Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.
Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.
Brandon Burton (00:00.94)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Today’s guest is a true game changer at the intersection of business growth, AI innovation, and Chamber of Commerce strategy.
Craig Turner is the founder and president of Momentum, the business growth agency, Momentum for Chambers, and Momentum AI. With Momentum celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2024, Craig and his team have become known for revolutionizing the way Chambers of Commerce and small businesses drive ROI through innovative sponsorship strategies, ambassador training, and powerful member benefit programs.
But Craig isn’t just building bridges between businesses and chambers. He’s also on the leading edge of the AI revolution. A dynamic speaker and in-demand consultant, Craig delivers practical, accessible, and fun AI trainings that demystify tech use for every day. Earlier this year, he launched MemberBoost AI, a game-changing platform helping chambers deliver custom AI-generated growth strategies to their members.
In addition to his work with Momentum, Craig currently serves as the interim executive director of the Niagara USA Chamber of Commerce, providing that when it comes to empowering businesses, he’s not just talking the talk, but he’s walking the walk.
Craig, I’m excited to have you back with us here on Chamber Chat podcast. It was just over a year ago, we had you on before. For those who want to go back and check that episode out, was episode 295, where we also talked about AI.
Brandon Burton (01:50.22)
But I wanted to give you an opportunity today to just say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening. It’s always fun to get that interesting tidbit about somebody. So if you’ve got something interesting about yourself you’d like to share, we’d be happy to hear it.
Craig Turner (02:05.517)
Absolutely Brandon. Well, thanks so much again for having me back on. You know, what’s interesting is we, was just about a year ago, but so much has changed. mean, we’re going to talk about AI in both, there’s two completely different conversations because everything’s moving so quickly. Interesting tidbit about me. I’ve got a little more than 20 years experience in the chambers and I’ve been on all sides of it. So I’ve been an executive, I’ve been a staffer, I’ve been a member, I’ve been a board member, I’ve been a board chair. I’ve done it all.
Brandon Burton (02:18.371)
right?
Craig Turner (02:35.309)
every piece of the puzzle, but I just the tidbit about me that I want to share I’m such a Chamber of Commerce nerd that I actually have published a book and it’s the first in a series called the Chamber of Commerce mysteries. It’s murder mystery set in the Chamber of Commerce environment and book number two is actually almost done and coming shortly too so I’m excited about that. So that’s how much I’ve dived into the chamber world.
Brandon Burton (03:01.262)
I love it. So book one was great. So I’m looking forward to book two. And for those who haven’t checked it out yet, it’s great. I love that the setting is a chamber of commerce that kind of focuses around the story, just kind of revolves around a local chamber. So I love it. I’d love to see that integrated more into our daily activities and entertainment.
So typically at this point in these podcast interviews, I’d like to have the guests tell about their chamber size, staff scope of work, budget, kind of set that perspective. I think it would be important to kind of get the little bit more background about momentum and in just a couple of minutes, but then also tell us about the Niagara USA chamber size, staff scope of work, just so we know what kind of resources you’re coming from as you’re applying some of these AI tools at the organization.
Craig Turner (03:55.656)
Absolutely. Well, they go hand in hand. What’s very interesting. so, working for the chamber, you know, 15 years ago, the regional chamber here in Buffalo, part of, I ran government affairs, but my part of my, my job was what we call business development, which was not, not sales, not membership sales, but business development for our members. And this was back during the recession and our board to their credit said, we’re going to start losing members because the good corporate citizen thing.
is going to start to be a question when someone’s going to say, just fired my marketing manager. Why am I giving the chamber $1,500? So we put together a team of seven people and we met with 400 companies during the great recession back in 2009, 2010. And part of what you needed to do was you needed to meet with them and you needed to come back to the office with three things you could do for them. Specifically, not go to this event, just specifically for them. We had an 88 % retention rate during the
during the Great Recession. So when I left the Chamber ultimately, I took that concept and built it into my business. So Momentum, what we do before AI, what we do is our clients are companies that join Chambers of Commerce. And we’re kind of the Jerry McGuire for them. We’re the agent. We tell them what Chambers to join, where to spend money. We get speaking roles for them. Even on a day-to-day basis, what events people should go to.
And to this day, I haven’t found anybody that competes with us. So we’re gonna keep on, we’re gonna keep on doing that. But then the chamber started to see what we were doing and come to us and say, hey, we really like what you’re saying on LinkedIn on member value. Would you like to come consult with us? And me being an entrepreneur, I’m like, of course, I don’t know what it looks like, but what we can. So next thing you know, I have momentum for business, momentum for chambers. And we taught the way we talk about it, we exist in the gray area between.
Brandon Burton (05:39.074)
Right?
