Month: January 2023

Estate Agents: The Survival of the Fittest

by Charlotte C.

Like a pride of lions, your reputation, and that of your Agency, are intertwined. And in the Real Estate Animal Kingdom, only the strongest survive. 

It’s no secret. Your industry is more challenging now, than ever. The potential for massive earnings and the low barriers to entry, are leading to increasing competition. 

Greater compliance oversight. Rising portal charges. Interest rate hikes. These are all very real challenges that demand your continuous evolution. 

Here’s the bottom line. Estate Agents are pack animals, not lone wolves. Every Agent is bound to an Agency, and must work together to market themselves and their properties. 

But what if your marketing department is failing YOU?

Hunting Together

To survive, indeed to thrive, you must hunt together. You will only ever be as strong as the brand you represent. How that brand markets itself, and markets you, is critical to your success. So ask yourself, “Is the brand I work for doing everything possible to support me?” 

Continuous evolution. I said it before. I’ll say it again. If your agency’s marketing team aren’t doing enough to have your back in this cut-throat animal kingdom, you die. If they stand still, falling prey to the complacency of how they do things, you die. If they are not leveraging the latest technologies, guess what? You die. 

Your marketing team has got to be top-notch. If they’re scrimping on budgets, or out of touch with tech, they’re no good to you. A weak link in your chain. Impeding your earning potential.

Animal Rights

It’s your right to query anything that could impede or enhance your income. If they’re not on their game, they’re taking you down a road to nowhere. Pure and simple. 

You need to know where your marketing department’s budget is being spent. And what that’s getting you in return.

Here are 5 questions that all Estate Agents must be asking their marketing departments in 2023:

  1. What international and local best practices are baked into your marketing strategy? 
  2. Are you originating tactics to distinguish you from competition, or just copying what others do?
  3. Do you consciously try to drive traffic to our website, and not just portals? How? What are the results?
  4. How do you ensure that the quality of content we, and our brand, publicly associate our names with, is always of the highest standard?
  5. For each marketing dollar you spend, what is our ROI? (Tip: Nothing less than 300% should suffice)

A Fighting Chance

overwrite.ai is a real estate domain-specific generative AI tool. This means that it generates accurate, localised real estate content based on specific data sets. The content is designed for customised property marketing listings and helps agents sell more homes.

A Little Tip

The easiest way to know whether your marketing team’s thinking of your best interest, is if they’ve subscribed to overwrite.ai for you. If not, get them to without further delay. Only then will you understand what you’ve been missing.

For informative news and views on the world of real estate, proptech and AI, follow overwrite on Instagram and LinkedIn, and keep up-to-date with our weekly NewsBites blog.

overwrite | real estate content creation, reimagined

AI Tools Helping Leaders Make Time To Be Human

by Charlotte C.

When OpenAI launched the AI chatbot at the end of November, it instantly attracted millions of users, with breathless predictions of its potential to disrupt business models and jobs.

It certainly promises to deliver on a prediction I made in 2019 in my book The Human Edge, which explores the skills needed in a world of artificial intelligence and digitization. I forecasted: “…AI can offer us more free time by automating the stupid stuff we currently have to do, thereby reducing our cognitive burden.”

The prize is clear for leaders.

Use ChatGPT to liberate hours spent on simple tasks each week. Then divert this time towards high-impact skills more suited to human beings. Activities such as:

  • Asking curious questions
  • Communicating purpose, vision, strategy, and values
  • Supporting collaboration
  • Catalyzing learning
  • Encouraging creative thinking and innovation
AI can help busy leaders make time to become more human

The Emergence of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is not a revolution. However, it is a significant evolution. This free online resource does the same job as previous AI assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, just better. Crucially, the bot remembers earlier answers in the same conversation. This allows it to adapt and respond more usefully to follow-up questions. The result is eerily like an intelligent, emergent dialogue.

The old cliché states leadership is a lonely place. For time-stressed managers, this AI means they have access to a free, confidential, and well-informed advisor. Over time, ChatGPT will evolve to support the work of functional departments such as HR, communications, and marketing. In the long run, it may spell the end of many executive assistant roles

Leadership Gains

Leadership use cases include faster research and brainstorming to generate ideas for team learning, business development, and strategy. Many will use it to speed up the creation of content they need every day: emails, talking points, and presentations. The AI supports the entire writing process: outlining, editing, proofreading, and summarizing. Wise leaders will use the saved time to engage on a human level with colleagues and customers.

A Tool, Not a Replacement

I would not advise using ChatGPT without judgment and discretion. Blindly outsourcing your emails and meetings to ChatGPT is an accident waiting to happen. It’s also crucial for leaders need to weave their authentic style into all their communication.

