On most episodes we focus on lead gen strategies that are old school and low tech – today we flip that on its head and talk with Chris Johnstone – master real estate tech marketer who we go deep with on all things AI. We discuss the importance of learning the prompts to feed AI to get the information that you want! We talk about what tools you can use to generate leads with the help of AI and how to use it as a booster for your current marketing rather than as a replacement.
Connect with Chris online (or ask Bard for information): https://www.connectionincorporated.com/
The Neighborhood Realtor is proudly sponsored by Treadstone Funding and Neighborhood Loans. For more tangible tips in real estate marketing, check out Matt's book, The Tangible Action Guide for Real Estate Marketing available on Amazon.
Learned something new, or have a suggestion? Message Matt Muscat on Instagram!
On most episodes we focus on lead gen strategies that are old school and low tech – today we flip that on its head and talk with Chris Johnstone – master real estate tech marketer who we go deep with on all things AI. We discuss the importance of learning the prompts to feed AI to get the information that you want! We talk about what tools you can use to generate leads with the help of AI and how to use it as a booster for your current marketing rather than as a replacement.
Connect with Chris online (or ask Bard for information): https://www.connectionincorporated.com/
The Neighborhood Realtor is proudly sponsored by Treadstone Funding and Neighborhood Loans. For more tangible tips in real estate marketing, check out Matt's book, The Tangible Action Guide for Real Estate Marketing available on Amazon.
Learned something new, or have a suggestion? Message Matt Muscat on Instagram!
Chris J. | 00:00:01:01 | And that is truly the largest secret that we've discovered with AEI is don't tell it what to do. Get it to tell you what to do.
Matt M. | 00:00:16:24 | Hey, everybody, thank you so much for tuning into the show today. I'm especially excited because we have a guest who stands a couple different industries and is also an expert in tech. Right. The current market has unique challenges. And I wanted to bring a guest on today who would be able to give us some new and novel ideas that we're not hearing about from the realtor down the road or the mortgage lender down the road.
Matt M. | 00:00:38:08 | So, Chris Johnstone, welcome to the show today. You've been published in Forbes, you've been published in Entrepreneur Magazine. I am unbelievably stoked to have you with us today. Thank you so much for joining the show.
Chris J. | 00:00:48:10 | Yeah, it's my pleasure. Happy to be here, Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt M. | 00:00:51:11 | So, you know, in the last couple of years, everyone has been talking about technology and about air and about all these other things. But I think because the market was so hot for so long, a lot of agents and salespeople, all of that is noise, right? They were like, you know, that sounds cool. It sounds trendy, but I'm not going to pay attention for right now because I have more business and I know it's do it or I have enough business.
Matt M. | 00:01:14:18 | And so they kind of ignored it or played around with it for fun. But now I'm getting calls left and right and I'm sure everyone is. For people that want new and novel ideas, like what's the next big thing, right? Like, what does the Zillow of 2024 going to be? And chats empty other forms of AI are all over the news in different industries and now they really are here in real estate, even in integrated into tools that you might not have thought of.
Matt M. | 00:01:41:01 | So, Chris, I know you've helped a lot of salespeople generate a lot of leads. What are you seeing right now when it comes to A.I., both in in lead generation and also like in the world? Like how can we use it as a normal salespeople?
Chris J. | 00:01:55:01 | Yeah, absolutely. So I think a lot of people don't realize how much a part of their daily life is. I give you a couple of simple examples. If you say, Hey, Alexa or Hey, Google and your assistant turns on in your house and you use a voice search with that device, that's artificial intelligence in the background. It translates your voice into text.
Chris J. | 00:02:21:17 | It uses that text to do a search. It filters what comes back and then gives you the best result based on what your audio prompt is. That's a great example of just like how A.I. makes our lives a little bit better and a little bit easier every single day. But when I do talks, people are looking for more tangible ways.
Chris J. | 00:02:43:06 | And so let me share with you a way that we're using AI to generate leads, arguably the highest quality leads we've ever been able to generate from marketing, marketing and advertising. So let me preface that. There's basically three ways to grow the business. You've got your past customers, you've got referral partners, and then you've got marketing and advertising.
