“Market research is easier than ever—stay on top of news and trends with these tools.” says Evan Britton of Entrepreneur. Evan goes on to talk about Topsy’s link search,Sency.com, Tweet Cloud, What The Trend, and The Top 100. It is nice article and you can find it here.

I mention it here on the emRG blog because of what it can do for missional research in Europe. A few years back emRG came up with a research matrix that was vetted by experts and contains key elements that catalyze church planting. Its three main areas talk about what the church is doing, what the society is like and how best to bring the good news of Christ into a local expression of the society. Click on the matrix picture to get a full description.

 

Real-Time web research touches nicely on our social context and then by extension onto our mission or bringing the gospel into our context.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about Europe’s Megaregions and so I plugged ‘megaregion’ into Topsy and it gave me the top links to the most referenced web posts that were mentioned in Twitter for that topic. The first was The Rise of the Megaregion | GOVERNING and the third was Latest blog post – Mega-Skepticism – - My skeptical take on the idea of the “megaregion”

But you can do this for one of the key research values of the Matrix like “sex trafficking Spain” and you will get a number of articles like: 23 held in Spain for trafficking Nigerian Voodoo sex slaves – Politics.ie . Or look up ethnic group London and you will find news related items from ethnic film festivals, other research items like this job offer in London, taken apparently: Peopleperhour.com – Social Research aimed at understanding a specific ethnic group across London, Other,

Give it a try for yourself.