This tool can accelerate the start of a thinking process, even if it is soon out of its depth. ChatGPT has yet to learn of world events after 2021, which was the last time it received training information. Like most chatbots, it also occasionally generates weird and incorrect responses. However, if it can provide such credible material for a delicate performance review, it must be helpful in automating more mundane, day-to-day communication.

Empowering the Creatives

Social media is ablaze with amazingly creative uses for this AI, including writing rap lyrics, generating food recipes, and creating new brand names.

For busy leaders, the clock is always ticking. ChatGPT helps with the heavy lifting at the start of a project, process and even a tricky personnel issue. But it’s not a replacement for thought, just the latest AI tool to make us more productive – so we can find the time to be more human.

AI in Proptech

Overwrite is a domain-specific generative AI tool for real estate. This means that it generates accurate, localised real estate content based on specific data sets. Overwrite uses its own natural language machine learning technology together with the data inputted by the real estate agent. The content is designed for customised property marketing listings and helps agents sell more homes.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of overwrite.ai and its owners.

Greg Orme writes for Forbes.

This story is from an article in Forbes published 11th February 2023.

For informative news and views on the world of real estate, proptech and AI, follow overwrite on Instagram and LinkedIn, and keep up-to-date with our weekly NewsBites blog.

overwrite | real estate content creation, reimagined

Quick Guide to Speaking in Emoji

by Charlotte C.

Emojis are relevant as ever. If used correctly, a brand can become instantly relatable to its target audience.

A Linkedin post. An Instagram caption. An email campaign subject title.

Make no mistake – execute “emoji marketing” well, and it can have a huge impact on your marketing efforts.

But there’s a whole language behind the pretty pictures. And if you want to 1) make your content pop, 2) appear relatable and 3) reveal the “human” behind your brand, (without making any embarrassing blunders along the way), you must follow certain rules.

Your Guide to Emoji Marketing

1. Context is 🔑

It’s crucial to be mindful of cultural differences. Regardless if it’s a one-sentence tweet, or a lengthier Linkedin post. What’s a normal emoji to you could carry a different cultural connotation in another country. The linguistic context emojis carry across cultures and generations mustn’t be underestimated. Avoiding any unintentional insults or inappropriate connotations is vital.

2. A 🍑 isn’t a peach 

Always look up possible risqué connotations for emojis before using them to sell your products. They can hold very different meanings. For example, a peach isn’t a peach. An eggplant isn’t an eggplant. Save yourself from getting caught up in a potentially embarrassing social media crisis, that could’ve easily been avoided with a simple Google search.

3. There is a 🕐 and 📍 for emoji use

Sometimes emojis can completely change the meaning (and tone) of a message. Some customers might feel that the use (or overuse) of emojis is frivolous or lacks professionalism. They also risk diluting the impact of your message, especially if it’s intended to be serious. Know when not to use them.

4. Test, test, and test 📝

Do your emoji-laden tweets get more engagement than text only ones? Do emojis on LinkedIn drive more clicks to articles you share? Do your followers swipe up more when you include emojis in your Instagram Stories? Test different use cases and learn from the results.

5. Research your audience 🧐

Understand your audience to see what will fly with them. Monitor their emojis and emotions to target your emoji marketing campaign and understand their sentiment towards your brand.

6. Minimal is chic ✨

Just because emojis boost engagement, you shouldn’t stuff your social post with emojis. Aside from being an aesthetic nightmare, an emoji-filled post will fetch you a one-way ticket to being trolled mercilessly online. Rightfully so. You need to know when enough is enough.

7. Beware of formatting blunders 😖

Emojis do not always look similar across different mobile devices. What’s formatted correctly on an iPhone may have weird line breaks when you check the same tweet on the desktop. Always keep this in mind while crafting content that’s dependent on a well-located emoji – it could completely ruin all your hard work and make your clients *cringe (enter appropriate *cringe emoji).

8. The Mindful Emoji user 😇

It’s not just cultures you must be aware of while using emojis. Generational differences matter as well. In essence, the next time you’re crafting content and want to use emojis, be mindful of the different connotations emojis carry across generations, as well as cultures.

Emojis are here to stay 🙏

Love them or hate them, they’re not going anywhere fast. In fact, the number of emojis available across multiple platforms and devices, seems to be ever-expanding. Understandable given the evidence that a single, cleverly placed emoji can add significant emotional cues to marketing content.

But too much of a good thing is never advisable. So use with caution. Know when enough is enough. Be mindful of your audience. Do your research. And, if you want results, it pays to be consistent, stick with what works, build momentum, and have fun along the way.