Matt M. | 00:03:04:04 | Basically, like the third one is just reaching new people, right? Like that could be there could be any, any marketing You do billboard Facebook ads, Google ads. That's not to people that you already know who live in your neighborhood.
Chris J. | 00:03:16:05 | That's right. And basically two types of advertising. So there is attraction marketing where people are pre sold on working with you and coming to you and calling you. And that is just like a referral from your database, a referral from a referral partner or a referral from Google. And we'll talk about that in just a second because that's where the highest quality leads are coming for in today's marketplace.
Chris J. | 00:03:42:27 | People who can actually do a deal, who want to do a deal at today's interest rates in today's marketplace that want to find somebody reputable. We've figured out how to use AI to get in front of those customers and get them to call you.
Matt M. | 00:03:55:26 | At the right time frame, which is huge.
Chris J. | 00:03:57:26 | Exactly right at the end of the buying cycle. But before we get into that, we have to understand the other options that are available and hear how AI is helping with that as well. So basically all other forms of marketing in our industry are pursuit marketing. So you run a Facebook ad or even a Google ad, or you buy a lead from Zillow or whatever it is.
Chris J. | 00:04:19:22 | You take a lead, you put it into a funnel and then you chase. And that means you've got to have a system set up automatic emails, automatic text messages, ideally a phone call that happens in the first 5 minutes and then a sequence of events preprogramed in order to go out and nurture and chase that lead. But basically it means cold calling and chasing.
Chris J. | 00:04:41:07 | Now there are artificial intelligence systems that are doing a phenomenal job of enhancing that process, connecting with more people, watching when response rates are actually happening and sending more messages during those times. It's making those systems better, but it is still pursuit marketing. And ultimately you have to get on the phone, you have to talk to that person.
Chris J. | 00:05:06:21 | You have to convert them from, Hey, I've been chasing you and it feels like a little bit of pursuit and get them to turn the corner to wanting to do business with you.
Matt M. | 00:05:14:21 | So I love that because you're not saying that like AI is doing our jobs, you're really just saying that AI is giving us more power to do our jobs better.
Chris J. | 00:05:23:27 | Exactly. And I hear so much of all this fear mongering being pumped by the news into like ads going to steal our jobs. And that's not necessarily untrue, because if you're an accountant or you're, you know, you're doing a processing function at a legal firm, there are a lot of this is the first technologic revolution that's going to replace white collar labor.
Chris J. | 00:05:48:25 | And so that is going to be a massive shift. However, those people are going to land at new jobs with new opportunities. And what A.I. is going to do is make everything that we do faster, smoother, more efficient, more profitable. And ultimately what it's going to do is empower us as human beings to have more of our most precious asset, which is our time.
Chris J. | 00:06:14:06 | We're going to be able to do more in less.
Matt M. | 00:06:17:03 | Now, I've noticed that part of part of using AI well is really understanding like what types of prompts to give it. So like, let's just go with the easiest example, you know, opening a HPT, figuring out if you can figure out what questions to ask, you can do really well with it. What have you seen, What useful cases have you seen real estate professionals do with with checkbooks?
Matt M. | 00:06:41:23 | What kinds of questions are they asking in order to get great usable value?
Chris J. | 00:06:46:29 | Yeah. So it's very important for everybody to understand using a tool like that. It is, like you said, only as good as the prompt that you give it. And so every chat that you have with chat, you get a history of that chat. On the left hand side, it's important to remember that every single one of those conversations is a unique learning opportunity for the artificial intelligence.
Chris J. | 00:07:16:19 | And as soon as you click on new chat, you start a new conversation. It's like talking to a baby almost, where the thing that you've said to the baby before, it's going to forget as soon as you start a new conversation. But it is also the most intelligent person that you ever talk to, because if you revisit a previous conversation that you've already had, it will never, ever forget what you have already told it or conversed with it about.
