To explain social media, the tools and how it is used to a large group, I assembled a Prezi, an innovative way to enhance the standard PowerPoint presentation.  The presentation and medium brought a lot to the table, both the content and the medium used.  While Social Media is still sporadically used within Childress Klein, I’ve helped develop a few other Prezis for high-profile presentations.

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I’ve reorganized.  They say, success is found in niches.  No one likes a generalist, the specialists are the ones who succeed.  Makes sense, but doesn’t sound that fun.  I’ve got a few things to talk about:

• Real Estate – two avenues here
  • The first, commercial real estate.  This is the bread and butter. It’s what I do for a living and what gets me up in the morning.  Commercial real estate isn’t just about office buildings (or retail or industrial).  It’s complex and challenging.  That’s why I like it.
  • If it’s not commercial, it’s residential.  I have a small taste of the investors world.  One, cash flowing, residential rental property.  While single family residential rentals aren’t terribly exciting, the barriers to entry are minimal.  When I’m not looking at the commercial stuff, I’m planning for the future on the residential side (at least for now).
• After real estate, I like to parlay on the web.  Call me, a wanna be webpreneur – Following the upstart adage: “fail fast, fail often,” I execute smart business ideas on the web.  I do it quickly and inexpensively.  I expand what sticks and abandon those that don’t.  You can see a few of the projects I’ve done at www.scharlemann.com.
• Finally, there is everything else – life strategies, book reviews, events and anything else that might seem noteworthy, interesting or entertaining.  Sometimes you need a break from all business.

Stay tuned, plenty more to come.

photo credit: Niche

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What if there was a website or tool where the community at large could vote on what tenants would do best in a particular space?  It would be great… not only would future tenants know what type of demand they might see, but it would make the space much more “sellable – or leaseable” from the landlords perspective.  Think about it… a user can sign on to a website, find a section of retail near where they live or work and make a recommendation for a tenant or vote on recommendations made by other users.

There’s probably ways you could tie the location-based services of foursquare or gowalla into this as well.  With foursquare, users “check-in” as they visit spaces and the user with the most check-ins is deemed “mayor”.  The success of these services is making a game out of ordinary and normal activities.  There might be a tool you can add to these services: the “I wish” application.  I wish there was a pizza shop to check-in at here.  Or something along those lines.

This is kind of like MyStarbucksIdea taken to another level.

That’s my thought for today.  What do you think?

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If you’ve heard those stories before, you can probably recall them; maybe not all of the details, but the general concept, theme and/or idea.

Chip and Dan Heath explore why these stories stand out better than many in their book Made to Stick.  Released in 2007, this book breaks down what makes stories or speeches memorable into six principles: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories; or SUCCESs.

Simple

The book offers a variety of case studies that show the importance of keeping the core simple.  One of my favorite examples was with Southwest Airlines.  Known as the low-cost carrier that excels in customer service and employee retention, Southwest Airlines internal motto and core idea is “THE low-fare airline.”  Employees are encouraged to reference this during the decision making process.  The example presented in the book was with Chicken Caesar Salad.  Customers like Chicken Caesar Salad – so should they offer this snack on particular flights.  The response from one of the company leaders: Would offering Chicken Caesar Salad on this flight make Southwest “The low-fare airline?”  No. That is the single most important thing.  I haven’t been offered a Chicken Caesar Salad on Southwest flight, have you?

Or, how about the 1992 Clinton campaign motto: “It’s the economy, stupid”?  Simple and succinct.

Unexpected

There are two approaches to generating unexpectedness.  The first is getting attention by breaking a pattern or creating a surprise.  A great example of breaking the pattern comes again from the airline industry.  In this instance, a flight attendant revised the monotonous, repetitive safety announcements we hear whenever we fly a plane.  What did she do?  She broke up the announcement into interesting pieces: “If you haven’t been in an automobile since 1965, the proper way to fasten a seatbelt is…”

While surprise gets our attention, interest keeps out attention.  One approach described is the “gap theory of curiosity.”  It’s like the often heard news teasers: “Which local restaurant received a D on a recent inspection scores? Are you eating there?”

Concrete

Tangible ideas and concepts are easier to understand than abstract ones.  What does justice or loyalty look like?  That is a lot harder to grasp than say a bicycle or avocado.  The more hooks used in the story, the better.  One approach to teaching prejudice in elementary school was described as brown eyes vs. blue eyes.  One day the blue eyes were better, the next day the brown eyes.

A second example described was setting common goals in tangible terms:  Boeing’s 727 was developed with the goal of: seat 131 passengers, fly from Miami to New York nonstop and land on runway 4-22 at LaGuardia (a runway too short for existing passenger planes).

Credible

Credible helps people believe the story or statement.  Search snopes.com for spoof emails about medicine and you will often see references to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  References to these groups add credibility to those statements, even in the case when the statements are untrue.

The Heath’s outline two types of credibility:  External Credibility and Internal Credibility.  The above example is using external credibility.  Internal credibility is found when convincing details are used or statistics are made accessible (more visual or easier to grasp).  One test of credibility is called the Sinatra test, from the song New York, New York.  The lyrics: “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”  If you safe guard the results of the Oscars, then you can probably safeguard or company documents.

