[Mike Bayer]
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success podcast, the longest-running podcast in the short-term rental industry with over 1.5 million downloads, and your source for all the information you need to master your rental business. Over the next few episodes in March, we are discussing the topic of artificial intelligence and its advantages and disadvantages for you and your business, but we need to recognize and thank our sponsor for this episode, Guesty. Guesty is a game-changing property management system giving hosts and managers the tools that they need to streamline operations, optimize bookings, and scale their business with confidence.

Guesty is also leading the way with some of the most advanced AI tools to support your Guesty account that are evolving every day to help take the work out of your workflow. Listen into the mid-episode break for another frequently asked question answered about the Guesty platform and check out the link in the description of this episode for a code to give you 50% off your first year with Guesty. And don't stress about the PMS switch, Guesty will handle all that by working with you to make the transition seamless.

Now, let's get this AI-focused episode started. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

[Heather Bayer]
So I'm super delighted to have back with me once again, Amber Hurdle. Amber, you know, you've been on the show a couple of times. We've met on so many occasions and it is always such a pleasure to talk to you and to have you back on.

[Amber Hurdle]
Well, it's always a pleasure to be with you because there's meat to your podcast. You know what I mean? Those of us who are attached to outcomes, we like your podcast.

[Heather Bayer]
Oh, well, that's lovely for you to say that. And there's definitely going to be meat today because, yes, I mean, we've, we've talked previously about branding. We've talked about leadership and today we're going to be talking about AI, but I want to start with you just introducing yourself to the audience for the odd one, two that I've never heard of you.

Or who have never seen you striding down an aisle of a conference in those high boots with a band behind you or even encouraging me to dance, which is, you know, that was a major feat.

[Amber Hurdle]
Well, as you know, I don't do forced participation. Like if you're feeling it, join me. If not, sit there, be cool.

It's cool. I don't care. Like do your thing.

We're all, we're all different. And I think that's really what encapsulates what I'm about, whether it's being a professional speaker and I really niche down. I'll speak in any slide, but I like being the opening keynote address because I like to get the energy up.

I like to immediately get people thinking differently. And, and so I'm more of a custom person. So depending on what the city is, what the theme of the event is, who's the audience, what's the industry, it should never be the same.

So custom keynotes. And then I'm also basically a fractional CXO. And, and it's because the way that I approach branding is, is about integrating and consistency across all different channels and with all key stakeholders.

So when people think branding, they think, Oh, logo and fonts, and that's not it at all. And as we unpack working with AI, you're going to understand that the brand messaging is the ticket to your success. And so we need to consider in the VR, SDR space, what I do.

And this is the very long bio, right? Because I don't know how to unpack it in like one cute little sentence, but we consider your guests. What motivates your guests?

We consider your homeowners. We consider your industry influence. We consider local government relations because that's going to impact your ability to manage or help manage the regulatory side of things.

We have to think about your investors, your bankers, everyone is your brand consistent and trustworthy in all of those. So fractional CXO, and also professional speaker, everything is custom to the audience. And I'm a global brand expert.

[Heather Bayer]
You won an award, didn't you recently or you got ranked as a speaker? Were you're not?

[Amber Hurdle]
Yeah.

[Heather Bayer]
Tell me about that.

[Amber Hurdle]
So Global Gurus is the only ranking system in the world that ranks like thought leaders. And so that means you're a speaker and author, perhaps a consultant with a huge visibility, something like that. And so I've been fortunate to be in the top 30 brand experts, according to Global Gurus since I think 2019 or 2020.

And this year I came in at number two. So that was, I saw that.

[Heather Bayer]
Congratulations on that. I mean, that's a, that's a huge achievement.

[Amber Hurdle]
It was amazing. And this year I was able to actually go to Bali. So the global speaker summit, all the speakers from all over the world, like in the United States, we have the National Speakers Association and we are a member of the global speaker summit.

So I was able to give a main stage keynote in front of my peers globally on the same trip that I went to Ubud [Bali]to go accept my Global Gurus award and got to hang out with all of these people, including two of the top futurists, according to global gurus. And I learned a lot about where AI is going. So buckle up.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, hopefully we're going to hook into some of those ideas that were generated at that time and you can share those, but I want to kick off with just a general question about how you're seeing people using AI in business now when you know when you're out and about talking to people. I know that you're asking the question or they're happily sharing what they're doing. What general feelings are you getting about how AI is currently being used?

[Amber Hurdle]
Poorly. And that is because garbage in garbage out. We are talking to a robot.

This is not your friend who has cognitive abilities to read between the lines and make some assumptions based on what they know about you or if you don't tell it, it does not know. And so it can look onto the interwebs, but not in the context of which you need it to think about things. So while I could get into the logistics and the deal analysis in the M&A space, and there's so many different ways that you can use AI, I'm very careful to just always put my conversations in the context of branding, marketing, public relations, customer experience, that kind of thing.