Chris J. | 00:07:41:21 | So interesting side fact, Matt, when Chad GPT 3.5 was released, it had an IQ of 16. It was.
Matt M. | 00:07:51:18 | Awesome. The smartest.
Chris J. | 00:07:53:04 | Not the smartest. Basically it was predicting the next word and basically repeating back to people what it thought, which should go in that conversation. Still groundbreaking and amazing and the first time people use chat GPT 3.5. It was like, this is incredible. This is going to change everything and it's going to change search, search in 3 to 5 years from today.
Chris J. | 00:08:16:02 | Google is terrified that they're going to lose search because A.I. is going to replace that search engines as we know them today are going to be 100% AI powered assistants in the future. There is no doubt of that. We're already using that to get customers. But I digress on that topic. We'll come back to that in just a second.
Chris J. | 00:08:33:09 | Chad GPT 3.5 basic functions still mind blowing at an IQ of 16. It took almost a year for them to train the models. Look at everything that people had put into it, what it had learned and then released. Chad GPT for Chad, GPT four had an IQ out of the box of 160.
Matt M. | 00:08:55:15 | So genius, right?
Chris J. | 00:08:57:21 | Genius. Einstein was 160, but that's a factor of ten times growth in knowledge in one year's time. And so that breaks all of the computational laws up until this point, like Ohm's Law was, it takes two years for computing power to basically double and artificial intelligence is just blowing that out of the water. So hypothetically in a year from well, technically that is of this recording like seven months from today, artificial intelligence could have a collective IQ of 1600.
Matt M. | 00:09:36:24 | Which is well we that's a different it's a different it's different playing field unfathomable.
Chris J. | 00:09:43:06 | So for our listeners, just to get your mind around how fast this stuff is moving, think about walking into Einstein's laboratory and Einstein has just figured out equals empty squared. So you walk in and let's just say you've got an IQ. I mean, I'm not the brightest person in the world. Let's say I've got an IQ of 100 and I walk into Einstein's laboratory.
Chris J. | 00:10:07:23 | He's got equals M.c squared up on the board, he's got an IQ of 160. And I say to him, okay, Oh, that looks cool. Can you explain that to me? And he goes, Oh, yeah, sure. It's the theory of relativity equals C squared. That's energy. Well, he's basically speaking Greek to me. I have no idea what he's talking about because I don't have the knowledge that Einstein has about what that language is on the board.
Chris J. | 00:10:32:24 | Right? Yeah. Well, there are engineers at both Google and Facebook that are working on high level, very powerful artificial intelligence algorithms that have come out and publicly said the AI is now communicating in languages and patterns that we have never seen and that we don't understand. They're trying to put this information out into the public. And what that is, is it's not that it doesn't make sense and it's not that it's that we don't have the capability to understand what it has learned ahead of us.
Chris J. | 00:11:11:04 | The genie is already out of the bottle with how much this can learn real estate.
Matt M. | 00:11:17:03 | It has a lot of contracts. I want this podcast to have a social contract as well. Here's what I need from you. If you're listening to the show and you get something valuable out of it or you hear something that you think that's awesome, I want you to send me a demo on Instagram, or if you sign my email, send it that way.
Matt M. | 00:11:32:01 | The more feedback that I get helps me to put together better shows and attract better guests. Well, that's huge. And like things like too, there's so many. Let's take House for example, right? Like it's the industry that we work in. Buyers and sellers have a lot of questions and a human can only know so many of those answers.
Matt M. | 00:11:52:28 | I mean, you're a realtor, you're out there showing five different houses in five different neighborhoods. They're all a little bit different. Right? But any question that you could ask relating to the materials in the house, the appliances in the house, the neighborhood, these are things that you might have to research, but you might be able to get a quick answer from in a system.
Matt M. | 00:12:10:11 | And because of that ability that Chris mentioned, or you can keep the chat stream going and I can learn the more questions you ask, the more it builds a knowledge base and you can really you can really do some wicked things, like you can have, you know, a conversation going about X, Y, Z neighborhood and continually feed it and ask it more questions.
