The Business of Staying Fit

This week, as I munched on junk food while watching Biggest Loser, I started thinking about the business of gym memberships. According to The International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, there are nearly 30,000 health clubs in the US. About 50 million of us have gym memberships making the healthclub industry a $20 billion a year business. That's a lot of money spent on gym memberships. Especially since fewer than half of us who join in January will still be there by April, according to SmartMoney. The average annual cost of a gym membership (including initiation fees) is $775. Combine that with all the money Americans spend on dieting and you might be looking for a cheaper way to a better body. Here are some ideas for staying fit on a budget:

• Some health insurance providers offer discounts on gym memberships. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas offers a flexible membership to several big fitness center chains with no contract required. So if you give up on your  New Year's Resolution by April, you won't be out a monthly fee for a plan you're not using.
• Pay your gym month-to-month rather than with an annual contract. Again, you won't be out that monthly fee if you're not using the service.
• Keep an eye out for Groupon, LivingSocial or other daily deal sites offering fitness classes at a discount.
• Check your local city for community fitness programs. Austin Parks Foundation is currently offering free Yoga in the Park every Wednesday in October.

Social Currency: More than just buzz

We have looked at how companies can monetize their social media with Social Commerce and we've introduced you to Famecount where you can find the popularity of brands, now with help from Vivald-iPartners  we examine how it all fits together to create Social Currency. The report Social Currency: Why brands need to build and nurture social currency explains that "today, one of the most important strengths of a brand is its social currency, the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their everyday social lives." Social of media has changed how brands are built. "Social media sites are actively used today by major brands to strengthen customer service, introduce or co-create new products and entertain people." A high social currency commands a price premium and creates brand loyalty, but it takes more than just buzz. "Companies need to learn how to make their brands more social, and how to interact in new ways with their customers.

The most interesting part of the paper explains that although there are 6 components of social currency (affiliation, conversation, utility, advocacy, information and identity), brands don't need high scores in all 6 to have a high currency. Different categories of products have different needs. Categories like fast food and beer seem to be less dependent on providing a strong sense of community, whereas airlines and IT rely on their user-base to exchange news, hints, and other information.

Free Webinar for Info Pros and IT

Evaluating Information Industry Services & Vendors: Best practices for info pros and IT staff Wednesday, October 26, 2011 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM EDT - No charge for the Webinar - Register

The information industry is again changing rapidly. First-time and replacement solutions offer many benefits, but moving forward involves a certain leap of faith. Before working with a new vendor or implementing a new product for you and your own customers, you cannot truly know how things will unfold. Yet without taking these risks and re-evaluating, progress stagnates.

Avoid common pitfalls and take some of the risk out of new solutions and relationships. Learn from experienced peers about engagement approaches, key questions, validation, and contract clauses to insist upon when you expand your portfolio of solutions and suppliers.

Panelists include:

• Armand Brevig, Global Director of Sales, Reprints Desk
• Perrin Kerravala, product reviewer for VIP and information manager with Export Development Canada
• Tim Buckley Owen, senior news editor for VIP and information industry journalist and trainer with 25+ years experience

Webinar hosted by FreePint - Family of sites and publications reaching over 100,000 information workers monthly

Casual Friday: Pop Culture Round-Up

Happy Friday, Everyone!  Fall is in the air and as some of you know, TV is our boyfriend and Movies are our back-up plan. Here are some of our favorite pop culture moments of the week: Was there anything funnier than Casey Wilson and Megan Mullaley singing "Torn" on Happy Endings this week?

We can't get enough of Mindy Kaling's Concerns. We heart the Target Missoni towels, too, Mindy!

The new Avengers trailer has us giddy with anticipation. Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk!