Craig Turner (05:48.706)
between the two, helping both sides have a better relationship. November 2022, OpenAI makes CHAT GPT available. And the first thing I’m gonna dive in, we’re gonna grow our company and we’re gonna, the promise we made to this chamber network that we’ve built is look, we know you don’t have time to sit on top of this stuff all day. We’re gonna do it. We’re gonna learn everything we can. We’re gonna curate the best stuff.
And we’re going to, we’re going to train you. we’ve trained more than 1500 chambers since, since that time, uh, around the country and we’re excited and we love doing it. We love building these relationships. know the same way, same, way you love building these relationships through the podcast. Um, so I belong to the Niagara USA chamber for, uh, uh, you know, for, for about eight years, been on the board for a long time. And I was the chair last year, our executive director stepped on earlier this year and the board said,
Craig, this is what you do. Do you want to take the reins in the interim and kind of build a foundation for us? So that’s where we are right now. The Niagara USA Chamber, we represent all of Niagara County, which obviously if you look behind me includes Niagara Falls. are not, like some of our colleagues, we are not a tourism chamber. We have a really, really great tourism agency that we work with. But we are, for the most part, in the advocacy chamber.
know, New York state is a tough place to do business and there’s consistently more and more regulation. And right now we’re dealing with big time energy issues as they’re trying to completely eliminate natural gas. So we’re in the thick of that, but we’re also a community chamber, a small business chamber. we work hard at building that community. have, you know, just coming up in about a month or so as our small business expo.
We have 480 members you were talking about member size 480 members across the county and The one thing I’ll say about our thing and I don’t think it were abnormal to chambers, but it’s a very diverse membership from the perspective of you know urban suburban and and rural most of the matter County is rural and We do as much agribusiness as we do City Main Street kind of advocacy. So so there’s there’s your rundown of the two, you know momentum and how they kind of
Craig Turner (08:10.327)
how they kind of work together. What we do love though is as we do these trainings for AI, we’re using AI with the chamber. So when I tell you that this prompt will work or this tool will work, we’ve already used it. We’ve already used it in the real world. that’s exciting to have a little sandbox to be able to do these things.
Brandon Burton (08:30.262)
Right. And as we talked today, I almost wish that we could be in front of a live audience to be able to get feedback and have people raise their hands and who’s tried this or that and to kind of course, know, or steer the course for our conversation today. But I think there’s a we both have had a lot of interactions with chambers across the country to kind of get a good feel of how they’re using AI or not.
Craig Turner (08:43.949)
Yes.
Brandon Burton (08:53.928)
And I think we can use that kind of as a base for our discussion today. our focus is going to be on what’s working in AI here. As this releases, it’ll be November 2025. like you mentioned, this is three years since Chat GPT rolled out.
to the masses. So we’ll see how things have evolved and what’s working for Chambers today when it comes to AI. And we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.
All right, Craig, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re diving into AI. And specifically, I’d like to know, as you see, as you’ve applied AI, as you’ve done trainings on AI, what’s working with AI? What’s really moving the needle for Chambers? Maybe some of those key prompts or exercises or, mean, prompt is such a good word because it covers so much from what you actually give the AI to do.
but also what you want that end result to be. But what are you seeing? What’s working?
Craig Turner (10:01.293)
So the time saving is the thing that most people have latched on to. Whether you’re talking about Chambers or their members. Knowing that you can do your blogs, can do your social media, a lot of writing. People understand that. So like when we do trainings, no, we don’t focus on that as much because most people know that they can do that. What we emphasize is what it’s actually accomplishing in the real world. What are you doing with that time savings?
There’s a delineation. We talk about this from the perspective of… People talk about AI is going to take jobs away. right, is AI going to take your job? And we always look at that in two ways. Are you using it as a crutch or are you using it as a tool? So the time savings, and we emphasize this every single time we talk to somebody, a crutch means I have a list of things on my to-do list, I’m using AI to get rid of them, and then I’m on to the next thing. A tool is…
I am using AI to enhance everything I’m doing to make it better so that we’re getting more registrations to our mats, we’re bringing in more new members, we’re getting better, a higher renewal rate, our emails are being read, those kind of things. So it’s the, it’s that purpose of what you’re doing. I see hit or miss around, around the country there. There are, there are a lot, everybody knows copywriting. That’s the easy thing. I see a lot of chambers using it for copywriting and that’s great. It does save time, but you have to make sure that you’re
you’re using it to do better. And when you talk about AI replacing jobs, I always say, look, if you’re using AI just to take the things off your to-do list, eventually your boss doesn’t need to pay you to do that because AI can do it. They can do it themselves. If you’re using it to enhance yourself, there’s no gray area in between. If you’re using it to enhance your work, guess what? Now you’ve made yourself super marketable, not only in your own organization, but elsewhere. That’s one thing that I’ve seen is that
Some chambers have taken on AI and gotten some good stuff done because one person was interested in it. That person becomes marketable. They leave the chambers back at square one again. And that’s a tough place to be. But I’m seeing some really great things happening around the country. I’m seeing chambers use it for, you know, again, to enhance their writing in their newsletters to make them stronger. I’m seeing it for…
Craig Turner (12:26.237)
Database cleanup is huge. I’m seeing it for a strategy, strategy, which is one thing that we emphasize. Yeah, for people to use and say, look, I have this idea, help me flesh out this idea, help me build a six month plan, ask me questions, play my devil’s advocate. These are the kinds of things that I think are starting to get in. We emphasize again, not just using it to save time, but
Brandon Burton (12:33.806)
That’s what I really like, yeah.
