Research Edge

The New American Factfinder

The U.S. Census Bureau launched a revamped version of its primary data delivery tool, American FactFinder, this month.  As this will be the primary vehicle for accessing 2010 Census data, the redesign is timely and welcome. 

The 2011 FactFinder offers a new look, new tools and easier access to Census Bureau information.  Users can search and analyze demographic and economic information about the nation and its communities using a variety of methods, with searches available based on keywords, geographies, population and ancestry groups, industries, and predefined topics.    The data can be downloaded in a variety of formats, and enhanced manipulation of tables, such as transposing rows and columns, is now available.  An especially nice feature is the ability to create customized maps based on many data sets.

What exactly is included in American Factfinder besides the Decennial Census?

American Community Survey is an ongoing annual survey drawn from a sample of households, designed to give communities current information needed to plan investments and services.  Data is collected on age, sex, race, family and relationships, education, health care, veteran status, where you work and how you get there, and where you live and how much you pay for essentials.  A comparable survey is available for Puerto Rico.

The first wave of neighborhood level data was released in December.  But there is a caveat for Louisiana. For the first time, the Census Bureau used a five year estimating period, with data collected between January, 2005 and December, 2009.  Given the Katrina related disruptions, the information does not reflect the current size and characteristics of the population. 

 Population Estimates Program publishes estimated population totals for the previous year for cities and towns, metropolitan areas, counties, and states.  Existing data series such as births, deaths, Federal tax returns, Medicare enrollment, and immigration are used to update the decennial census base counts as of July 1 of the current year.

Economic Census is the collective name for the censuses of construction, manufacturers, minerals, minority- and women-owned businesses, retail trade, service industries, transportation, and wholesale trade.  It is conducted by the Census Bureau every five years, in years ending in 2 and 7, and profiles the U.S. economy from the national to the local level and by detailed industry and business classification.

Annual Economic Surveys.  Three different surveys are included in Factfinder.  The Annual Survey of Manufactures provides sample estimates of statistics for all manufacturing establishments with one or more paid employee, including employment, payroll, supplemental labor costs, cost of materials consumed, operating expenses, value of shipments, value added by manufacturing, detailed capital expenditures, fuels and electric energy used, and inventories.  County Business Patterns , which covers most of the country’s economic activity, is useful for studying small areas.  It includes the number of establishments, number of employees, and payroll data by NAICS code.  Nonemployer Statistics collects economic data by industry for nonemployer businesses, ones that have no paid employees, annual business receipts of $1,000 or more, and are subject to federal income taxes.

On-Line Reputation Monitoring

What’s the value of reputation to the success of your business?  It’s priceless.  With the growth of social media consumers have more access to information about your company, both good and bad, than ever before. Businesses need proactive online strategies for managing reputation, and the first step is to monitor what people are saying.

An earlier post identified a number of tools to tap into on-line mentions and conversations.  You could perform periodic searches, but why do extra work when the process can be automated? 

Using Google Alerts is an easy first step.  At a minimum, you should set up notifications for your name and company.  By clicking on “advanced features” you can set the frequency of alerts (instantaneous, daily, weekly), tolerance for relevance, sources searched (web, blog, or news), and delivery method (e-mail or RSS feed).  You are allowed up to 1,000 different alerts. 

The trick here is to target the search so you are not overwhelmed with irrelevant items.  Carefully choose your keywords, and refine based on returned results.  For example, my company name is comprised of common words.  I encountered numerous ads for audio speakers and an African company with the same name in hiring mode.  Adding some Boolean logic (“research edge” –acoustic  –kenya) eliminated a lot of the irrelevance.  My own name is unique, but I need to include both my given and nickname (“cindy fromherz” , “cynthia fromherz”). 

Google Alerts will return mentions in indexed pages, but is less reliable for blogs and virtually useless for applications such as Facebook and Twitter.  You can set up a parallel set of alerts using a search engine designed specifically for social media.   Social Mention, for example, aggregates across most of the popular applications, and allows you to receive free daily e-mail alerts.   

For a comprehensive program there are other things you will want to monitor – key company personnel, brands, competitors, industry activities, etc.  Repeat the above keyword refinement exercises for each concept you need to track, using both Google Alerts and Social Mention. 

But the more searches you incorporate, the more tedious it will become to sort through the e-mail notifications.  Choosing to receive the alerts via an RSS feed rather than e-mail makes it more manageable.  I build dashboards for my own monitoring using iGoogle, grouping alerts into logical categories via its tabs.  Feeds are simple to set up with Google Alerts, under the advanced features tab. Unfortunately, I have not found a social media aggregator engine that reliably delivers results in RSS.  Depending upon the sources you wish to monitor, you will need to repeat the keywords using the RSS feature of specific engines – Technorati (blogs), Board Reader (forums), Kurrently (Facebook) or Twitter Search. 