So what I'm seeing, especially in the VR/STR space, is we're using AI for chatbots for guest relations. We are seeing it in creating social media content. We are seeing it in creating scripts in all different kinds of blog posts and white papers.

I'm seeing it in all of the contexts that we're already using as like brand materials, collateral imagery, that sort of thing. And that's the other thing is I'm seeing the imagery too, which I've got beef with robots in there. It's so bad and people are using it.

And I'm just like, okay, well, that's an option. So it's being used. And I'm a strategist, first and foremost, and it's not being used strategically.

[Heather Bayer]
What mistakes do you think people are making? I know going back to the end of, are we talking the end of 2023 when ChatGPT was first launched? Yes, yes.

When everybody was talking about prompts and prompt engineering, and you could download 500 prompts, and they would all be one-liners. You got them in the spreadsheet, and it was just simple one-liners. Write me a blog post on x subject.

And now I'm hearing about, I'm listening to podcasts, and I'm hearing people say, I have seven and a half thousand words in my prompt.

[Amber Hurdle]
Some of mine are very, very long. But I think that the problem that I'm seeing is we are treating our interns as if they are the C-suite. And if you were to sit down with an intern that is just dough-eyed and green right off the farm, and you look at them and say, write a blog post about this topic, and then walk away, how do you think that's going to turn out?

But if you were to ask like a CMO, I need you to write a blog post about XYZ. They have enough context. They have the emotional intelligence.

They have an understanding of human behavior. They have at least a shallow understanding of psychology and the things that our brains do, whether we know it or not, neurologically. And you would get great content.

And so what we need to do is begin our ChatGPT. And we'll just keep it in that. There's Claude, there's so many different, so many different options.

But most people know ChatGPT. So I try to keep the conversation there and then apply it to whatever it is that you want. Treat ChatGPT like the intern.

We can talk about CustomGPTs, but let's just talk about one prompt. If you were sitting down with a college student who is helping you, what would you do? What would you need to tell them?

What would you need to ask them? I ask oftentimes, like even preparing for this interview, I asked, I said, what do I need to know to be fully prepared and responsible with Heather's audience? And it gave me some ideas.

And I was like, okay, I want you to do one. And then I got very clear about exactly what I wanted to have happen based on its number one suggestion to prepare. So then it built that out.

And then I was like, okay, now I want it's more of a building process. It's more of a stepping up ladders. And then as you're seeing how it's processing the work, then you can start refining, refining, refining.

When you just give a 7000 word prompt, that's a lot of thinking for a robot to do and to output something that is going to be clear and on brand.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And I think this is what I was getting at, whether it's one sentence or it's 7000 words, if it's done without intention. And if it's if it's done without some prior planning, then it really is probably going to go the wrong way.

So let's go back again, because I've sort of gone into the details before exploring the wider picture. So let's just start with, what are the advantages of AI in business? And I'm not talking about the advantages of revenue management tools that are using AI, or other SAS models that are, that have AI built in.

You know, I know Breezeway does, and just about all, Boom, have you looked, have you looked at Boom? I have looked at Boom. Yes.

And I'm having Shahar is going to come on and talk to us as well.

[Amber Hurdle]
So I won't even I will reserve that for Shahar, but holy wow, is that I mean, I was my first response to watching the interconnectivity of everything and how it all spoke to each other, the efficiency of it, with the ability to layer on your brand so that it was like, I was like, can I have this for my business? Is this something I can buy for my business? Can I retrofit it for like consultancy?

And so the question that I guess the answer to that is, to me, the best benefit strategically is speed of execution and efficiency. But just like in a human capacity, we wouldn't, like, let's just say that we were serving a glass of wine at a restaurant. It's a luxury restaurant.

And so the service of that is going to be, you know, you're going to have your napkin over your arm, you're going to talk about where it came from, you're going to engage the customers, you're going to reference like, well, you're having this for dinner, you're being very customized as you're doing it. And, and then you pour the wine and it's a process. And it's a very thoughtful process.

What people are doing with AI is coming in and dropping the bottle off at the table and just executing the task and going back to the kitchen.

[Heather Bayer]
That that's that is such a great analogy. I love that analogy. I'm going to pinch that use it.

It really describes exactly what I was trying to get at actually with my question, you gave me the answer in an analogy and love that. How do we do this better? There's a big question.

[Amber Hurdle]
Well, I, of course, being me, I put a framework around it because my ADD brain needs like needs step one, step two, step three to follow. So I just assume the rest of the world is neurodivergent like me, but I have the aim framework. So it's assist, infuse and monitor.

So we are aiming to stay on brand. We are aiming to differentiate ourselves because like Sally Hogshead says different is better than better. And so the first step is you're using your AI tool as an assistant.