Matt M. | 00:12:30:18 | And with the help of that, you can be the smartest person about that neighborhood pretty quickly and offer a true resource to your buyers. But I mean, take that to the next level. You can put that information on the internet, you can market that, you can you can use that as content for your website. You can use it as a prompt for Google, Google search.
Matt M. | 00:12:48:18 | The sky's the limit there, from what I'm understanding.
Chris J. | 00:12:51:26 | Oh, 100%. And think about your individual communication and stuff. So when you start a chat with Use Chat GPT, you can tell it what you want it to be so you can go in in the first prompt in a conversation is Hi, I want you to be an MBA educated communication specialist for a real estate company. Here's my web site.
Chris J. | 00:13:14:25 | Here's my social media profiles. I want you to go through all of my communication and build a profile. This is okay, great. It can go on the Internet. It can search all your profiles, find everything about you, and what it spits back out is very entertaining as far as what it can find about you and your brand and how you communicate.
Chris J. | 00:13:34:26 | Then you can say, okay, great, you're an MBA educated communication specialist. Here is an email that I just got from a client. This is my response is What do you need from me in order to make this better? And that is truly the largest secret that we've discovered with AI is don't tell it what to do. Get it to tell you what to do.
Chris J. | 00:14:03:20 | What do you need from me in order to X, Y, z? And it will give you a list of questions and if you answer them correctly, it then has the knowledge base to write all of your emails for you just like you. So yeah, every time you get an email take it into the same prompt, give it the email and say Give me a response.
Chris J. | 00:14:27:25 | It will give you a prompt and not a prompt. But that prompt will give the response. And then you say, you know what? Make it more casual, make it more friendly, or make it more serious and tell it who you're communicating with. So this is a this is an email from a client. This is an email from a vendor.
Chris J. | 00:14:44:02 | This is an email from my spouse. And it will learn your different communication styles for the different styles of people that you communicate with. And eventually gets to the point where you can just put an email in the chat hit enter and it will prompt a response. So that's better than what you would write in less time than you would take than it would take you to actually write the email.
Chris J. | 00:15:07:23 | And so the communication assistant is a very tangible use case of a I to save time. But what I really like is to generate leads and generate money using a I. But, you know, let's work into that.
Matt M. | 00:15:24:16 | We want and I want to talk about the general weeds, but like just to give people an example of like how I started using it, right? Like I am told by my team on a daily basis that I talk too much. I'm told that my my initial emails and my initial blog posts are all too long and I'm writing things.
Matt M. | 00:15:41:22 | I'm basically spelling everything out in crazy detail just so I don't miss anything. Right? But it seems always like it's too long. So I will literally be doing this for a year now. I take whatever I've written in the chat and I say, Cut this in half and it literally cuts it in half. But then I'll say, Oh, but add back the section about this because that's important, or reduce the reduce the sections about this, but keep all the statistics if you can keep it all in the same dialog, in the same bubble and it gets exponentially better, I can say like I could even give them like a blog article and say, okay, turn
Matt M. | 00:16:18:16 | this blog article into a rap to the tune of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song. And it will do things like that for me. So it even helps me, you know, be funny and add some brevity into into Syria, even serious and sales, these marketing things. But, you know, aside from I mean, I've used it to do crazy stuff with Excel, figure out formulas.
Matt M. | 00:16:36:28 | I didn't know, Well, let's get into leads because everyone wants more business. How are you seeing people use using and understanding these systems to get more leads from the public?
Chris J. | 00:16:46:06 | Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so Google is now basically run by I saw the websites that are showing up on the front page of search, not all of them, but they are starting to implement artificial intelligence and letting it decide which businesses show up on the front page of Google. So let's take the example of a realtor in a local marketplace, the highest quality phrase that you can rank on when somebody goes to Google and types in realtor near me.
Chris J. | 00:17:20:05 | Now, arguably, it does not get the most amount of search traffic. But if we're looking at intent of the person who's going to pick up the phone today, call a realtor and say, Hey, I want to go see one, two, three Main Street, I'm ready to put an offer or I want to list my home in today's marketplace.