Craig Turner (12:54.771)
integrating it into your operation so that it becomes actually a way of life for you.
Brandon Burton (13:00.302)
Yeah, I can see as far as the, you know, getting the ideas, the strategy. I mean, when was the last time as a chamber that you’ve looked at your onboarding messaging? You know, was that pre AI? Has it been post AI? I mean, that is a simple idea of how you can really utilize it. And I would say whatever AI gives you, don’t just take it, make it, take the idea and then, you know, customize it, make it yours. So it sounds like you and Craig, you’d put a post
I think it was on LinkedIn a week or two ago where you talked about one of these tells, you know, as you see an AI post. You want to talk about what that is and maybe people can kind of look for that in languaging when they’re using AI for their social media posts or newsletters.
Craig Turner (13:49.514)
Sure, absolutely. That was a fun post. Yeah. So there’s this thing out there now where people say, I could tell if it’s written with AI. When, you know, my AI was so trained, I tell them my AI is so trained, you’ll never know. It’s so trained on me. But you can tell there are things. So a couple things people talk about the hyphen, you know, and if you cut and paste something right out of AI into LinkedIn or your newsletter, there’s going to be that big hyphen in there. People are going to know. The other one, the tell that I said on LinkedIn is
AI loves the, this isn’t this, it’s this. It loves that format. you know, yeah, yeah. So our, so Monday’s Thursday’s business after five mixer isn’t, you know, isn’t just a networking event. It’s a game changer, you know, and that’s how, that’s how it’s in almost everyone. And you can see it. And the thing is, I said this, you might not have seen it Brandon, but, it was on a comment on someone else’s post is, is that okay?
Brandon Burton (14:25.144)
The comparison, yeah.
Craig Turner (14:47.969)
Well, it depends on your audience. If your audience is fine with it, then it doesn’t matter. That’s fine. But if your audience are going to see that you are, you know, is going to feel one way or another about you using AI to do stuff, well, that’s something you have to take into consideration. yeah, there are, you can tell. And to your point, you never want to just let the AI just run with it and go. That’s one of the things that I talk about. Interesting. It’s a good segue to something like a chatbot. All right. So.
If you have a WordPress or a Wix website, sometimes there’s a plug-in you can put a chatbot on your homepage. I always caution against this and the reason I caution against this is because it’s not necessarily implemented correctly. Because think about it, if somebody comes to your homepage, your first interaction with that person is going to be, you’re just going to turn that right over to AI. People don’t realize that when you do a chatbot, if you really want to do a chatbot, so you go to your electric company or whatever, there’s a chatbot.
The chat bot is backed up by 3000 possible different answers, right? Thousands of answers. The AI goes in there and picks the right answer. It’s not just this random AI is just going to give an answer. It goes into the data that you’ve already, that you’ve already updated. And the best example of that to me, it was always Siri. You could ask Siri all kinds of stuff on your phone, but what happens if Siri didn’t have the answer? That she just sent you to Google, right? And that’s a great example of it. So.
Brandon Burton (16:12.654)
Yeah.
Craig Turner (16:17.409)
So you you don’t want the AI to just take the wheel. We always say you like to have the human have one hand on the wheel. All right. So don’t just pull out an AI, cut and paste it and send. You want to read it, you want to edit it, you want to make sure it’s still in your voice. then you don’t have to worry about those towels.
Brandon Burton (16:34.368)
Right, yeah. And to your point, I think there’s times where it’s OK to have the tells. And when you look at the business community at large, businesses are looking for ways to implement AI. So if they can see that their local chamber, who’s supporting business, is also utilizing and embracing and implementing AI,
I think that’s important. if you’re a chamber out there and you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re using AI, I think you’re probably doing a disservice to your organization. I don’t know if you have similar thoughts.
Craig Turner (17:05.069)
I do, I absolutely do. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, and I hope you will because I’m doing AI tips just about every day, but I use AI images every day. And for me, it was always about stock photos because I always tried to have an image with my post, but stock photos to me were always search for 45 minutes to find a picture that is kind of what I needed, but not exactly. With AI, I can do
Anything I want, can make exactly the picture that I want and add it to my post. But I don’t hide that I’m using AI photos. mean, they’re obviously AI photos. What did I do? What did I do early that they were recording earlier today? I took Brandon’s logo and I had my little robot walk across the front of it. It’s obviously AI. So, and to your point about the chamber and the community showing that they’re using AI, demonstrating some validity in it.
