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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Sphinn hates me. And Small Business Brief doesn’t work.

I’m trying not to take this as a sign of impending doom in regard to the social media portion of our blog building strategy, but, well, impending doom is hard to discount.

Anyway, as you know, both of these sites are places to submit articles or blog posts and have them viewed by their respective communities. Sphinn is focused on online marketing. Small Business Brief is focused on small business.

In the last week, I’ve submitted two seemingly relevant blog posts to Sphinn, and they show up for a while, but then disappear. I suspect foul play, and grow more paranoid by the day. Emails to the contact page have gone unanswered. I’m sure editors on this site delete posts that they don’t see as relevant, so maybe I’ll take this protracted silence as constructive criticism and be ever more vigilant in keeping to the online search and marketing focus. That’s only fair, I guess.

I’ve also tried to submit blog entries to Small Business Brief, but their submit tool keeps giving me errors. It seems to have something to do with our blog url, but I can’t figure out what. I can’t even find a contact page on this site to ask someone about it.

I’ve wasted at least an hour posting, or trying to post, to these sites. We’ll chalk it up to education and hope that once we’ve got the hang of this social media thing, the time commitment will be lessened going forward.

I have done some work with our delicious and StumbleUpon accounts, so check us out there. I’ll keep trying at Sphinn and Small Business Brief, but might also look around for other alternatives. Anybody use any article submission sites that they’d care to recommend?

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. 

This monthly newsletter looks at what’s new in libraries, business, and technology by highlighting relevant reports, articles, and blog entries. It saves you time by bringing to light issues affecting these industries today and issues that might affect them tomorrow.
 
In the April 2008 newsletter, learn how much libraries will spend on content by 2010, how much businesses will spend on technology by 2013, how differently-sized businesses are affected differently by rising energy costs, and how many times students used the term "LOL" in school reports in 2007. 

Oh, and feel free to distribute this newsletter if you’re into it – just please point folks back to this blog. Thanks!

First, a confession: I’m intimidated by the words “social media sites.” The idea that I have in my head of these things is of a complex system involving lots of time spent putting comments out there, and lots of time spent figuring out how to interact on these sites.

You know what, though? I don’t think it’s as hard as I think.

We’ll get to why I now think that, but first some background.

Social media sites – in general – let you post links, Web site descriptions, blog entries, opinions, news stories, and pretty much anything else onto a site where other people can see what you’ve posted. These postings can be things you’ve created or just things you’ve noticed online. Other people see what you’ve posted, and can choose to visit those sites/news stories/videos/whatever and then post those posts on their own account if they like what they see. If it works, it’s a kind of domino effect. Your post leads to some people looking at whatever you posted about, and maybe some of those people post about it themselves. A bunch more people see those new posts, and maybe they post it themselves, too. As more people post, more people see, and it all gets snowballed. If the original post was one of your blog entries, each of those new social media posts means more traffic to your blog. Make sense?

Here are the big social media sites:

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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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