Chris J. | 00:17:36:17 | It's a tricky market. I need somebody that I can trust to guide us through this process. Right now, Best realtor near me is the search phrase that's going to generate you the highest quality client from Internet marketing hands down, guaranteed. So that person does a search phrase or a variation of that. Go ahead, Go do that. Google search in your local marketplace.
Chris J. | 00:17:58:02 | You will notice that over the last 6 to 9 months, Google has removed the ads from the top of the search. There's one, maybe two. If any. And then there is the map placement, because the artificial intelligence, I believe, has been tasked with the goal of giving people the answer to the search that they want with just one click.
Chris J. | 00:18:22:26 | And so they're featuring the map placement because you can click once on a business listing, get the phone number and call that business. And somebody who has a high intent. That's the activity that they want to do. They want to call a business owner and talk to an expert. Right? But then if you scroll down the search and you look underneath that somewhere on that front page, you're going to see what's called a knowledge panel.
Chris J. | 00:18:47:09 | And it's going to say people also ask, and this is really cool, because what Google is doing is they're actually taking the people in your local marketplace and taking the most frequently asked questions that people ask to Google in that local marketplace and featuring the most frequently asked questions in that people also ask section on the front page of Google.
Chris J. | 00:19:11:20 | So voila, no keyword research tools. You know what the number one most valuable searches are in your local marketplace? Well, Google has also released a Q&A panel inside your Google Business profile. So if we know that they're featuring the knowledge panel and they're trying to get the answers to those questions to people with one click, do you think it would be valuable to the search engines if your Google business profile had that question and the answer right in the Google business profile?
Chris J. | 00:19:47:02 | Of course it would. So what do you do? You do that search in your local marketplace. You take those most frequently asked questions. You get a business profile to ask you that question on your Google business page, and then you use chat GPT or bar to write the response, double check it, make sure that it's good, and then you've got the most frequently asked questions.
Chris J. | 00:20:08:15 | And a I created content that answers the question. So Google sees you as an authority in the local marketplace.
Matt M. | 00:20:17:08 | The Neighborhood Realtor podcast is proudly made possible by the support of our sponsors Treadstone Funding and Neighborhood loans to amazing Midwest Mortgage companies that now have offices all around the country. You're a realtor and you'd like to learn more about connecting with one of our lenders. Dammit, Matt must be aided and often acting with someone in your market.
Matt M. | 00:20:34:14 | If you're a lender and you want to join the right mortgage company, ADMA, and I'll connect you as well. Will this because, you know, five years ago you'd have to figure out the questions. And my the way that I used to teach people to do this would be to like, write down every question that a client asks you.
Matt M. | 00:20:49:29 | And that's still a great practice. But this is almost like having the answers to the test. Like you literally take the AI driven data from Google or your favorite search engine. You see what questions they recommend, and then you use another AI system to answer the questions and you put it back on the Internet. I mean, it's kind of you don't have to have a lot of originality there.
Matt M. | 00:21:11:07 | And it's a great way to kind of game the system a little bit, but while also giving people real and valuable information. A question I have is this one comes up all the time. Certain AI systems I know don't always have the newest and most updated information. How does that come into play? And is that all of these systems are just some of them.
Chris J. | 00:21:29:17 | So it depends on which system you're using. Chat GPT If you pay $20 a month for their subscription, that gets you access to chat. GPT for plug ins. So they this week actually shut down. They had a search feature where you could search Bing inside a chat GPG thread. They put that on pause because it was open on the internet and they were getting some weird stuff coming back from it.
Chris J. | 00:21:59:06 | But there is a plug in that you can install on chat GPT four called Key Mate and it will go and search Google for you so you can install that plug in, go into a thread with that plug in, ask it a question and it will go out. Search Google, find real time Search results based on its search and then come back and give you the answers based on a Google search and what they found.
Chris J. | 00:22:22:24 | Now that's one way to do it. But before that feature was released, what I would do is I would feed it the information that I wanted it to have. So it was limited up to September 2021, up until they basically gave GPT four open access to the Internet. And so I'll give you a use case of this. I wanted to know when the best day of the month was to dollar cost averaging to Bitcoin.