Brandon Burton (17:43.596)
Right.
Craig Turner (18:01.213)
I believe in it I, this, I I’m not going to say I train this. I’m going to say I preach this. Your chamber needs to be front and center on AI because everyone, because it’s so game changing. The last thing you want is. So, you know, a small business, you know, I gave you $250 for the membership. I’m trying to figure out what I get out of that membership. And then the community college or another group down the road holds an AI training for 30 bucks. They go to it.
changes their world. It completely changes their business. And then they start going, why didn’t the chamber give me that information? It is imperative that you take the reins in your community and be the AI for business leadership.
Brandon Burton (18:42.42)
Absolutely. So I know there’s been several ways that I’ve implemented AI into my daily practices and even into the podcast. So before we hit record, I told Craig, I have all the guest share a bio with me that I can use to introduce them on the show. And I’ve created a custom GPT saying, here’s the bio for Craig. And I want you to make this into a podcast introduction. So it’ll kind of massage the introduction and
bring out those key points that are relevant to the podcast.
another one that, so when you talk about time saver, so I think that’s an enhancement, you know, to as far as the bios go, as far as a time saver goes, even the platform that I use to record the podcast on and I’ll, I’ll plug it. It’s called riverside, but I’ve been using it for a couple of months now. And what it does is it seamlessly, it works a lot like zoom as far as what you see on a video call, but for pod
podcast production, it has AI embedded in it all over. So before I would have to record on Zoom, I would have to export that into another program called Audacity, do all the audio balancing, and have to then take it to the hosting site that I had everything to upload the podcast to. And so it was time, each of those things was costing money. And then now with Riverside, I go into it, we’ll have this recording. I already have predefined settings.
So I’m going to go into, you know, a few minutes after this recording is finished and it’s going to have a made for you section that has the video. It has the audio, all the audio balancing is done. I can export it for an audio podcast, a video podcast. It’ll create shorts, you know, short videos for reels and tick tock and things like that. so it’s a, it’s a cost savings and it’s a time savings while enhancing what I’m doing. So it’s, it’s a game.
Brandon Burton (20:46.384)
just to implement AI into our daily activities. So what are some of the big things that you’ve actually implemented there at the Niagara USA Chamber? There’s a couple of things that I’ve seen that you’ve done, but what are some of those things that stand top of mind to you that other chambers could really benefit from?
Craig Turner (21:10.167)
Well, the hallmark is our email newsletter open rate. So I came in and the database is a little bit of a disaster. again, I don’t think we’re abnormal to that. Even before AI, I said, look, I would give presentations and I’d say, once every two years, get an intern to come in and just go through every member in your database and check their contact information. So I came in and we had…
We had about a 34 % open rate on emails, which isn’t, you know, it’s not the end of the world. It’s not bad. It’s industry standard. So I began using AI to do a couple things. One, to clean up the database. So that’s a project that’s still ongoing to the point where it’s going so well that I actually am creating a tool that will, you know, will make available to other chambers at some point. It’s actually close to being done and it’s exciting. But
But using AI to clean up the database, get as close as we can to the right contact person, that foundational piece is so important. again, it was a lesson to me because AI was always like, you would always say, it helped me save two hours. It was always like the metric. helped me save two hours. It helped me save this amount of time. For this project, it…
I changed my talking points. Now I say, I can’t even give you the number of hours. It saved me because I never would have started this project without AI. Right? So the foundation of cleaning the database has, has done a couple things. One, now I know who to send the email to two. Now I know who’s supposed to get the invoice, the renewal invoice in the first place, instead of it just going into the ether. So there was one part of it. Then the second part was
is something that we call audit, which is optimizing your communication. So it’s not just having AI write for you, it’s optimizing. So, and it’s, I use that word purpose, which is very important. So when we do a newsletter or a LinkedIn post, you might say, write me, you know, here’s our event coming up, write me the blurb for this. And people stop there. But what you need to say is we are looking to drive registrations. We are looking to send people to the website. We are looking to have people write a letter to the governor.
Craig Turner (23:33.166)
What is your purpose for doing that? And that’s going to enhance the way that the copy comes out and what you’re going to put in your newsletter. The other thing with the newsletters is, and this is where AI comes in very handy again, a lot of this is, you know, a lot of it is people don’t feel like they’re, you know, a lot of the opposition is I don’t want to turn all these things over to AI. I’m turning things over to a computer. You’re not.
What you’re doing is now you have access to all of the knowledge that’s on the internet at the same time instead of having to figure out how to ask for it yourself. What I always say is when it comes to LinkedIn, Facebook, Axe, emails, AI knows more about the algorithms than you do. So, spam email. You can write the most beautiful, prettiest, you can have your list cleaned up, you can write the most beautiful newsletter if there are triggers that spam filters go for.