So we're going to treat it like the intern. We're not going to treat it like the CMO. And then we're going to take whatever we got assistance with building out an outline, putting top points together, analyzing a potential ideal homeowner, analyzing different ways that you can approach homeowner acquisition.

And then we're going to infuse our brand personality into it. So I make no secret that I am horrified if I find out of a company doesn't have a brand guide, a brand messaging guide with your visual brand tools at the end. So you have to understand who you are.

You have to understand what you're about. You have to understand like, what's your business's personality? What does it sound like out online?

And it needs to be different because if your customer service message, your automation, the automated email could be any other STR in the world, then you're off brand, you're not aiming. So assist, and then we infuse the brand. We use it up.

We slap our stink on it. And then we continue to monitor and we need to check its work. We were just having this pre-call conversation where, I mean, my CustomGPTs are dialed in and it still gets things wrong.

And I will ask questions. And because I happen to know the answer, and then I'm just wanting it to like make it shorter or briefer or give me a one sentence for it or whatever, it sometimes gives me wrong information. So you don't set and forget an intern.

You don't go like, hey, welcome to the company. I'll check in at the end of the semester. Let me know how it goes.

Like you check the work. You make sure that it's on brand. You give suggestions.

You tell that intern, you know, here at Amber Hurdle Consulting, we're very warm and friendly. And this just feels very stale. And so I need you to reference the brand guide again.

And let's think about how we can make this message more on brand so that our customers feel that relationship value that we have. So yeah, assist, infuse, monitor.

[Heather Bayer]
Love that. So you mentioned ChatGPT, CustomGPT. And I don't want to go into the deep depths of how to create a CustomGPT.

But for somebody who's listening and thinking, what the heck? What is that? Can you give a brief description of a CustomGPT?

[Amber Hurdle]
So I'll do a comparison. Your normal ChatGPT is going to search the internet and whatever it knows from everyone else feeding ChatGPT with information. And it can also think through other conversations that you've had with ChatGPT.

And it's pulling the information from those sources. A CustomGPT is defining the sources. So it's the filter in which ChatGPT is going to function when you choose to have a conversation through that GPT.

So like the top three things that you can program your CustomGPT with would be your brand guide. So yeah, you need one of those. It could be guest communications, redact any names or any personal information.

And then also, any of your like SOPs or any of your marketing materials, I'll say like other, right? So we want to make sure that we're represented as the brand that we're considering who we're talking to. And then what's our personality with all the different communications internally and externally, you can upload and say like talk like this.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, so I have some GPT that creates the questions for my podcast. So it knows what the podcast is about. It's got some information on previous podcasts.

It knows how I ask my questions, how I tend to ramble on, lose my... occasionally lose grasp of what we're talking about, but it knows the podcast and it will generate and then I will tell it, you know, today I'm interviewing Amber Hurdle. And I will provide it with information on you.

I provided it. And in fact, it knew because it's got your previous podcasts in there. So honestly, well, now it's different today because we're talking about AI and specifically this one's going to be entitled, Your ChatGPT is showing.

But I said, but I want it to speak to people who perhaps don't have that in-depth knowledge of AI. And it came up with some pretty great questions as it usually does. But then there is that next step.

And that is, I think, that's your part of your framework. It's the infused part. I've got to infuse me into it.

I've got to tweak it. I've got to have these questions coming out in my voice. I mean, I'm not, I don't tend to follow them slavishly anyway.

But if I do get stuck and I go, oh gosh, I'm going to go to one of these questions. I want it to sound like me. So it's not a matter of just, of just asking the question of this CustomGPT and saying, just feed me the answer and I'll use it.

I've seen a lot of models and frameworks on how to do this. This is, this is really simple, but I do like, I do like the infuse part of it because I think this is what a lot of people are missing out on. And this is why their ChatGPT is showing.

So that's a great segue into, into the title of this, this episode, telltale signs that a piece of content is written by AI. And we know this, I hope this email finds you well.

[Amber Hurdle]
Yeah, we all suddenly need our tea and crumpets too. And like, especially in the United States, that's not how we talk. So there's formal English and then there's Americanized English and those two are different.

Yeah, I just, I think I want to go back. I did, I did that post your ChatGPT is showing, I guess last week or some, some time ago on LinkedIn and the top three that I see that I want you to program your CustomGPTs with. And none of these are bad or wrong.

And I use all of them. But again, I'm a career writer, like I went to journalism school, I have a PR degree, like I have two communication minors, like marketing and organizational communication, I have certifications. So I can see these things.

And I can hear my English professors united, cheering everybody on that we told you this mattered, because it does. And if you don't understand sentence structure, then you might not have the pattern recognition that I might have. But y'all, come on now, stop with the parallel contrast, you don't have to use that every other sentence is a very human thing to do.

