Business Blog

This Friday I am giving the sophomore business clusters and orientation to business research and resources, as I do at the beginning of every quarter.  Some of the research topics are easier than others for a librarian to teach.  In general, the larger the industry (automobile, airlines, retail, music) the easier it is to use business databases to find the necessary information.  Likewise, it’s generally easier to teach the students how to use the necessary databases if they have topics that will actually work with them.

This quarter, the first project is the social networking industry.  Needless to say, you can’t exactly find company financials for Facebook in Hoover’s since it is a private company, and the most appropriate NAICS classification for the industry is “Internet Content Providers.”  I’ve got a few ideas of places to go for articles, but I thought I would ask other experts in social networking (my fellow librarians) where they might look for information.  The project description is below, and I would love to show my students how librarians used a social software (this blog) to do research on the social networking industry.  Please leave a comment below if you’d like to help out.  This will also be cross-posted on my Business Blog.

Your team is to conduct extensive research on the history, current condition, and future of the social networking industry.  You are expected to make extensive use of library as well as internet resources for this study.  PLEASE REMEMBER:  It is always our expectation that you back up your findings with the data found in your research, and that you make EXPLICIT REFERENCE to numbers where necessary.

In particular, you will answer the following questions:

1.    How do social networking firms make money?
2.    Two of the main competitors in this field are facebook.com and myspace.com.  Which one stands the best chance of winning this competitive battle?
3.    Other than the threat they pose to each other, what is the biggest threat these two organizations face?

Each observation or recommendation you make must be substantiated by the research you conduct, with clear justifications provided in all cases.

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Fortune has published an interview with Steve Jobs.  I’d definitely recommend looking at it for understanding what makes the CEO of one of the world’s most admired companies tick.  Some excepts are below:

On market research:

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products. “

On work:

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

On management:

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

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There are a few cluster groups working on the home improvement and construction industries.  This article from MSNBC might be interesting to them:

Construction spending took its biggest nosedive in 14 years and manufacturing activity contracted, fresh trouble signs for a struggling economy.

The Commerce Department reported Monday that construction spending plunged by 1.7 percent in January. Builders slashed spending on residential projects, but the weakness spread beyond that ailing sector. There were cutbacks in spending on, among other things, hotels and motels, highways and various projects by state and local governments.

Get the full story here.

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Fortune Magazine has released their list of Most Admired Companies for 2008.  The list can be browsed by industry, by state, and by best and worst selections.

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