Emotional

The Mother Teresa principle is a very interesting study.  Participants at University of Pennsylvania were given five $1 bills to take a survey about technology (completely unrelated to the purpose of the study).  Along with the $5, participants received:

1. A letter detailing the statistics of starving children in Africa
2. A letter detailing the specifics about a starving child in Africa, Rokia.
3. Both of the above to letters.

Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act.  If I look at one, I will.”  Participants that received the first letter donated $1.14, participants that received the second letter donated on average $2.38 and participants who received both letters donated, surprisingly, $1.43.  The second letter pulls more on our emotions than the first.

Another approach is to appeal to a person’s identity.  Texas addressed their litter problem by implementing a “Don’t mess with Texas” campaign.

Stories

The last principle in Made to Stick deals with stories.  Stories work as simulation – talking shop with co-workers so they know what to expect or “look out for” – or as inspiration, see Chicken Soup for the Soul.  The right story can help convey the message and a great story is often retold multiple times.

SUCCESs

Those are the six principles in Made to Stick.  The outline of these principles is very high level.  If you found these concepts and ideas interesting, I suggest reading the book and related case studies for each principle I didn’t mention.  It’s quite obvious that using these principles in your communications, formal and informal, will help the listeners retain your message.

If you give speeches, talks or presentations for fun or for work, I would strongly suggest reading this book and implementing a few of the SUCCESs principles.  Your speech doesn’t need every principle in it, but I would think at least three of the six.

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The more I started to think about this, the more frustrated I became.  So I took a step back and started reading a little bit (current reading list on Shelfari if you’re interested).  I came across Getting Real, by the team at 37 Signals.  About 2/3′s of the way through the book and assuming these are hard and fast rules that I should probably follow, I’ve done a lot of things wrong.

1. My design sucks – I’m no good at it.  And when you’re a programmer, with no team, you get a crappy design.  I knew going into this project it would suck.  But I figured if the data analysis worked and provided valuable information, who cares what it looks like.  I thought the graphs I was able to setup were pretty freaking neat (and still do).  You want design?  Look at those graphs!  Which brings me to

2. graphs, charts, and other fancy diagrams.  Getting Real says, get rid of them. More is less.  Well, my design sucks and now you want me to get rid of the one cool part about it?!?

3. You’re design shouldn’t suck.  It should be your starting place. Don’t program and then design.  Sketch the design on paper, mock up some HTML pages and then program.  Not how I rolled.  I programmed, then designed.

I’m sure there are others, but who cares… it’s time to figure out where to go from here.

Getting Real suggests finding competition and doing something simpler than what they are doing.  Less features, less code, faster delivery.  Looking in the sporting event space (marathons, triathlons, etc.), active.com seems to be the biggest site out there.  They offer a lot of different features, but from what I can tell don’t really do one thing great.  There’s just a lot out there.  I feel like there might be an opportunity in organizing the organizers space.  If I want to know about every race/event in Charlotte, NC (or maybe the greater Charlotte area), where can I go to find the information on what’s available from active.com, setupevents.com, fsseries.com, activezach.com, etc.  There are a ton of different organizers out there, but who’s organizing the organizers?  So you organize the organizers, allow the community to provide feedback or ratings on the events and maybe sign up for the event (via the organizers website).  How do you generate cash flow doing that… or is it too early to think about the revenue or profitability of the project?  I’m not sure yet… haven’t gotten to that part in Getting Real.

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The raw data is on the left in the above picture.  In each segment, the website shows you the time it took to complete, the distance (if it was a swim, bike or run), your pace (if there was a distance), your rank after the stage, your rank in the stage and how many people you passed or vice versa.  It’s very similar to the endorphin reports that are available at some races.

In addition to reviewing your (or your friends) race specific results, you can setup a profile to save this information, comment on race events and that’s about it.  So where should it go from here?  Endorphin reports cost $10 each, which if you run one race big deal, but if you do multiple races a year it can add up over time.  Greg’s Stats could try a subscription based model – each user pays $10 a year to view the detailed race result information.  I think this model would result in a lot of one time subscriptions.  In other words, I’m not sure the data that is provided is worth 10 bucks.  Sure it’s nice to see and fun to review, but I would probably balk at paying $10 a year (but less so than $10 a race).  This also raises some questions: does the $10 only free up your report or does it free up all reports?  Making all reports available for $10 is tough because you could essentially provide your friends results to them, avoiding the $10 fee.

There may be a freemium model worth looking at.  A portion of the information is free, say race results, race comments, but if you want to view a breakdown of how a person performed in the race, the cost is XX amount.  I wonder what charging a $1 per report would equate to in this model.  There’s a small barrier to view a report, but it’s not that much money.  Maybe a user could buy 10 credits for $10 and each credit opens up a report.

There’s also the advertising only model (how it’s currently setup).  Everything is free with a few text ads or image ads scattered in.  Obviously as the site grows in popularity, there would be more opportunity for revenue through this model, but I think it’s been shown that the advertise only model in the internet world isn’t successful.

I’m sure there are other opportunities for monetizing Greg’s Stats.com, but these are the few that I could think of initially.  I’ll update this post as I think of other money generating opportunities.

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