We were very excited to recently receive and install a new version of the Simmons Choices (III) database here at the library. And by “excited,” I of course mean “terrified” – because of all the complicated business databases out there, Simmons is the most complicated. But after poking around in it a bit, it turns out that Simmons is actually more parts awesome than terrifying (although there is some “intimidating” in the mix). You’ll see why it’s so neat in just a minute, but first, some background.

The Simmons Choices III database contains consumer product and brand usage data. You can use it to find characteristics of the people who consume particular types of products, or to find brand market share, state-specific customer research, and statistics on market potential. The database covers all sorts of products and consumer types, and works by combining these characteristics to find what the market looks like where they intersect. So, for example, you can use Simmons to find out how many 18-24 year-olds (characteristic #1) prefer Budweiser (characteristic #2). Data comes from a survey of several thousand people.
 
The top seven ways Simmons can help you do business research:

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The annual Fortune 500 list appeared in the May 5, 2008 print issue of Fortune magazine, and it’s available online for your perusal. 

(Just for the record, our nonprofit Hill Library did not make this year’s Fortune 500 list. And while I’m only about halfway through the 100 Most Beautiful People list published in the May 12 issue of People magazine, I haven’t seen us represented on that one, either.)

Apart from ranking the 500 largest U.S. corporations, the Fortune list can offer some insights about another question we’ve been hearing more of lately: how does one go about determining the fastest growing industries?

Maybe more people are looking for career changes, or wanting to start new businesses in high-demand industries, or targeting sales efforts at growth industries. Whatever the reason, there are several resources to investigate to get to the bottom of this topic.

Business publications are certainly a good place to start, and Fortune magazine takes its own shot at fast growing industries here. Entrepreneur is another magazine that compiles a Hot List of burgeoning industries and segments. And lists of hot growth companies (like this one from Business Week) can also be useful in spotting macro-level industry trends.

In addition to trade magazines, government agencies can also provide some understanding. Consider the resources from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the BLS charts the fastest growing (and most rapidly declining) industries in terms of employment growth, with projections through 2016; occupations with the largest job growth for the next eight years; and employment by major industry sector. The Bureau’s Occupational Outlook Handbook may offer hints as well: just click on the link for “Tomorrow’s Jobs” on the right-hand side. 
 
Other government sources to check include the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which tracks GDP by industry, and as the name of the agency suggests, is chock full of wonky details about Value Added by Industry, Gross Output by Industry, and so on. And the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration, which lists both today’s high-growth industries, and industries targeted by the High Growth Job Training Initiative.

The commercial site America’s Career InfoNet runs with some of the data published by the BLS, and publishes its own fastest growing industries list here.

And it’s always worth checking with a Department of Economic Development in your state to see if there are similar resources more specific to your own geography.

(Thanks, Sarah!)

When the BEA says "personal income" they mean wages, health insurance benefits, investments and a bunch of other stuff. Looking at a flat-out personal income figure for a location, comparing locations, or tracking income over time can offer much insight into a place's economy and consumers.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently released new estimates on personal income in counties and metro areas across the U.S., with data from 1969 to 2006. This Local Area Personal Income site walks you through the steps of accessing that data. Follow these steps by first selecting a table - or topic - and then selecting a geography and date range.

When the BEA says "personal income," you might say "holy cow this site is overwhelming." If so, check out BEA Regional Facts, where this data is simplified and presented in paragraph form.

The time of day when Allen and I post updates to this blog generally has more to do with when we can find time away from our other duties – like for-hire research, BizToolkit work, and YouTube – than it does with any sort of strategy.

But a recent study identifies the best times of day to post to a blog – the times when posts tend to get the most response on social media sites – just in case you’re a bit more methodical with your online bloggety-blog strategy than we are. Check it out: Thursday at Noon is the Best Time to Post and Be Noticed. And investigate this entry from Read Write Web for further discussion.

So what’s the best time and day to post?

“between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends - nobody cares.”    

For more on using social media sites to spread your blog entries around the Internet, see our recent write-up. This research will surely come in handy as we continue our blog building mission here at the Hill – hope it’s useful for you too. 