We often do it when we're trying to wrap things up, like we've rambled on and then we say, you know, being on podcasts isn't just about positioning your personal brand, it's also sharing your ideas and building an authentic presence with new people who are familiar with you. It's not "just", it is. We can't only depend on, but we can. It's, that's parallel contrast.

Again, I do it a lot. Like I sent a voice note to a friend today and I recapped everything with parallel contrast and I giggled at myself because I'm so hyper aware of it now. But we use it in everyday conversation.

Just please don't use it every other sentence. Yeah, it is. I'm seeing it in emails.

I'm seeing it in some of the apps that like I listen to like meditation type stuff. It's everywhere, and I'm like, simmer down.

The second thing is the em-dash. We love commas still people. There's semicolons. There is other punctuation other than the em-dash. And so the em-dash is like the longer one.

I'm a journalist at heart. I write an AP style. And so it's great to draw attention. Whereas commas, it still gets a little bit lost. But if you're scanning, then the em-dash draws attention to this one part that we want you to pause. We want you to be reading, reading, reading. Okay, pause and really pay attention to this.

Okay, read, read, read. That's the use of the em-dash. It dilutes the em-dash when every other sentence has em-dashes in it.

Okay, so train your CustomGPT. Or if you're creating something, you can say lay off the em-dash. And then the other one that I see a lot are complex sentences, compound complex sentences.

And so without I'm not going to get into the whole English structure of that. But social media is micro learning. Okay, so we don't need to have super complex like, you know, there's like a sentence and then a semicolon and then like a whole other sentence attached to it.

Maybe that's better for a blog post. I don't know, maybe even not that because that is more for like narrative style writing that is more of like a feature article that you would find in a magazine. When we're writing online, that's more of an AP journalistic style.

And so in social media, we need things to be short, punchy, attention grabbing, easy to scan, easy to consume. When we're doing long form content and blog posts, we still have to write like we're writing for eighth graders. And so ChatGPT has these really sophisticated sentences and sometimes really sophisticated words.

And that is not the average reader. And so you might look fancy to yourself. But if your audience isn't able to consume the information in a way that they can receive it, process it and act on it, then you're wasting time anyways.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I've actually used the write me your answer as if you were writing to a ninth grader. Tell me I use it a lot. If I see something that's super complicated, and I just want to break it down so I can understand it, I will say summarize that as if you were talking to a ninth grader, and actually the ninth or 10th and that, that actually brings out some clear language.

[Mike Bayer]
We're going to take a short break to hear from David Angotti at Guesty to share how Guesty might be the solution to your property management system challenges.

[Heather Bayer]
Welcome back, David. Tell me about the tools and approaches that can help property managers feel confident that their pricing is optimized.

[David Angotti]
This one is absolutely critical to our businesses. If we get pricing wrong on the high end, lots of studies have shown that's going to kill your bookings. And if we're on the low end, expect your phone to ring from the owners.

So we know what does not work at this point. This is not a set it and forget it scenario or a buy to get one free like it was 10 years ago. This is not what the market wants today.

So we're wanting a solution that's analyzing real-time data, market trends, competitor rates, booking, pacing, and then from all of that, recommending effective pricing that humans, real people that have revenue management experience can digest all of this information and then push it live to all of these different channels with a lot of different pricing rules layered on top of that. And so, of course, technology has to play a role. No one person can do all of that.

If you're going to ensure maximum revenue potential, you need a tool like Guesty Price Optimizer that does everything I just said, but not only all of that, it's natively embedded right into your property management software because it's the same company and just makes it really easy to work with, no separate logins or anything like that.

[Heather Bayer]
I need to touch on one that you haven't mentioned. And that is something that I was taught years and years ago. And it was maybe in a presentation skills course, 2030 years ago.

And it was the rule of three. Yeah. And I've always used the rule of three, you know, I use it in presentations, I use it in writing.

And I've used it sparingly. But it has that impact because it's been around for a long time, the rule of three, it's like, oh, I'm trying to, I asked, I'm going to go back a sec to see what chat GPT said to me this morning. So bear with me a second while I head back into it.

And what it told me about you. Oh, today, she's bringing her insights to our industry sharing the biggest AI advantages for short term rental professionals, common mistakes to avoid and how to ensure your AI generated content aligns with your brand. That was three, the biggest AI advantages, common mistakes to avoid and AI generated content.

And that was, oh, yes, she's known this is you for her no-nonsense approach to branding, marketing and leveraging technology. And was there something else? Yes.

How do we use these powerful tools authentically and strategically without losing trust, brand identity, or that personal connection with our guests?

[Amber Hurdle]
Boy, it knows me.

[Heather Bayer]
But each time it was coming out with those three, always three. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But it's that same as using the parallel contrast that you just use it sparingly.

