Market research - the sites I find useful

Here are some of the places I find useful when I am doing research work for clients.

US Corporate information

Edgar If you are interested in publicly traded companies then this site justifies buying a computer and paying an internet service subscription all by itself. A free searchable database of every document that a publicly traded company has to file with the SEC. Some of the documents are pretty hefty and they come in an unfortunate marked up style that your browser or word processor won't translate - so you see the tags throughout the document. There are utilities to strip them out and any experienced Word user should be able to write a macro to remove them if you need to present the information to a client or a boss. But, information that is invaluable for the researcher, even in the marked up text format.

Corporate Information If you are researching a company (publicly-traded or privately-held, foreign or domestic), this is an excellent site. It contains a list of other sites that offer information about companies, and is organized by country. Most of the sites that are linked here offer information free of charge, but there are some fee-based. This is one of the few sites that offers worthwhile information about private companies. You can search by company name from the home page, you don't need to hunt around the country page unless you want to.

American City Business Journals If a target company is located in a Metropolitan Area served by one of the 41 business journals represented on this site, you can find very interesting snippets that didn't make it out of the local area. Executives will often tell the local journalist things that they would not normally pass to their competitors - revenues, factory size, expansion plans and employment plans.

Market information

Demographics

US Census Bureau You almost feel good about paying your taxes when you find a Government site like this. The Census bureau can supply, on line and free, almost any demographic information you might need for a study. An excellent site with excellent data, though of course hampered by the fact that the census is done only every ten years. The site includes national, state and local data as well as some specialized studies and links to other governement sources.

Country and region information

International Trade Administration - Trade Information U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration provides guides and statistics aimed at companies who export products from the United States.

Technology and intellectual property

Delphion Intellectual Property Network Don't ever pay for patent information on any of the other WWW patent sites! Here you get free searches and images of patents. If you want the full thing, you can order it. The only downside is that the records are graphic files, not text or pdf, so they take up a lot of space. But for a quick print of the jacket of any patents you are interested in, this site can't be beat. All referenced patents are hyperlinked, so it's easy to fully explore a topic.

General information sources

Prices's List of Lists A guide to lists of information on the Internet. Many of these lists present information in the form of rankings of different people, organizations, companies, etc. Prices's list is often a better place to start than Yahoo or Alta Vista for research in a specific area.

Fuld & Co. are competitive intelligence specialists and this site provides a great introduction to the subject with links to sources.

CEOExpress is a great, compact starting page for business research and all business information.

Market Research and statistical theory

Market Research Calculators If you need to check what your sample size means for the accuracy of the results and have mislaid your statistics reference book, you can do a lot of statistical calculations on line here.

SurveyMonkey There are a lot of web sites offering on-line survey systems. Unless your needs are very complex, you should find that can this site can handle your survey. It is easy to program and configure, provides excellent tracking and data and is very reasonably priced. The one downside, from my perspective, was the name, since it is clear in the URL that you give your targets. I felt my targets, security professionals as a rule, might not be quite as keen to click on this as the typical GenX web user. However, when I gave this feed back to the President of the company, he modified some settings for me and now my targets see a URL like http://www.surveymk.com/..........., with which I was delighted. I have used it in earnest for one survey of Security Directors and I am working on another as I type this. Highly recommended.

e-Commerce

Cyberatlas I've been researching eCommerce recently with a view to setting up a site for a client. Cyberatlas is a great source of information on this burgeoning area. This is one research area where last year's data is worse than useless, so be careful with some of the other links you may find on the Web.