And to start the weekend off right, we'll be lunching at Steak Me Home Tonight:

Social Commerce: Monetizing Social Media

Social Media, everyone is researching it these days and everyone wants to know how to make it pay. I ran across this white paper from syzygy group that describes social commerce as a "fusion of social media with e-commerce." Social commerce includes 6 dimensions: social shopping, ratings & reviews, recommendations & referrals, forums & communities, social media optimization, social ads & apps. The simple definition is "helping people connect where they buy, and buy where they connect." Amazon has been bringing customers together and getting ratings and reviews in their online store for years, and now stores are popping up in Facebook. 1800Flowers and Gilt Groupe now sell their wares right there so you can more than just "Like" them. There is also potential for brand building by creating associations in the minds of customers. Researchers are using psychology measures from social intelligence to gauge brand worth (see chart below). Next week I'll cover more on the new subject of a brand's social currency. The report is available from Social Commerce Today. Their site is full of the latest news on the subject. Check out all the companies making social commerce a reality and see if they are  cashing in.

Casual Friday: Don McMillan Day

We haven't had a Casual Friday in a while, and that's a tragedy that will be rectified now by some quality business comedy, courtesy of Don McMillan.  He's one half engineer, one half comedian, and his office-related humor is well worth watching, especially if you've ever seen a bad PowerPoint presentation. Caveat:  These are standup videos, so expect the general qualities of standup comedy, e.g. stereotypes, that may make them unsuitable for office viewing (in case you work in an un-fun office).

Security Badges

Office Math

Marketing Statistics

Business Dress

Last but not least, Don's magnum opus:  Life After Death By PowerPoint

The Business of Dieting

A little over indulgence this weekend and so many new diet supplement ads on TV it got me thinking about the market size of diet industry. Check out the counter from World-O-Meter for up to the second spending on weight loss programs in the US today.  Marketdata Enterprises is a research firm specializing in the diet market. In May they released the U.S. Weight Loss & Diet Control Market off-the-shelf report. The 412-page study is a complete analysis and forecast of the major segments of the U.S. diet market including diet drinks, foods, pills, and even diet books and exercise videos. According to Marketdata Enterprises, there are an estimated 75 million dieters in the US and those dieters spent $60.9 billion in 2010 --  up from $60.4 billion in 2009, and up 3.2% from $58.6 billion in 2008. The last 2 years have been dubbed the "value diet" years. With belts tightening both figuratively and literally, about 80% of all the dieters tried to lose weight on their own (the highest percentage to date).  They bought books, over the counter pills, and signed up for diet websites all in the effort to lose the pounds without losing their shirt.

Even with so many do-it-yourself dieters, sales of all commercial weight loss chains grew about 2% for the year. The 8 top chains grew at 3.3%. Adding the revenue from the big chains with all the small local commercial weight loss centers, Marketdata analysts forecast the market to be worth $3.14 billion.

The diet websites didn't do that well and most of them are not profitable and are moving to a user-free, ad-supported model. Not surprisingly the sites are expected to grow by 8% by 2014. I'm sure all the new weight loss apps will have to be added to this market before the next biennial report comes out.

For an overview of the report see the Marketdata press release. The entire report is available for $2,295  - order online at Marketdata Enterprises. What follows are Marketdata’s estimates for the major segments of the U.S. weight loss market ($ billions):

De-shark-ifying

At bizologie we’re actually big animal lovers, so please don’t take this post’s image too literally.  Sharkrepellent.net is not the oceanic equivalent of bug spray but rather, according to its parent company FactSet, a “corporate governance database,” which, “provides takeover defense and corporate governance data for more than 5,600 U.S. incorporated public companies.” To use Sharkrepellent.net’s services to the fullest extent, a company would need to purchase an account.  Luckily for us intellectual freeloaders though, they provide near the top of their homepage a nondescript link to their reports archive that dates back 10 years.  It’s full of short yet detailed- including spreadsheets and graphs- reports concerning all things poison pills, proxy fights, activist tactics, and hostile M&A’s.  For those who find corporate dramas riveting reading, or those with the potential to have a Conglomo breathe down their neck, it’s definitely worth dipping a metaphorical toe in the water and visiting the archive.

bizologie Favorite Tools: SnipSnip

Need to crop a YouTube video? Check out SnipSnip. SnipSnip allows you to take any YouTube video and crop out just the parts you need. We love this for using videos in presentations or tutorials. You simply find the video you want to use, copy it to SnipSnip and input the start and end time you want. They'll give you a link to use or HTML code for your website or blog. No sign up, no hassle. Love it!