Alright and they’re not always seen especially for chambers so exclamation points. If you have exclamation points throughout your newsletter it’s going to the spam for the tougher spam filters are going to are going to pick it up. Chamber of Commerce how about this free free event the word free will trigger your spams filters alright so you want to do your events at no cost to members.
complimentary to members. Don’t use the word free because it’s going to get that. So by cleaning up the database and optimizing the newsletters and the LinkedIn posts to hit the algorithms the right way, we’re averaging around 55 % open rate right now. Which again, is a number on paper. Here’s the thing that happens in real life.
We just had our launch yesterday. I know we’re releasing this in November, but yesterday we had one of our launches and it’s the third out of the last four that we had to close registration because we were sold out. All right. So why are we selling out? Because people now are opening the newsletters and claiming that we’re actually having an event so they can come to it. So this is where you take the…
Brandon Burton (25:35.394)
They’re saying, how come the chamber never emailed me before?
Craig Turner (25:38.542)
Yeah, how could they never email? Weren’t they doing anything before? And the bars in the community about what we’re doing is hot right now, which is excellent. So that AI work, behind the scenes and then out front, and then it was less about time savings and more about let’s make this work. And again, you build a relationship with your chat GPT, but I’ve told chat GPT every time I…
newsletter I’m like I want this one to hit 60 % like that’s my goal is there 60 so we’ve got enough to 57 % on one of our newsletters I want 60 so I’m gonna keep working on these things keep optimizing but that’s kind of a that’s kind of the hallmark thing that we’ve been able to to go to I will the other one I’ll say small business expo the event we have our second one coming up shortly last year the entire event was designed by AI I didn’t tell anybody that until that day
until the day of the event, but the event started with me saying, opening ChatGPT and saying, I want to put on a small business expo, right? Built the whole thing on AI, implemented it, got it all ready to go. All the advertising was AI. I did it intentionally to see if we could do it, but, and then that day I revealed to everybody, hey, everything that you’re seeing around you today was built by AI. so those are, yeah, so those are two real good examples of, of,
Brandon Burton (26:56.748)
and made it real. Yeah.
Craig Turner (27:03.231)
of what we’re doing, but I say it often, there’s no way I could run my company and a chamber at the same time without AI. It just couldn’t happen. So five years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to take this role, but now we can do it and we’re getting some real good stuff done. And my goal is to, with the chamber, again, I’m an interim when I pass it off and when we hire the second person,
We want to have AI taking care of a lot of the admin stuff and things like that so that when we do hire somebody again, we can focus on business development. You know, we don’t need somebody sitting at the front desk doing data entry. We want to focus on somebody out there talking to members and that’s the goal here. That’s the real world goal here is I was talking about repurposed it there. So I use the AI to write my social media and only takes me 15 minutes instead of an hour and a half. Well, what are you doing with that time that you just recaptured?
Are you using it to generate revenue or are you standing at the water cooler talking about the football game? You need to have that strategy intact that if I save time here, that’s going to go into revenue generation. And that goes for businesses too. Same thing, same thing.
Brandon Burton (28:03.926)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (28:14.796)
Yeah. So your thoughts on the prompt for expressing what the purpose is, like specifically with this newsletter and the purpose to drive registration. That brings up the next question that I had on my mind is the quality of the prompts that you give to the AI model versus the limits of what AI can do. I know I’ve had ideas and I’ve tried to get AI to do something and
Craig Turner (28:34.807)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon Burton (28:45.481)
And sometimes I think maybe I need a better quality prompt. And sometimes I think maybe this is beyond the limits of what this AI model can do at the moment. So can you help us navigate that between the limits of AI and the quality of the prompts?
Craig Turner (29:03.351)
Sure, sure, absolutely. I will tell you what’s one of the funny things is, well people will, you know, when I do my training sometimes and I’ll make a point of it, my prompt sometimes is longer than the response I get because I know exactly what I want. And what’s neat, if you haven’t played with video yet, Sora came out and Grok has a great video and now Google just yesterday came out with their, you know, their enhanced video. The video will really teach you how to prompt because it picks up on every little word and it…
you if you want it to be right, you got to kind of have it the way you need it. But let me talk about the limits first, and then I’ll go into the prompts. So when I do the conferences, whether it’s a chamber conference or something else, a lot of the times, again, it’s not me, but it’s AI, because AI is such a hot topic, the conference organizers will put me first. All right. Start with a bang, know, start with AI, you know, crazy. For the rest of the conference. Yes.
Brandon Burton (29:57.09)
gets people there on time.
