
Really Really nice list. Probably the best compilation I've never seen. Thanks! :))
Posted by: E. | July 03, 2009 at 08:44 AM
muito bom!
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Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.
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