The Next Boom

I'm currently reading Jack Plunkett's new book, The Next Boom: What You Absolutely, Positively Have to Know About the World Between Now and 2025. Jack is the CEO and publisher of Plunkett Research a leading provider of industry sector analysis and research, industry trends and industry statistics. The book is a refreshingly optimistic take on the world economy (and honestly that is exactly what I need right now). Plunkett "persuasively demonstrates the emerging trends, technologies and changes that will lead to a new period of substantial economic growth in emerging nations as well as many of the world's leading economies. He presents a panorama of carefully documented developments in areas including energy, health care, education, demographics, trade, technologies and the rapidly-growing global middle class - showing how trends in America and around the world have tremendous synergy that will lead to a long-term surge in global business. This book will help you understand how to best position your business, your investments and your career to benefit from the coming era of global growth." (Amazon) Definitely pick up the book and also check out The Next Boom video series available on YouTube.

Bookmark Futurity…

…but be forewarned that it’s highly addictive.  In a nutshell Futurity.org's akin to the colorful see & be scene watering hole, the one with an amazing happy-hour special where all the hip people go to flaunt themselves.  Only the colorful characters are the top research universities in the US, UK, and Canada, and what’s being flaunted isn’t skin or fashion but research findings.  (Granted, some of those findings could theoretically be about skin or fashion, but I digress.) Now research findings may not immediately sound interesting to everyone, but with highly catchy titles, one-pager lengths, and summaries that aren’t painfully erudite, it’s easy to find yourself thinking, “I’ve got three minutes.  I’ll just click on one more link because I really want to know how they figured that out.”

Futurity breaks its research headlines into four categories: Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Technology, and Society & Culture.  For business researchers, that last category may have the most draw, with tantalizing headlines like: Super food: Shoppers will pay 25% more, or Exports + R&D = competitive edge. The other categories though often highlight emergent technologies that have the potential to form the basis of for new or niche markets, so they are worth looking into as well.  Who knows?  If nothing else you may read a study that’s a nifty conversation starter for the next time you find yourself at your local see & be scene watering hole.

Kids Count

The Annie E. Casey Foundation just released their 22nd annual Kids Count Data Book and now have their data available online through the Kids Count Data Center. "Kids Count is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the U.S. The Foundation provides policymakers and citizens with benchmarks of child well-being and seeks to to enrich local, state, and national discussions concerning ways to secure better futures for all children." With the online tool users can compare individual states or look at indicators across states for comparison and rank and then download the data in charts and maps for presentations. The statistics cover all of what you would expect but you will also find unique factors represented for a complete overview of children's well-being. Research includes information on children's:

• demographics with info on immigrant families
• education including test scores
• family structure
• health with insurance, dental, even mental health stats
• safety with stats on out of home placement

Megaregion Research

Megaregions are massive interconnected cities scattered throughout the United States, e.g. the Houston/Austin/Dallas Triangle, and the America 2050 initiative is putting them under the microscope (metaphorically speaking). Their about page says, “America 2050 is a national initiative to meet the infrastructure, economic development and environmental challenges of the nation as we prepare to add about 130 million additional Americans by the year 2050.”

If you’re doing business research- especially research concentrated around megaregions- then their site is a veritable goldmine of information.  America 2050 features free reports on topics ranging from energy & climate, high speed rail, broadband infrastructure, commuter patterns, etc.

Beyond the sheer concentration of data and analysis packed in America 2050's content, their maps are an excellent highlight.  The main maps page features many versions of the national-level megaregion concentrations, plus proposed passenger transit lines throughout the US.