And that once again, it comes back to, you know, once you've generated the content, then you go back into it. And you look for those things and look say, does this does this sound human? Is this something that somebody is going to read and say, that was written by ChatGPT?

[Amber Hurdle]
Yeah. And I think the for those who are watching, because you're a copywriter, or you're a brand person. And I know that we, I'm not because I know I'm way better than chat GPT, chat because I'm 20 years, or been writing every day since they were 11.

So don't worry about you losing your job, because the average person cannot do even basic sentence diagrams. And that's okay, because you don't want me taking over your accounting department, I assure you. So just think about how you are using the product and then sell your services based on how you can help them improve, like teach them how to use it to don't leave them in the dark, but then they will see that you understand language.

And you understand intentional copywriting for specific audiences based on brand. And you can teach them how to do all of that, of course, but it's never going to be you, it's never going to be that the true human element. And if they don't know how to program it, and if they don't know how to do the infused part or the monitor part, then maybe it's your role is more of like the AI person overseeing it.

Or if you have a marketing person on your team, help them understand that they now have a new employee, and it's called chat GPT, but you're still responsible for guiding it for evaluating it, giving it constructive feedback and making sure that it's performing according to your performance standards.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, so are we getting this message across? Do you think so? I don't want us to come across and say, you know, you shouldn't be using, you shouldn't be using this.

Yeah, but it's, you know, are there any specific types of content where it should be really used cautiously?

[Amber Hurdle]
Not yes, communication, although that too, we'll come back to that one. But occupancy rates are going down. They're still just dreaming of a 2020 profitability, you know, and things are a little wonky right now economically, things are a little wonky socially, things are a little wonky with technology taking over.

And you have some homeowners that are maybe more relational, and they bought this family home, and they're just paying the property taxes or their whatever, they're covering their costs by making it a short term rental. Then you have people who are expecting you to be an investment manager. And those are different conversations.

And so blanket communicating to your various homeowners, sometimes you have to, but like, keep in mind the average of the collective of what would inspire them, what would what do they need to hear, how do they need to hear it, and speak in their language while staying on brand. But if you're having a homeowner emails you, and is upset about some things, don't just stick that into chat GPT and go What should I say and then copy and paste it and send it. Think about who am I talking to?

What motivates them? What is it that they're afraid of? Why are they Why did they just send me a nasty gram?

Or what is it? What's the emotion that I'm capturing? So maybe that's the first question is, hey, chat GPT, what's the emotion that's captured in this?

Okay, now that I know that how do I address that motion emotion while staying on brand, and taking care of this person who has entrusted me to steward their investment, like be very clear about what it is that you're doing. And then it might give you some feedback and then say, okay, this is exactly what I want to say, it can send it back, you you that's the assist, then we're going to infuse with all the other little things. And like, hey, I saw your I saw that your dog just had a litter of puppies on Facebook the other day, congratulations, then get into the message and then get the response back, upload that response to the same chat and say, analyze the effectiveness of this conversation.

And what do I do next? That's how you can use it cautiously. copy paste is wildly irresponsible.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I did a presentation a couple of times years ago. And it was just called one size does not fit all. And it but it was about owners, it was about owner retention.

And if it was exactly that, if you treat every owner exactly the same way, you're going to alienate most of them. Because you just can't do this on a, an average level, every, everybody's different, they've got their own nuances. And, and those business development people in property management companies know this, they know their owners.

So communication with them. And I know this from 20 years as a property manager, you only have to get it wrong once. And, you know, a relationship that's been going for five or 10 years, can be toppled by a poorly written response to an email because they expect you if they've been with you for a long time, they expect you to know them through and through.

They expect you to know that your dog's just having a litter of puppies.

[Amber Hurdle]
And this relationship business, the entire industry is built on relationships.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And not every owner is an investor.

[Amber Hurdle]
Right, right. And I and isn't that fair that we begin to make assumptions. And then that unconscious bias is then in the it affects what we're doing.

And so one of the powers of chat GBT is it removes that. And it helps you look at things a different way. It helps you maybe, unless you say that you're, you're upset because your homeowner just got to the home and they shouldn't have been there and your housekeepers were there and they didn't announce themselves.

And then they interacted with your housekeepers. And then your housekeepers felt threatened and they popped off and now they're emailing you and demanding that you fire your housekeepers. And then you're going to want to be defensive of your housekeepers.

And so you go, well, I'll tell you, and you're emotionally responding. What if, what if you asked for an assist? What if you said, I'm not going to respond emotionally to this.

I'm just going to take about four breaths. And then I'm going to ask chat GPT, like, what's the core of this message? What's the problem we're trying to solve?

Like, let's just use it like that. Let's use it when you have to give difficult feedback to the housekeeper who popped off at your homeowner. Like what, what motivated them?