For informative news and views on the world of real estate, proptech and AI, follow overwrite on Instagram and LinkedIn, and keep up-to-date with our weekly NewsBites blog.

overwrite | real estate content creation, reimagined

The Biggest Opportunity In Generative AI Is Language, Not Images

by Charlotte C.

The buzz around generative AI today is deafening. No topic in the world of technology is attracting more attention and hype right now.

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that can generate novel content, rather than simply analyzing or acting on existing data. 

The white-hot epicenter of today’s generative AI craze has been text-to-image AI.

It was the sudden emergence of these text-to-image AI models over the summer that catalyzed today’s generative AI frenzy: billion-dollar funding rounds for nascent startups, nonstop media coverage, and waves of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hastily rebranding themselves as AI-focused.

It makes sense that text-to-image AI, more than any other area of artificial intelligence, has so captivated the public’s imagination. Images are aesthetically appealing, easy to consume, fun to share, ideally suited to go viral.

The AI Avatar trend went viral in late 2022

Text-to-image AI is incredibly powerful technology

And to be sure, text-to-image AI is incredibly powerful technology. The images that these models can produce are breathtaking in their originality and sophistication. Image-generating AI will transform industries including advertising, gaming and filmmaking.

Reimagining Albert Einstein, through Generative AI

But make no mistake: current buzz notwithstanding, AI-powered text generation will create many orders of magnitude more value than will AI-powered image generation in the years ahead. 

Machines’ ability to generate language—to write and speak—will prove to be far more transformative than their ability to generate visual content.

The Power of the Written Word

Language is humanity’s single most important invention. More than anything else, it is what sets us apart from every other species on the planet. 

Almost nothing about modern civilization would be possible without language.

To illustrate the depth and breadth of the coming transformation, let’s walk through some example applications.

From Sales to Science

The first true “killer application” for generative text, in terms of commercial adoption, has proven to be copywriting: that is, AI-generated website copy, social media posts, blog posts and other marketing-related written content.

AI-powered copywriting has seen stunning revenue growth over the past year. 

Jasper, one of the leading startups in this category, launched a mere 18 months ago and will reportedly do $75 million in revenue this year, making it one of the fastest-growing software startups ever. Jasper just announced a $125 million fundraise valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Unsurprisingly, a raft of competitors has emerged to chase this market.

Copywriting is just the beginning

Generative AI will transform the world of customer service and call centers, across industries: from hospitality to ecommerce, from healthcare to financial services. The same goes for internal IT and HR helpdesks.

Language models (like overwrite.ai) can already automate much of the work that happens before, during and after customer service conversations, including in-call agent coaching and after-call documentation and summarization.

Soon, paired with generative text-to-speech technology, they will be able to handle most customer service engagements end-to-end, with no human needed—not in the stilted, brittle, rules-based way that automated call centers have worked for years, but in fluid natural language that is effectively indistinguishable from a human agent.

To put it simply: nearly all of the interactions that you as a consumer will need to have with a brand or company, on any topic, can and will be automated.

For some lower-stakes use cases—say, writing outbound sales emails or website copy—the technology will soon be advanced and robust enough that users motivated by the potential productivity gains will feel comfortable automating the application end-to-end, with no human in the loop at all.

At the other end of the spectrum, some safety-critical use cases—say, using generative models to diagnose and propose treatments for individual patients—will for the foreseeable future require a human in the loop to review and approve the models’ output before any real action is taken.

But make no mistake: generative language technology is improving fast—almost unbelievably fast. 

Within months, expect industry leaders like OpenAI and Cohere to release new models that represent dramatic, step-change improvements in language capabilities compared to today’s models (which themselves are already breathtakingly powerful).

Over the longer term, the trend will be decisive and inevitable: as these models get better, and as the products built on top of them become easier to use and more deeply embedded in existing workflows, we will hand over more responsibility for more of society’s day-to-day functions to AI, with little or no human oversight. More and more of the use cases described above will be carried out end-to-end, in a closed-loop manner, by language models that we have empowered to decide and act.

This may sound startling, even terrifying, to readers today. But we will increasingly acclimate to the reality that machines can carry out many of these functions more effectively, more quickly, more affordably and more reliably than humans could.

Massive disruption, vast value creation, painful job dislocation and many new multi-billion-dollar AI-first companies are around the corner.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of overwrite.ai and its owners.

Rob Toews writes for Forbes.

This story has been published from an article in Forbes published on 6th November 2022.

For informative news and views on the world of real estate, proptech and AI, follow overwrite on Instagram and LinkedIn, and keep up-to-date with our weekly NewsBites blog.

overwrite | real estate content creation, reimagined