Losing my voice..

The day I thought I might lose my voice.

That was Saturday morning.

But let’s take another trip down memory lane.

I used to be a full time musician. It was only for a short period of time – my musical skills are not such that I was going to rise to the top percent of musicians that get recognised to the point of making the big bucks.

But one thing that was almost guaranteed was after 4 nights and 6 gigs I would lose my voice. Mondays would be a very quiet day. Tuesday it might come right, and by Wednesday I was ready to go again.

This is not what happened last Saturday morning!

With the help of an extremely professional, reassuringly expensive, and highly successful consultant, I had some Linkedin posts scheduled.

Here was our process (this is a great process if you want to build a pipeline of social media posts):

• I generated a whole lot of topics and ideas that I thought might be useful or interesting to agents, and a bunch of personal anecdotes that I could work into a story much like I do in these blogs. (I think I churned out 50 topics – a pretty good number!)
• Each idea was teased out a bit more with some bullet points or more ideas in a combination of myself and the consultant.
• The ideas were fed into an AI assistant that built them into Linkedin-friendly posts.
• The results of the AI were then tweaked, edited and reworked into something I might say. This was done manually by myself and the consultant.
• They were then scheduled.

There was a lot of human touch in this work. It was not AI doing all the heavy lifting.

And to be fair once we were done the posts were very much beginning to sound like me.

Until they weren’t. This was last Saturday morning.

For 24 hours I had been struggling with the content on one post that had been scheduled. It just wasn’t right. I started having bigger picture thoughts on this topic:

• It was adding noise but it wasn’t adding value.
• It was trying to impress an algorithm rather than trying to offer insight.
• It had a touch of braggart, not my style at all.

So I pushed pause. I did not stop the process, I paused it. 24 hours of stewing was the sign for me that it was a problem – I think we are back on track now.

We are awash with so much content coming out – and as real estate people, we are about to have the same with listings – a lot of listings as the market shifts, and a lot of AI integration into our communications and marketing – so look out!

We are all so very different, and yet we are so very similar. As humans we are absolute masters at B.S detection, but we are also easily led and highly fallible. Once we see something enough it becomes safe and we trust it. Repetition of a message. We stop noticing…

In order not to lose our voice in the crowd and in the AI assisted world we are moving into, the importance of transparency and genuine connection is going to become a rare and valuable commodity.

This is the knife-edge we are all going to be walking. Keeping it real is going to be one of the challenges.

AI Thoughts
Those of you who can remember when email became available on our phones:

• It was going to unlock productivity. It did.
• It was going to give us more time. It didn’t always.

Our competitive nature as humans meant that we simply could do more work in the same amount of time. So pretty soon everyone was just doing more in the same amount of time, and ‘bonus’, we could work poolside in Fiji too.

AI might produce the same shift – there will be more getting done in the same amount of time. It will be our challenge (maybe not our job – leave that to AI) to filter all the new information being generated, organise it, judge it, and make sense of it all.