Craig Turner (30:00.044)
Yeah, some people sometimes they put me at the end so that people don’t leave in the morning. You know, it’s kind of it’s a strategy. I get it. But some if I go first for the rest of the conference, anything that comes up, anything, someone will make the joke and slap me on the arms. Hey, Craig, can I do that? And my answer is always it can. I mean, depends on what you want to pay to do it. I mean, your chat, you may be able to do it. So there’s like a there’s like a hierarchy, you know.
Brandon Burton (30:03.849)
Stay. Yeah.
Craig Turner (30:28.045)
And most of us, can sit in front of our chat GBT and do all kinds of great stuff. You talked about creating a GPT. That’s the next step where you’re creating an automation that kind of 30, 40, 50 % of the work is already done. All you have to do is input the data. From there, you kind of have to move into actual programming. And you could do all the things, but the key to AI is the data that you’re putting into it. And if you don’t have the data, you have to get the data.
So programming will start to do that and we’ve got you should see I got code all over my screens here now but so the limits are Murky, I mean you can really kind of do almost anything you want Which is which is very cool. And sometimes you just go to your change of routines. I want to do this and see what happens The prompt yes, is the prompt, you know taking the prompt to
to make it do what you want to do is a skill. I mean, there’s a reason people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this stuff, working for bigger companies, is because there is a skill to it. But I always talk about it’s the, know, for chamber people, give them, I think people know the what. I need a blog about community service. They know the how. I want it to be a thousand words and have a tone, you know, written for busy professional, busy small business people.
But the why is the big thing is why am I doing this? What am I trying to accomplish here? The neat thing about AI is you don’t have to restate your question. can say, no, I really wanted it to do this. I really wanted to do this. Change this sentence for me. But, you know, so you can get to that perfect prompt eventually, but people don’t. I mean, that’s what they’re trying to encourage them to do. But that first prompt is this is what, you know, is going to set you on the right course.
One little trick that you can actually do is you can ask your AI, whichever platform you use, to write the prompt for you. Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish in real life. Can you write the prompt for me to do that? What I like, I’m a chat GBT guy and the thing I like about chat GBT is the voice. I’m constantly talking to chat GBT. This is how I spend my time in the car on road trips, doing all strategy and whatever the case may be.
Craig Turner (32:52.129)
is with the voice, you can just brain dump. This is what I want to accomplish. Just ramble, complain, do whatever you got to do, put it in there and then say, write me the prompt to get me where I need to be. And you’ll be so far ahead just because again, like I said, the data is the most important point. Complaining to your AI is data. You’re giving it data and complaining sometimes is the best kind of data because you’re using all the keywords and you just rant and you just keep going. And then you ask for the
Summary of what you said and and it’ll do it so so that’s a little trick is if you’re you know to make your prompt better You can ask AI to write it the other thing you can do is if you aren’t even sure you know You know you have to get something done. You aren’t sure you tell AI Interview me ask me questions ask me questions. We got it. Here’s where I’m trying to get I don’t know where to start ask me questions to pull everything out of my brain And then we’re gonna write the prompt after that so there’s a couple there’s a couple different ways you can
you can get at it to strengthen your props. Somebody at one of the chambers the other day said, cause I did a sprint. I do a lot of the trainings, which are an hour long training and they’ve been everything from, you know, one-on-one to advanced trainings. But I did a sprint lately, which was two weeks intensive, three sessions. And it was focused on automations.
Automations, GPTs and projects. One session of each. And the goal was, it wasn’t about me giving you a prompt and showing you how it works on a screen. It was me giving you a prompt that you can customize to your own chamber of commerce. I’m sorry, it wasn’t chamber, it was small businesses. It was small businesses, but it’s integration. What we did was we got 10 chambers to send us 10 companies each. It worked very well, but it was about integration because so many times people go to these one hour trainings, they leave.
They opened their email, they got 35 emails, they get busy. I see them six months later and they’re like, oh, I loved your training, but I just haven’t gotten to it. So the sprint was designed to take you to the next level. Look, while you’re sitting here in front of me, you’re going to integrate it into your, into your business. And it worked really well. It was, it was, it was an exercise, but it worked. It worked really, really well.
Brandon Burton (35:07.086)
That’s a great idea. So you mentioned that the GPTs are kind of the next level after prompting and then coding after that. Were you a coder before you had access to AI?
Craig Turner (35:19.831)
So I’m one of these guys that has an interest in coding. So back in the 80s, I learned how to use a couple of different coding things. And I would just play with it. So I learned how to use the periodic table back in the 80s for chemistry class by coding myself a quiz. And I just quizzed myself on all the elements and everything. So yeah, nerdy. So when I started
Brandon Burton (35:40.705)
Okay.
Craig Turner (35:46.37)
doing all the training and everything. went back to this whole thing, this relationship between the, the chamber and its members. And I’m like, okay, we’re doing well, but it’s me driving around the country, doing all this stuff. said, I need to figure out a way to scale this. So I started to, look at that and I created what’s called member boost AI, which is a, a platform where, where members chamber member chamber subscribes.