Okay, this isn’t technically a business-related post, per se. Maybe it has something to do with growing opportunities for businesses to find customers online, but really, if I'm being honest, it’s just a cool article. 

Check it out: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It’s the transcript of a talk Clay Shirky gave about his new book, Here Comes Everybody, which looks at the shift in attention from TV to the Internet.

“if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”

The asset Shirky calls attention to is the surplus in free time, which since the 1950s has been filled with television sitcoms. As the shift in attention moves from TV to the more participatory Internet, what will we build with our collective participation?

globalEDGE is a leading provider of international country research online. Recently, however, this global actor started thinking local by organizing research on all fifty U.S. states in the State Insights database.

The level of state-specific detail available here rivals that available on whole countries elsewhere. Find key state facts like GDP, per capita income, unemployment rate, and business tax index prominently displayed. Explore the topics at left for further background, demographic and infrastructure data, international business statistics, top corporations, and current headlines from local papers.

And if you need all of this detailed information distilled into a one-page executive summary, well, they’ve thought of that too. Just click the “state memo” link within each profile. 

There’s a looming crisis. And it’s not global warming, or terrorism, or even really the economy – although that plays into it a bit. This crisis is something we’re bringing upon ourselves: Stress.

Only one out of three Americans say that they’ve gotten enough sleep in the last month, according to a recent CDC report. The press release lays some of the blame on “busy schedules and shift work.”

Our friends to the North are in the same boat. A recently published study, called Sleep Patterns of Canadians, finds that “overall, the more we work, the less we sleep.”

The New York Times ran a story a while ago on the stressful nature of business blogging (In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Til They Drop), which cited the recent possibly-stress-related deaths of two prominent bloggers and the survived heart attack of a third.

And Alex Iskold at the Read Write Web believes that stress will be a constant part of our future. Not particularly uplifting reading.

So what should we do?

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Maybe even earlier.

That’s the unstated promise of this May 2007 list: 20 Free Applications to Increase Your Productivity. The list highlights free web-based and downloadable tools to help optimize your software programs, conduct business online, and keep your computer virus-free.

Of particular interest to this blogger are the following:

Free Download Manager
“Free Download Manager is a highly recommended download accelerator and manager. Don’t waste time waiting for your files to download. Free Download Manager will instantly increase your download speed by up to 600%.”

Google Web Accelerator
“Speed up the Web with Google Web Accelerator. This simple program will allow you to enjoy faster web browsing in seconds.”

You can tell my home Internet connection is slow, can’t you? Maybe tonight will be the last one I spend late at work balancing my checkbook online with the library’s sweet T1 connection.

But you go on home early.

Note to my boss and my boss’s boss: just kidding about the staying late thing. You know I’d never stay late at work.  

Note: Welcome to Web of the Week subscribers! We’re happy you’re visiting our blog. Take a look around – and don’t be shy with the feedback – if you have any questions or comments let us know!

Ever hear that blogging is a good way to get the word out about your business? So have we. So we started the Hill Library Blog - where we highlight research reports, online tools, and promising business tactics.

But not a ton of people read it. So we've introduced a plan to build the readership of our blog, and we've laid out our goals, tactics, and success measures. Follow along as we put this plan into action over the next weeks and months, and pick up some tips to build your own blog. Or just watch our blog for the best in business research (along with archives of Web of the Week). 

Is highlighting a Hill site in Web of the Week shameless self-promotion? Perhaps. But wait! The Hill Library Blog is all about helping businesspeople and researchers find information, so it's really you-promotion. And there ain't no shame in that.
 

In addition to recent book and trade journal additions to our collection here at the library, we’ve got a little something for the web-based business researchers among us. And if you're reading this blog, well, that's you. In the last couple of weeks we’ve added a new crop of free online market and industry reports to our Special Issues Index. Here’s a sampling of the reports added:

• The Sky's the Limit: Travel Trends Among the Baby Boom Generation

• IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report

• Statistical Profile of Older Americans Aged 65+

• Statistical Profile of Black Older Americans Aged 65+

• Outlook for Spending on Health Care and Long-Term Care

• Ethanol Industry Outlook 2008

Follow the “more” link for, uh, more…

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