This morning I had a call with my Google Adwords rep and she pointed me to a very interesting tool for research. It can be used for social media OR Adwords, or really many other things.
Go to http://google.com/trends
On this page you can enter keywords that you feel relate to your business. And then you can slice and dice interest by country, state, region and then also select a date range. I’ve added some screen grabs below based on a Maryland search for the key phrase “boots.”