My team and I develop PR pitches for our prospective clients. This is one of my KRAs. Planning requires, besides understanding the client’s business and requirements, a lot of research on the industry, the competition, and the current image that the client has in the market. This involves primary researches like speaking to journalists and domain experts. But before that we need to conduct a host of initial secondary research that involves scanning through a lot of print and online media. I am sure this is the same with every team in any PR agency.  So what are the various sites we visit on the internet to gather our initial understanding of a subject or vertical? The requirements and solutions depend from client to client but on an average, these are some of the top sites that you can start off with.

1. Search engines - Google is the obvious answer, and there’s no contesting that.  Additionally, we have Google News Search, if you want to scan through news reports; and Google Blog Search, if you want to scan through blog posts. These are pretty useful search engines that you can use in case you don’t find much headway on a normal Google web search. I also use an addon like Customise Google on my Firefox in times of absolute desperate situations when I need to run a query on other search engines like Yahoo or Live, as sometimes they throw up different results.

Sometime, when these search engines are not sufficient, there are specialized search engines like Truveo and Blinkx for video and audio search, Pipl for people search, and Twing for search within Internet forums.

You can compare Google and Yahoo search engines with SearchBoth. See screenshot below:

2. Wikipedia - We all know Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia contributed by everyone. Now the credibility of Wikipedia has been debated by many before, but I still think that it can be a good resource for reading up on a new technology, place, person, or a subject e.g. public relations. I understood more clearly about PR from Wikipedia than any text book I read in school.  You can also use Wikipedia to get media profiles.

3. IBEF -The Indian Brand Equity Foundation site is a credible site to get information on various industries in India. Take a look at the links on the left side of the page. You can read up the summary and latest news reports of various verticals including automobiles, auto components, aviation, banking, biotechnology, cement, financial services, food industry, gems and jewelery, healthcare, information, technology, insurance, IT enabled services, media & entertainment, oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, real estate, retail, semiconductors, steel, textiles, telecommunications, and tourism & hospitality.

4. India in Business - This is an Indian government site created to help foreign investors in India but you can take advantage of it as well. There are essays on the Indian economy, different industries in India, and alot on foreign investment regulations.  There are sections on the Union Budget and Economic Survey of India.

5. Indobase - This is a good site to get the names of major events in India categorized according to industry and cities.

6.  Industry association sites - Industry association site like CII, FICCI, NASSCOM, and ASSOCHAM are good places as they keep on publishing free reports that you can quickly download and read. There are good content on the sites themselves. Besides these four, we can go to sector specific association sites. For example, for anything on online and internet data in India, we can go to IAMAI. There are associations for each sector.

Do you  know of any good research resource? Share it in the comment.