What do I know about them? If you have personality profiling on them, put that in there. And I will tell you my little cheat, and I talked about this at DARM, and there are seven communication patterns that I pay attention to.

You see, I like things to be simple because I want them to be simple and applicable to everything. And so I'm certified in the how to fascinate assessment and whole system. And it's a branding tool.

And so I know that somebody's going to speak the language of innovation. So the language of creativity, they might speak the language of passion, the language of relationship. It could be that they speak the language of prestige, the language of excellence.

So that's, you know, in that luxury market, sometimes we get confused, we're prestige, but it could be that our homeowner is actually speaking the language of trust, the language of consistency. They made this investment because what matters to them is continuity over time and something that they can count on. Then you have mystique.

If you do, if you can't read somebody, that's probably mystique because that's the language of listening. That's the language of observing. And so they're going to speak with substance only, they're not going to be the chatterboxes like you and I are.

And then there's the language of alert. That's Justin Ford, for sure. It's like preventing problems with care.

It's I'm looking out for you. And so if you can just through the communication that you're having with people, if you can analyze and just and I don't mean like, hyper analyze, but just, oh, this person is usually warm. And they want to create that warm emotional connection.

Okay, so I know that I need to be very relational in my communication with them. This person's always asking about the inspections, about the tax consequences, about did you hear that there's, you know, so and so that just moved in a block? How's that going to impact our bookings?

Like that person speaks the language of alert, like boil it down and into things that you can categorize. And then that's how you use chat GPT is like, here's the framework, here, here are the different personalities, here's who we are, here's our, our voice, but don't, don't over complicate it. Keep things simple and repeatable.

And then that's what makes it scalable.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, great, great advice. And it does come down to collecting that information in the first place, because, yeah, you know, when you've got 200-300 owners, you know, how do you know, whether you know, where they're coming from, how they like to be spoken to how they like to communicate. And that's where just where a good CRM comes in.

I know that we weren't the greatest add as but because we kept all this information in our heads. And I think that's a lot where a lot of property managers do CRM is another topic of another, another podcast.

[Amber Hurdle]
I just taught for three hours the other day, branding and using your CRM to yes, make sure that your brand is being carried out.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we've talked we've sort of strolled through chat GPT with a little bit of custom GPTs.

But are there any other AI tools or any features that you'd recommend that people use to do what this is all about? It's about streamlining work. Yeah, but without losing your voice without losing your branding without losing your authenticity.

[Amber Hurdle]
Well, could I put just more of a caution on another one that I think is super popular? I think most of us who are writing, use Grammarly. I'm not sure if you use Grammarly.

[Heather Bayer]
No, no, I did, you know, I've never used Grammarly because I maybe, yeah, I never used Grammarly because that was my thing. That was English language was my thing. And I came from a journalistic family.

All my family were, you know, newspaper writers, and it sort of came down to me, I guess. And maybe that's me being a bit arrogant that I've never used Grammarly.

[Amber Hurdle]
No, you know, and that's, I mean, that's a whole other side conversation is the more reliant we get on these tools to think for us that we lose the ability to think for ourselves. The volume in which I write, like in the month of January, not even counting my own content or other client content. For one single client, I wrote the equivalent of a 300 page book.

That's a lot of words. My book, The Bombshell Businesswoman was like 243 pages. And I wrote another book.

So at the volume that I do it, I do use Grammarly to just because speed is my thing, not necessarily accuracy. So although I get better and better, I can't slow down to be as accurate as I used to be, as guess what I'll say it. But if you're using Grammarly, it doesn't understand what style that you're working with unless you tell it.

And so it's going to, for me, it always wants to give me an Oxford comma. Well, I write AP style, and there is no Oxford comma found in a news article. They just don't exist.

Of course, most people who learned how to write in English class, and they're going to learn MLM, and so they're going to use an Oxford comma. So think about what am I using this for, and then program even your correction tools for that. From a visual perspective, oh, I get frustrated with chat GPT's ability to create or refine an image.

So I might tell it to create an image, and then I want it to fix one thing, and then it comes back with an entirely different image, but that one thing fixed. So I like to hop over and it's integrated now with chat GPT, but I'm a Canva junkie. Canva has a way where you can have more of a conversation around it, like, okay, make this, okay, now I want you to add this, and you can piece it together to make it, but I would just caution using the AI tools that are visual, and especially the ones everybody's using for their bio images, like their professional headshots.

Those are, I mean, I'll just reflect anecdotally on when I wrote my first book, and we had to create one of those banners for book signings. And it was sent back to me, and my face was flawless. It was just completely airbrushed.

And I was like, um, you know that my real face has to sit right next to this giant face that looks perfect. And they're going to see like, I got like a hot dog bun right here, you know, that they're going to see that it's where's my hot dog bun. And don't allow AI to strip you, your personal brand, your business brand, and your employer brand of authenticity.

