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So, it was a year on, and I was Groundhogging my way back up to Northampton to present to the IPA Stage 2 posse all over again. I didn't get to graduate up to another talk, so I was lumbered with "Desk Research" again. Still, grand opportunity for me to polish up the deck and add in the latest online research tools.
It is interesting how much has moved on in a year. Social Media measurement tools are now at the forefront of desk research. The emergence of various buzzmetrics platforms are rapidly beginning to diminish the allure of "professional insight" tools like Mintel and TGI. Real-time insight is suddenly far more applicable to a brand. We just need to be able to convert that information into insight and action pretty bloody fast.
The other new development is the decline of the blog. The planner blogging bubble is in decline as the likes of Twitter make it far easier to share links without the hassle of commentary. Either that, or the planning community has realised that they were all talking about the same thing. Still, planning blogs has always been a rather insular source of insight. Better to delve into the real world. And here is how:
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
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.
A tool you may want to explore is Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Tool (MAIT) available at www.LetSearchMakeYouSmarter.com. This is a free add-on to Excel which gives you access to the full history of searches performed on Bing (and before that Live Search). You can then look at demographics, geographics and a great bunch of data for any given term. I wrote an article about the use of this tool here (http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/analytics/archive/2009/08/04/marketers-should-think-outside-the-search-box.aspx) that you might find interesting...
Keep up the great work.
cedric
Posted by: cedric | February 22, 2010 at 06:34 PM
Thanks for the update. Useful stuffs as usual. I would add Google Ad Planner. It is pretty neat to profile a brand's audience online - a free Nielsen alike.
If you're lucky enough to work on big clients, you might find http://www.brandtags.net/ usefull as well, a collective experiment in brand perception.
best,
Posted by: Folktalks | February 23, 2010 at 04:15 PM
Well useful - bookmarked and shared!
Nice one.
Posted by: Iaintait | March 04, 2010 at 11:15 PM
No offense Nick but I think desktop research is symptomatic of very lazy planning.
Posted by: Mikelaurie | March 05, 2010 at 01:36 PM
Mike - whilst I agree desk research can lead to laziness, you have to agree that it often happens as a first look at a problem. Sometimes you have no time, no data, no hypothesis - so it has to be used to some degree.
Thanks very much for this Nick.
Posted by: Will | March 31, 2010 at 05:22 PM