Furthermore the incredibly detailed region-specific reports found in the Research tab have maps illustrating economic interrelationships among cities, e.g. wood products’ traffic concentrations within the Texas Triangle.

For those who want to keep abreast of the major economic, environmental, infrastructure and transportation trends that are shaping America’s most heavily populated and trafficked areas, this site is definitely one to bookmark.

bizologie Favorite Tools: Historical Value of a Dollar

Ever wonder how much that $20 bill would have purchased in 1950? Or how much that same $20 would be worth today had you invested it in the stock market back in 1970? There are a couple of great online tools and apps that help you do just that. The American Institute for Economic Research has a great cost of living calculator that lets you put in a dollar amount and compare that amount between two years:

Foodtimeline.org is a great source for tracking food prices throughout American history. They've got great lists like "The Hershey Bar Index" and historical prices of McDonald's Hamburgers. In 1955 a Hershey bar was just 5¢ and a McDonald's hamburger was 15¢.

But what if instead of spending your 20¢ on candy and burgers, you had invested it in 1955? Well, there's an app for that, of course. MeasuringWorth.com has an app called The Time Traveler's Investment Calculator. "The Time Traveler’s Investment Calculator is a simple way to go back in time and choose a hypothetical investment strategy and see how you would have done. You can compare your actual investments with what you wish you had done."

But if apps aren't your thing and you want to kick it old school, check out The Value of A Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States. This is a great resource for historical products and services dating back to 1860 and is almost always found in your local public library's reference section.

Can happiness lead to success?

What if everything we've learned about success leading to happiness is backwards? Studies show that happy people are up to 30% more productive. These positive people also suffer from less burnout, and take fewer sick days. What if happiness directly leads to our success and not the other way around? This is becoming a hot topic of research at business schools. Raj Raghunathan is an associate professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and writes the Sapient Nature blog for Psychology Today. I heard him speak at the UT Libraries a couple weeks ago and was intrigued by this idea. So many people define success as overcoming obstacles and reaching goals. But what happens then? We move the finish line. We set more challenges and goals. So that means we put happiness just out of our reach or at the next goal. Can we redefine happiness, and therefore success?

Shawn Achor author of The Happiness Advantage and former teaching fellow at Harvard University is also researching in this field. He explains that we get in a negative mindset and will always look for the negative. Can we change our viewpoint? What about the negative nellies? Is being a pessimist genetic? Achor says it is possible to change the way we think and become more positive. Raghunathan also believes we can get happy-smart and make happiness a priority.

What can you do to become more positive?

• Be grateful - for 21 days write down 3 things you are grateful for and why
• Exercise - get those endorphins flowing
• Stop multitasking - focus and learn to meditate (even for just 2 minutes a day)
• Think of others - volunteer or praise/thank just one person each day

The research shows that happiness is actually contagious. So theoretically as a manager or team member, you could spread positivity to your colleagues and help them become more productive and successful.

When Being Open Is the Benchmark…

…Then you can count on having waffles.  In a great case study of sorts from the Wall Street Journal A-Hed column, writer Valerie Bauerlein extols the virtues of the Waffle House, a humble fast food diner that has carved out a niche by being ahead of the game for quickly reopening after major natural disasters.  Where other restaurants may take weeks to reopen, Waffle House is differentiating itself on a model in which nothing save for total facility destruction will prevent it from being the first restaurant back in business in a devastated community. The planning and effort that goes into reopening so fast has earned the Atlanta-based Waffle House chain its own index from FEMA (yes, the FEMA), much loyalty from its occasionally desperate customers, and money for its pocket books so it can keep doing what it does best.  Take a few minutes to read Bauerlein’s story, and if afterward you find yourself re-thinking your own disaster preparedness plan, then below are some resources with free materials to make sure your business is in ship-shape for weathering storms.