That's the number one thing. And when I think about some of the other tools that I use, I don't really want to share them because the ones that are like the juiciest are the ones that my customers know about, and that's what gives them their brand's edge. And so like, that's the other thing too, is we're in a sharing economy.

And we definitely want to share knowledge. But when you're really taking things down to like, what makes you competitive, you don't have to share everything.

[Heather Bayer]
There were a couple of things you said there. And it tends to go out of my head very quickly. But I was thinking, Oh, that's a good Opus clip.

[Amber Hurdle]
You know, there's the tools that we're accustomed to using every day and you can even take the content, I'm going to call it content, from a price labs or a wheelhouse and you can take that and then you can use that AI generated information or data and then you can partner it with a cloud. I'm trying to think, I'm just going to keep it in ChatGPT because then I'm going to go off on tangents and I'm really good at that, you know. So you can take that information and then you can bring it back to your wordsmith, your copywriter robot.

So you have your data robot, you have your copywriter robot and then you can tell the story behind the numbers. That's something that when I'm working with founders and they're working on their pitch decks and they're working on trying to get investments, they have numbers and I have to coach them on telling the story. What do these numbers mean?

How can we synthesize this information? So like in the hotel world, we might have the data that we served 5,000 meals at lunch for whatever group that was in-house and you know, we hear numbers all the time and that might be meaningful to the small minority of people who think that way or the majority of people are storytelling type people that learn through story and so you can say, we served 5,000 meals and that's the equivalent of all the kids in this school district having a free lunch, something like that and then you can start building on that story and start breaking down like the number of attendees and what does that mean for profitability and instead of it just being like a boring snooze or PowerPoint with numbers on it, tell a story.

[Heather Bayer]
I just want to come back on something you just said. You talked about your copywriter robot and your data robot. Can you just explain what you meant by that?

[Amber Hurdle]
Sure, so price labs or wheelhouse or any of them beyond would be your data robot and that could, I mean, it is using artificial intelligence to synthesize and aggregate information and so that's your data robot. That could be so many different things but just keeping it, that's pretty familiar one in the STR space. Now, even if we're just talking about that, it's the same philosophy.

John Ahn gives a very, with tech tape, he gives a very clear way of looking at that. I have a toolbox in my house. I own the tool. I have it and I know that the hammer is to put a nail on the wall but I'm not a handyman nor a carpenter and so just because I have the tool and I kind of know what to do with it doesn't mean that I can apply it in a specific project. I could screw up a drywall because I don't know to find a stud. I mean, there's all kinds of things I can do wrong if I don't have somebody help me use the tool that has experience using the tool.

So there's that side of things but even if it's just the raw data that you're getting out of these platforms and you're not a carpenter, then go over to your copywriter, Chet GPT, with all of the information that you talked to about it and then tell it exactly what you want it to analyze, communicate and put a story around and it will tell a story. I've done that before. I've even liked it with my own vision board.

I've said, okay, these are my goals for 2025. This is what I have on my vision board. You know, I do my word of the year and my song of the year and all that kind of stuff, tell me the story of my 2025.

And so I'm just walking my dog as my robot friend is casting a vision over my year and I can go back and listen to that at any time to inspire me to move forward. Storytelling is, but it's got to be on brand. It's got to, it's got to come out the way that in one of those seven forms of communication, you need to lead with at least one of those.

If you have 300 homeowners and you don't know all of them, you can make a general assessment based on, um, I always tell people now I'm rambling, Heather, I'm sorry. You get me going in a direction and then I'm like, but just to pull all this together, we're taking the data, we're giving it to the copywriter and then we're saying, this is who we're talking to. So just think about your five favorite homeowners.

When I'm thinking of an ideal customer profile, I want to know your five favorite, well, what makes a favorite? They pay, they refer, and you enjoy them. So they're profitable, like they're repeat customers.

They've been with you for a while. They refer other people to you and you actually enjoy working with them. What do those five homeowners have in common and what language do you think that they speak?

What matters to those five collectively, and then you can apply that to the 300 and chances are you're going to be communicating in a way that is effective for the type of people you really want to work with.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. Well, I mean, we used to, we used to talk about personas, um, and this is what this is really, isn't it? It's just taking the persona into the AI world.

Um, I want to go back to the very beginning when I said to you, you know, how are you seeing property managers and hosts using AI in their business? And you said very poorly. So I want to come, you know, all the way to the end here and ask you for your recommendations, suggestions, ideas, advice, whatever you'd like to call it for those owners who don't want to do it poorly, they're perhaps starting to explore AI within their businesses.

What would you suggest to them that they do?