Does initiating an on-line reputation monitoring system involve work? Undeniably.  But not nearly as much work as repairing your reputation after being trashed by a disgruntled customer!

Seventh in a series

Google – Are You Using All the Features?

Have you looked beyond the Google search box lately?  Explored past the header categories, to the “more”, and the “even more” pulldowns?  Google is continually adding features to make it easier to find what you are looking for on the internet. 

This is why the company hosts the world’s most popular search engine.  According to The Nielson Co., Google has a 65.1% market share, while Bing has moved into second place (13.9%), followed by Yahoo (13.1%).  Google is my search engine of choice for all purpose research.  And depending on the task, I often make use of its advanced features. 

Google has options to narrow your search by media type (images, video) or content type (news, blogs, products).  You can also specify the time frame (the latest, or within the past day, week, month or year).  It provides market summaries and time lines of trending topics.   Here are some other research tools:

Maps.  In addition to directions, Maps offers traffic info, web cam footage, bike routes, real estate listings, and more.  I use the “street view” to check out businesses and locations of interest.  (Drag the little yellow figure on top of the zoom bar into the map.)

Books.  You can view a search term and a few lines of context within a number of (but not all) books.  This is often sufficient information to answer a question, or to determine whether a book is relevant for purchase.  Related books are also suggested.

Scholar.  From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources for scholarly literature: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.  Sources include academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.  However, only a portion of the content is freely available. 

Patents.  Google and USPTO have entered into an agreement to make bulk patent and trademark information available to the public at no charge. The listing includes over 7 million entries.

Translate.  This free service provides instant translations of words, sentences and web pages between any of 57 supported languages.

Labs.  This is Google’s experimental area.  It features some nifty tools that are not quite ready for prime time. 

Wonder Wheel.  Search terms related to the current query  are presented in a graphic display, providing additional relevant keywords and thus more options to gain information.

Third in a series

Search the Internet Like a Pro – Part II

An earlier blog presented basic pointers on effectively searching the internet.  Here are some additional tips to get you quickly to the content you need, using various “operators” in the search field.

Site Specific Search.  You can search a specific website for content that matches a certain term even if the site doesn’t have a built-in search feature.   (And often a search box leads to press releases rather than site content.)  Simply add the site: operator followed by the site’s domain name to your query.  To quickly locate references to biomass on Department of Energy’s website, use the following query.  (biomass site:energy.gov)

Domain Specific Search.  The site: operator can also be used creatively to narrow search results.  For example, my initial search for “solar panel” returned a lot of commercial sites wanting to sell me a system.   When I used the example query to exclude .com domains, most of the results were non-profits with an “org” extension.  (“solar panel” -site:.com)

Specific Document Types.  If you want to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the operator “filetype:“.  Virtually every extension is searchable in Google.  For example, you might be looking for presentations related to geothermal technology.  I found 58 using the following query.  (“geothermal technology” filetype:ppt)

Word Definitions.   If you need to quickly look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply use the “define:” command.  Results will be returned from on-line glossaries, as well as a list of related terms.  (define:photovoltaic)

Similar Sites.  Use the related: operator to find pages that are similar to a specified site.  Just follow the command with a web address.  (related:altenergy.org)

Location of Words within Web Sites.   A cluster of operators will let you target precisely where on a site the words of interest appear.  They include intitle:, inurl:, intext;, and inanchor: (for links to the page).  These useful in relatively specific circumstances, but can be powerful.  Just follow the operator with the query term.  (inurl:geothermal)

You should be a pro by now!

Second in  series

Google Public Data Explorer

Compiling commonly used government statistics can be a tedious process.   I was excited to discover a new Google product that makes it a snap…Google Public Data Explorer.  http://www.google.com/publicdata/home  The application is still in Google Labs, their playground for products under development, but it shows real promise.  Data sets are limited at this point, but new choices are being added.

Guided by the most frequent queries for information of this type, Google tapped into statistics from agencies including the World Bank, Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Centers for Disease Control.   Featured are a variety of metrics relating to population, employment, GDP and personal income, world development indicators, cancer rates, and others.  Most can be broken down into subsets for further analysis. 

Here is the result of a query comparing the trend in unemployment for the metro New Orleans area to the nation as a whole.  http://bit.ly/av4WH4   Creating the entire graph required less than a minute, including adjustments to the time period displayed.  Note the Katrina related spike. 

This example shows how various states compare on cancer rates:   http://bit.ly/9bW64j  I had no idea that Maine led the nation!

The tool has nice features.  Data may be displayed as a line graph, bar chart, map, or bubble diagram.  There is the option to export for incorporation into a web site or e-mail.  (Although WordPress does not support the snippet currently generated; hence the links above.)  And if desired, the saved query automatically updates as new data is added.