1.  Though their design looks a bit like an old dental office website, Stargazer.org has among other things, a free organization safety kit of downloadable PDF forms that you fill out and save “to organize critical information needed in an emergency”.

2.  The Sunshine State has fielded its fare share of hurricanes, so it comes as little surprise that provides a rich Business Disaster Survival Kit with scads of info, including an interactive Disaster Planning Wizard.

3.  It's good for Uncle Sam when business bounce back after disasters, so the Ready.gov website has a page where you can download all of their preparedness publications, including useful things like a list of costs and a sample plan.

Casual Friday: A Celebration of "Fridays"

Since this isn't just any ordinary Friday, but the sacred Friday before a holiday Friday, we thought we'd celebrate Fridays. If you'd like to take a sip of your adult beverage of choice every time we say "Friday", that might be fun. According to the Interwebs, Casual Friday has been around since 1965 as "Aloha Friday", when employers in Hawaii would allow their employees to wear "Aloha Shirts" on the last business day of the week a few months out of the year. Word spread to California and eventually it became known as "Casual Friday".

The only thing we love more than Friday is pop culture. And pop culture, as you know, loves Friday. Friday Night Lights. SNL wannabe Fridays. The Cure's Friday I'm in Love. His Girl Friday. Below you'll find some of our favorite video clips about Friday.

T.G.I.F.

A Study on Spending

Once again academia has pretty much confirmed one of life’s truisms.  In the 2006 Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, authors Epley, Mak, and Idson, in an article titled "Bonus of Rebate?: The Impact of Income Framing on Spending and Saving," drew on previous research in mental budgeting & accounting, which has demonstrated that where our spending behavior can be predicated on which account we pull money from.  They took another step along this line of research and conducted four experiments, each of which supported their hypothesis that when we spend, we do so with a consideration of how we acquired that money to begin with. Basically, if we receive money that is presented to us in the form of a “bonus” to our absolute wealth, we are significantly more inclined to spend it than if we are told that the money is couched in the form a rebate, or “a return to a prior state” of our wealth.  This behavior, in their words, has important “ implications for the consumption of other commodities, assessments of risk, and government tax policies.”  For example, our government has in recent history (2001, 2009) given Americans rebate checks with the hope that Americans would spend them to stimulate the economy.  Unfortunately for those officials the numbers cited (at least for 2001) reflected that nearly only 22% of us spent that money, and as we know, we still have yet to recover lickety-split from 2009.

UT Business Librarian YouTube Channel

Check out the new UT Business Librarian channel on YouTube. These videos aren't as cute as the surprised kitten or as funny as the talking dog, but they do contain tips and tricks to help you navigate business databases. The short, 2-3 minute videos detail how to use some of the business subscription databases from the UT Libraries Business Information Center. Feel free to use the videos on your website or direct your users to them. And, visit often. More videos will be added each month.

OESA: Auto Supplier Barometer

The Original Equipment Suppliers Association's (OESA) Automotive Supplier Barometer takes the pulse of the auto suppliers' twelve month business sentiment. The bi-monthly survey of the top executives of OESA regular member companies provides a snapshot of the industry commercial issues, business environment and business strategies that influence the supplier industry. What is the overall sentiment of the suppliers? Are they positive or negative about the future? What materials do they think they will have problems getting? Do you they think they'll be able to get capital? These are some of the questions asked in the survey. The Automotive Supplier Barometer is distributed to vehicle manufacturers, financial institutions, governmental officials and the media to provide an on-going profile of the supplier industry. More Questions answer by the barometer:

• Identify your top three materials, commodities and/or services that have availability risk in in the next year.
• List the top 3 customers (in order) where your company is focusing personnel and financial resources.
• What are the top three actions your company is budgeting for to meet expected volume in the next year increases?
• On a per unit basis, indicate your expected yearly percent increase or decrease in your direct material costs for the following?
• Provide your anticipated North American light duty vehicle production planning volume (in millions of units).