Members can go onto the onto the platform, enter some information about themselves. And when they hit submit, they get a customized strategy on how to use that their membership, how to best use and get ROI from their membership with that chamber, not just any chamber. I’ve got it trained on the chamber. I got it trained on the chamber to the point where it says. It doesn’t say go to a business after five event. It says go to the business after five event on November 14th and, and,
Brandon Burton (36:27.47)
okay.
Craig Turner (36:41.165)
You know, gives you elevator pitch. gives you all kinds of stuff. It’s, it’s, it’s actually very cool, but it’s what, it’s what I do in real. It’s what I do in real life, but now it’s automated into AI. So more, more chambers can do it. But I tell you that because when I started that project, um, I told a colleague of mine, said, I think I can code 90 % of it. And then I need to, uh, probably get some, some help after that. I blew right through it with, with, you know, AI coding capabilities, as long as you understand the logic.
Brandon Burton (37:09.432)
Yeah.
Craig Turner (37:11.047)
it, yeah, you, can get everything done and it turned out very well, but now I’m, now I’m out of control. get it. have a new idea every, every other day. I’m like, so the, the Gen Z years have come up with a phrase called vibe coding, which I love vibe coding. have an idea. I sit down and I code it. I’m actually, I’m actually going to teach that at our small business expo, in November. just a little 15 minute session on vibe coding, but like I teach my kids to try to do it too. I’m like,
Brandon Burton (37:23.756)
Yeah, yeah.
Craig Turner (37:39.618)
I’m like, this is going to be an important skill. again, starting with AI, we’re not trying to put a man on Mars. We’re not trying to cure cancer. Make me, know, code me something that will roll a pair of dice for me. All right. And just put it up there. Just code it. See how it comes up and see what, you know, see, and then you build off of that. So I, I’ll tell you, I coded a, I did for LinkedIn just for some content. I needed some content. I was thinking about over the weekend. This is, I don’t know, back in May or so.
Brandon Burton (37:58.412)
Yeah.
Craig Turner (38:09.837)
I’m like, okay, I’m gonna give myself a challenge. I want to code a five question trivia quiz and I want it to be graphical so I have it look like it’s on an iPhone and it came out and I did Chamber of Commerce trivia. All right. I put it up on LinkedIn and I wanted to I wanted it to say, okay, you got three out of five, correct? But I said I want to do the whole thing in less than ten minutes. That’s my goal for this thing. So I vibe coded this thing.
It was great content. got so many views. People were emailing me and saying, I only got three out of five. I guess I need to learn my chambers of commerce. But then I didn’t do anything with it. So a couple of weeks ago, I’m on a hike talking to Chet Chibuti in my ears. And I’m like, OK, I need something like just a wow people with some of these chamber leaders. And I’m going back and forth. Chet Chibuti is giving me ideas. And I’m like, no, that takes too much time. No, it’s not personalized enough.
And Chatchabeechee actually said to me, what about that trivia quiz? And I’m like, well, what about it? He said, well, you can repurpose that platform. I’m like, my goodness. So I have this thing. It’s done. I keep pointing at my screen. It’s right here. It’s done. It’s ready to go. And it’s going to roll out probably before this podcast is aired. But I’m excited about it. It was an experiment. that’s what happens. You do one thing.
And then you’re like, well, if I could do that, then I could do this. Oh, then I could do this. Then I could do that. And next thing you know, you’re deep into code. But it’s exciting.
Brandon Burton (39:38.444)
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and I know, I mean, I don’t have the coding background, but as I’ve come across different projects and trying to implement different automations and it’ll, it’ll walk you through step by step with like a Google app script or something like that, or just basic coding that you could embed into a custom GPT and things like that. So,
Craig Turner (40:01.134)
Yeah. When you’re, and you’re right about GPT’s, GPT’s are such a powerful, powerful tool because you really can, you can build what you want using natural language and you don’t have to, you don’t have to know anything about coding. I created one when I started this, I said, what is the, you know, okay, so we’re entrepreneurs. We want to solve problems. What is the biggest pain in the butt thing for a chamber, for chamber staff meeting minutes?
So I created a GPT that does all you have to You can actually take a picture of your notes, put it in, and it’ll write the meeting minutes for you. And the GPT store gives you stats, and that one’s just been used so much because it’s so easy. We hit on it. And that’s free. It’s in the GPT store. free. And it’ll save you all the headache of meeting minutes, which is the absolute worst thing ever.
Brandon Burton (40:52.59)
That’s right. Well, Craig, before I let you go, our time has gone super fast as it does. But I always like to get a good tip or action item for listeners who want to take their organization up to the next level. What would you suggest for those listening?
Craig Turner (40:59.466)
It does, it does.
