GOOGLE TRENDS

One tool in Google Labs is called Google Trends. In the business world, especially in marketing it is important to be dead on when thinking about what people want and are attracted to. Google Trends shows you what people have been searching for the most. If you are trying to mass market to everyone in America then this website is very important. You can even specifically search through the history of trends. For example, when I typed in baseball, I found tons of information about it. It gave me a graph of the search volume in the past 4 years as well as the country that searched for it the most. What could be most importatnt is the list of cities that searched for it the most. If I wanted to open a store that sold baseball things like bats, gloves etc, this would be very important for me when thinking of what city I would want to start in.

Myspace

One thing that businesses have been doing recently is using Myspace to see if their potential employees are good for the company. Many people see this as a bad thing, but when you think abou it it could actually be very useful. Myspace may or may not be an actual showing of what a person really is, but why take the risk? If I am in management and I am looking to hire someone and I come across their personal page and I see that they do drugs or could potentially be a problem in my business I see no reason why I shouldn't use that when making a decision about that person. IT is getting harder and harder to protect yourself from people looking at your personal sites but there still are precautions you could take. Myspace has a function to make your page private so that no one can look at it. If it has this function and someone isnt smart enough to use it, then maybe they arent smart enough to be in my company.

Online Stores

Managing a company like amazon is easy with new technology. The whole point of Amazon is that people can go online anywhere in the world nad update their wishlists and what not. Technology makes it easy not only for people to browse and choose what they want, but if they make a decision then it is even that much easier to actually pay for it online. This is beneficial because instead of actually having physical places where people need to go in and purchase things they can use the internet to do it faster.

The Internet

The internet is probably one of the greatest pieces of technology thusfar. PRetty much anyone can use it so it is easy to relate it to my major. In management it is key to understand the type of business you want to run as well as other businesses around you. The internet is an awesome way to get information about other businesses in your field and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Say I wanted to create a website for the business I am managing, an easy thing to do would be to go on the internet and look for another business that is similar to mine and copy the things that are good on their website and improve on the things that are bad.