[Amber Hurdle]
Slow down so you can speed up, slow down so you can speed up, slow down and determine, we, I think we talked about this the last time we talked about AI and it's, I wish AI could do blank so that I can blank define the mission first and foremost, then define who am I talking to? Then make sure that your brand is overlaid on that and then have the outcomes that you're looking for. Be very clear on the design of things.

We don't do anything else in the business willy-nilly. We have data that forms, informs the strategy when we're talking about revenue management, we have data that informs the strategy when we talk about, um, forecasting or, you know, the financial side of things, we use data to inform the strategy in so many different ways, but then we just like do whatever the cool kids are saying to do or we follow an influencer that we like and we kind of try to do it their way and we're just out here shooting in the dark and now we're going to add AI to it and completely make it impersonal and hope for the best.

Let's go. We can't do that. Be as intentional with your communication and your brand as you are anything else because guess what?

Everything else follows, falls under brand. So if you're not getting it right up here, you're not getting it right with your homeowner reports. You're not getting it right with your marketing.

You're not getting it right with team communication. You're not getting it right with guest communication. Everything about your business is becoming more and more inauthentic and less desirable because you are not differentiating yourself from your competition by not slowing down so that you can speed up.

[Heather Bayer]
And once again, going back to your AIM framework, that seems to be that is such a simple method, I think, for anybody to take on AI and say, OK, I'm going to follow this framework. So just once again, just talk us through that AIM.

[Amber Hurdle]
Sure. So first is assist. So we are treating our robots.

And I love my robots. I talk I have all kinds of robots I talk to all day long. So I'm saying that with love.

But we have to ask our robot to assist us not to take over. They are not the CEO. They are our assistant.

And so treat your assistant like an intern level. Guide it. Second is infuse.

Infuse your brand. You can do that on the front end with creating a custom GPT. You can do that by infusing things on the front end with your prompt.

But most importantly, when you get things back, look at it through the lens of your brand and infuse anything else into it that needs that it needs to feel on brand for you. Aim to be on brand. And then the last piece is monitor.

We don't tell an intern to do something and then check in on them at the end of the semester. Every single day we are monitoring that interns work. We're making sure that it's on brand.

We're making sure that it's quality. We're making sure that it is communicating things in a way that our audience can receive and process and act upon. So we're always aiming to stay on brand by using our robots as assistants by infusing our brand into every aspect of it and monitoring on the back end to make sure it's accurate on brand.

And also just look for the trends. This worked. This didn't.

We're going to do more of this.

[Heather Bayer]
So can I share that that aim, Dr. I'll have that put in the Show Notes so everybody can download that because I think that is, you know, for somebody starting out that's just super simple. Just follow this. Follow this model.

[Amber Hurdle]
And I'll start breaking down as well. Like I said, it's been a wild Q1 as it always is at Amber Hurdle Consulting and Employer Brand Central. But it's extra wild with the amount of writing I've been doing.

And but what I'm going to be rolling out is taking this one step at a time. Like what falls into assist? Well, what type of prompts can I use for that?

Like we'll unpack this over time. But if you just start out with having that top of mind and being conscious of it, you're already going to be ahead of the game because other people are just shooting in the dark.

[Heather Bayer]
This has all been terrific, Amber. I knew that that you were the person to come along and start to kick off this A.I. month. I'm still honored.

But I think it's you know, it's really given us this overview on well, how to make our voice on brand and not just a chat GPT clone. Yeah, so important.

[Amber Hurdle]
And you do it brilliantly, Heather. I mean, I love talking about A.I. with you specifically, and you see me anytime it comes up. I'm like, have you talked to Heather yet?

You know, because you do a brilliant job of it. And of course, I know your background. You've had either the mental health side of things.

You have the English side of things, a journalist side of things. So that's a lot of the lenses that I look at things. And when you're when you understand human behavior and you understand how to leverage language, you put those things together, magic happens.

And I'm just I love nerding out on this stuff with you, Heather.

[Heather Bayer]
Me, too. I've got I've got a whole month of talking to people about A.I., which is so much fun. But it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and having you share your thoughts and your wisdom on this.

We will talk again. I'm quite sure about this. And I will I will see you at a conference at some point over the course of this year, I'm sure.

[Amber Hurdle]
Oh, for sure. Yes, I'll be at a lot of them.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah.

[Amber Hurdle]
Oh, can't wait. Oh, thank you for having me, Heather. It means a lot.

[Heather Bayer]
We'll talk soon.

[Mike Bayer]
Before you go, don't forget to visit our sponsor, Guesty. They've been helping vacation rental managers stay ahead of the curve and if you're looking for the right tech to streamline your operations, you know where to go. Check out the link in the description of this episode for a code to get 50% off your first year with Guesty and don't stress about the PMS switch.

Guesty will handle all that by working with you to make the transition seamless.

[Heather Bayer]
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the show notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you and I look forward to being with you again next week.