Craig Turner (41:10.061)
I’m going to say, and I’ll simplify what we normally say, is use AI with purpose. Find a reason that you’re using it and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Find a task, and this is something you could do today. Find a task that you have to do. You can’t avoid as a chamber of commerce, and there are lots of them, we know, and see if you can get AI to get rid of 50 % of that task for you.
Automate some of it whether it’s meeting minutes or whether it’s member outreaches or whatever the case may be Keep the human involved but try take one task and try and see if you can get AI to get to do 50 % of the work for you And you’ll be you’ll be well if you can do that. You’ll be well on your way
Brandon Burton (41:52.11)
It’s a great challenge. So hopefully everybody’s listening and saying challenge accepted, you know, try it out. Well, Craig, I always like asking everyone I have on the show about the future of Chambers. How do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?
Craig Turner (41:53.825)
Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Turner (42:09.099)
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. The main thing that I see, again, we’ve kind of dedicated ourselves to using AI to do it, is I feel like chambers are going to need to have a more intimate relationship with their members going forward. I think the chambers that do that are the ones that are going to be the strongest, because in the end, the…
You know, the competition, your competition as a chamber for that $250 membership or the $10,000 sponsorship is not the chamber in the next town. It’s every other group out there that says, if you give me a dollar, I can help you grow your business. So it’s the networking tip clubs. It’s the manufacturers group. It’s a, you got AI groups popping up all over the place. it’s social media. It’s any of those organizations that can.
Brandon Burton (42:55.128)
social media.
Craig Turner (43:00.353)
that can do that and in the end you think about what would one of the bread and butter for chambers was always education. But you know what I don’t need to take 90 minutes out of my day because I can go to Chetch EBT and get all the information I need right there. So it’s that intimate relationship with your members again even the small business members who come and go that you know okay so I know what you need and we have a team of people here to help you do it.
I always call it the bad phone. That’s what I tell every member at our chamber in Niagara USA is you have a sun speed dial because there’s going to be something that crosses your desk this month that you’ve never seen before. And we have five, almost 500 other members who have seen it already. So don’t waste your time trying to figure it out yourself. Just call us. We’ll connect you with somebody who’s, who’s already seen it. But I think that’s going to be, I think that’s going to be important is, is that knowledge and this data driven economy, knowledge of your members.
what they need, what makes them tick, so that you are always in a position to take care of them. Because that’s something a chamber can offer that a lot of those other groups can’t.
Brandon Burton (44:04.43)
That’s right. Good advice. Well, Craig, where do you want to point any listeners to that might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about Momentum and the services you offer? Where would you point them?
Craig Turner (44:16.471)
So I’ll give you two. So MomentumHub.ai is our website and that’s got everything. And it’s separated into chambers and businesses, but actually there’s some tools on there that people might really like. There’s an FAQ on how can I use AI for membership? How can I use AI for renewals? So there’s a drop down there with an FAQ. The other thing I just recently put on there are member-ready blogs on AI.
So they’re right there. You can take them, can give them to your members, you can post them. You know, we just have a little disclaimer at the end, just say it was ours, but you can post it as your own content. We’re excited about that because again, like I said earlier, I believe so much that Chambers need to be front and center on this. We’re going to give you everything you need to do that. The other thing is LinkedIn. I’m super active on LinkedIn, as you mentioned a few times today. And my LinkedIn is usually 50 % Chambers, 50 % AI and then whatever else I feel like talking about, it’s usually chamber and AI related. I appreciate that. I will say, I just one quick story real quick. So Chad GPT told me that, cause I’m big on LinkedIn and I’m talking to you, how do we grow as a tech company? And at Chat GPT said you have to be on X. So I started an X account and I went over there and I’m
Brandon Burton (45:19.278)
He’s got cool stuff on LinkedIn though, so check him out, follow him. Yeah. Yep.
Craig Turner (45:42.355)
I mean engaging and getting in with people and man that those are the techies those are the that’ll be intimidating so let’s just say that I’m taking the intimidating techie stuff from X and that’s the kind of stuff that goes on my LinkedIn in a more palatable version for people.
Brandon Burton (45:59.086)
Thanks for making it simpler for us. I appreciate it. Yeah. Right.
Craig Turner (46:02.689)
Yeah, yeah, wow. My head was spinning when I went over there.
Brandon Burton (46:07.81)
Well, Craig, this has been fun having you back on the podcast. We may need to make this a more regular thing to have you on and share what’s the latest thing in AI and just help keep chambers up to speed so they can keep their member businesses up to speed and help the business community overall throughout this country. So thank you for sharing your insights and knowledge with us today.
Craig Turner (46:11.373)
That’s good.
Craig Turner (46:25.792)
Absolutely.
Craig Turner (46:29.601)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts, Spotify or now on YouTube. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your feed each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.