Chris J. | 00:22:51:00 | So I went to Egypt and I said, Hey, look, go find all of the daily prices for Bitcoin and give me get as much data as you possibly can and then statistically find on a monthly basis when the lowest point Bitcoin is at on average. So I figured that out up to September 2021. And then I said, okay, well I'm going to go search Google, get the daily prices for all of the prices of Bitcoin from today back to September 21.
Chris J. | 00:23:22:16 | I just copied it, pasted it off the website into chat, and I said, Here is the real time data. And it said, okay, took that and then recalculated everything and gave me the best day of the month due dollar cost averaging to Bitcoin. But then here's the really interesting thing I wrote and I said, Here's where I got that information from.
Chris J. | 00:23:48:06 | Then I said, Hey, go do the same calculation on Etherium. And because I had trained the prompt previously on what information I wanted and where I went to go get it, it did. The Etherium calculation passed the knowledge base of September 21 to Current without me prompting it at all. So because it watched me learn how to figure it out on Bitcoin, it was then able to figure it out itself and do the calculation on a theory.
Matt M. | 00:24:23:12 | But I mean, there's so many use cases here. Like if you're in real estate and you put out like a newsletter every month and statistics and information about the local areas, this is all in. And a lot of times searching for that information is the hardest part. That's very easily train cheap t to figure out how you're doing it and in essence do it for you.
Matt M. | 00:24:40:20 | And then you would just have to format it however you need to. That's insane.
Chris J. | 00:24:44:23 | So another thing that I've I've worked as a consultant for large, large organization, so I don't know if you've seen but there's a company in Tokyo. It's a publicly traded company, billion dollar organization. They replaced their CEO with AI and their stock is up 14% year over year. It's actually beating the stock index and it's the first company run by AI.
Chris J. | 00:25:11:27 | So it can like if you think about what a CEO's job is, it is to look at all of the data within the organization and make forecasts and forward motion decisions within an organization in order to put that company on the right track. You can take your financials and say, Hey, here's my last three years financials, here's my revenue, here's my profit, here's everything.
Chris J. | 00:25:36:18 | Forecast out what my business should do to grow by double. And what do you think the greatest opportunities are that I have? So you've got a lot take a look at market statistics. If you've got your board statistics for the last two years, you can feed that information to Detroit, GPT and say create a statistical analysis on where you think the market is going to be six months from today.
Chris J. | 00:26:01:06 | And then you're the local realtor that gets to go to all the news agencies and gets to publish all your blog posts and get that PR on. I asked GPT where the real estate market is going to be in six months and here's what it said. And then you can compare your market analysis to what the AI came out with and all of a sudden you've got a topic that all the news agencies want a feature and jump on because you've positioned yourself as a local expert against AI and really fundamentally said, Hey, look, you need a local market expert.
Chris J. | 00:26:35:03 | Yes, we can use this to get data, but it's my analysis that takes it to the next level and really makes it valuable for you. So there's also the use cases are only limited by your potential to have the creativity around it.
Matt M. | 00:26:49:06 | All of this crisis has been immensely helpful and eye opening. I mean, I'm going to start downloading key meat, that plug in you mentioned ASAP after this call. I cannot wait to use that. What if someone out there listening, a realtor wonder if they wanted to get in touch and, you know, solicit you for help on some of that stuff or, you know, lead generation in general to help grow their business?
Matt M. | 00:27:07:28 | How could they get in touch?
Chris J. | 00:27:09:09 | Yep. So our website is connection Inc dot com all spelled out connection Inc. dot com. And I'm Chris Johnstone. You can find me on all the socials. You can go to bar and ask for my information and it'll tell you all about me and Connection Inc..
Matt M. | 00:27:27:01 | I love it. Chris, Thank you so much for being on the show today. I cannot wait to show it again.
Chris J. | 00:27:30:27 | Matt, Thanks so much for having me.