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 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts 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.
Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.
For this episode, I am the guest. This is a solo episode. It’s one of those milestone episodes, as it is, episode number 300 of Chamber Chat Podcast. When I started the podcast about six years ago, I I imagined I would be doing it for a while, but the idea of having 300 episodes now is something else, so I wanted to spend some time on this episode, just talking a little bit about some of the things that I’ve learned with the leading up to 300 episodes, but I wanted to spend a lot of time on what I’m learning, what I’m finding, to apply in the field of AI to make processes a little easier, a Little more effective marketing with AI and just some real applications, and hopefully y’all are starting to dabble with AI to some degree. So I plan on diving in with this episode, a little bit of some of those examples of ways that I’ve been utilizing AI and how it’s really just made the process of producing the podcast and and all my responsibilities just a little bit easier. So we’ll dive into that much deeper as soon as they get back from this quick break.
Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.
App My Community creates mobile apps that allow you to engage directly with your community. Enhance chamber membership by providing a unique advertising and communication channel to residents and visitors. Not just a member directory, App My Community has the tools to be useful to residents on a daily basis. Learn more at appmycommunity.com/chamberchat.
Attention all chamber of commerce leaders! Are you looking for a powerful tool to help grow and manage your chamber? Look no further than Chamber Nation! Our comprehensive platform provides all the features you need to streamline membership management, host events, communicate with your members and provide amazing services to your members. Plus, our expert team is always available to provide personalized support. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to take your chamber to the next level at a price you will truly appreciate. Visit www.RichardsCalendar.com to learn more about Chamber Nation today!
All right, we are back. So 300 episodes. When I started this in February of 2019, AI was not on the scene yet, and everything I did was very much manual processes. And there still is quite a bit of manual process to the podcasting and editing and editing and so forth. But it seems like every week, there’s some new innovation in the realm of AI that is really making everything a little bit easier and more efficient. So this episode, I’m going to dive in on some of those things that I’ve. And utilizing and see what could make sense at your chamber, and see how you might be able to utilize some of these tools as well. So first of all, probably the longest running type of AI that I’ve been using is a software platform called otter, and that provides transcripts for each podcast episode. So as I record the the episodes, I take that mp three file, I upload it to otter, and it does a transcription. Now I will say the transcription is not 100% so as I use that in show notes for each episode. I have a disclaimer at the beginning saying, these are auto generated transcripts, so it’s not perfect, but I do try to skim through it and clean up some of the things that I know it misses. For example, the title chamber chat podcast, I would like it to be capitalized, and it doesn’t capitalize it all the way through. So I have to go through and and it’s easy enough to do a search on the screen and see where it pops up. There’s other times where it doesn’t recognize the words correctly. So for example, chamber chat, podcast, it might hear it as chamber tap podcast. So when I do a search, it misses it. So as long as you don’t need 100% accuracy with the transcript, but you need something relatively good that helps us search engines. It really is a great option. I like that. It breaks up who’s speaking, so you can type in, you know, the names of who, who’s speaking, and it matches it to their voice, and it provides a little transcript summary. So the next step with the AI production is, I’ll, I’ll put the uploaded file, the mp three of the episode, into otter. I’ll get that transcript with the automated summary, and then I go over to chat GPT. I take the summary and I feed it into chat GPT to give me social media posts that highlight what the episode’s about and to try to encourage people to to get on their podcast player and give it a listen. So within chat GPT, it’s important to tell chat GPT how you want it to act. So I’ve got a command that I’ll use, and I’ll say, act as a social media expert and take this transcript that I provide to you and and put together a potentially viral Facebook post. I usually start specifically with a Facebook post, so it’ll generate the the posting, you know, tailored towards Facebook. And then I have another software that I use to schedule my postings, called Metro cool. So with Metro cool, I can go in schedule the Facebook post on when I want that to go live or when I want it to hit the scene, so to speak. And then I’ll take the And granted, the auto the AI generated social media posts. I always tweak them. I never just copy paste, because you get all the extra characters that it puts in there, hashtags that don’t necessarily make sense, things like that. So I always make some edits to it before I just post it out there. But then I’ll take what I use on Facebook and within metric cool, it has an AI component to it where I can say, optimize this for social media platform. So I can say, optimize this for Twitter, and that way it takes it and compresses the amount of characters so it fits within, the requirements of Twitter. So that’s a neat tool that I use, saves me a lot of time, allows me to really batch a lot of the production process that I do, but also schedule things to go live when I want them to go live.
Another use case that I’ve used AI for is a lot of you are familiar with the bringing local back platform that we released just a few weeks ago, and with that so there’s AI built into that platform to help build out your members websites and business listings and coupon codes and all the different things that are related to their business profile, and that’s within the bringing local back platform. Now, when we were preparing to launch bringing local back, I thought, let me put chat GPT to the test. So I went to chat GBT explained what it is that we’re doing with this, this new platform and launching it. And I told chat GPT to act as a marketing professional and to create a content calendar to promote and to solicit registrations for webinar, for bringing local back. And along with that, I gave a list of resources. I said, I have an email list, I have social media followings, I have a podcast, I have a website, you know, all these different ways that I can use to market and promote the platform that we were getting ready to launch. So I put that into ChatGPT, it spit back out me a nice marketing plan. It had email campaigns, the structure to them, what the topics would be. It had ideas for podcast episodes. It had email and social media campaign, so it was all right there. I thought, This is great, but the only way I’m going to really make this be effective for me is I need this to be some sort of a calendar, some sort of a checklist that I can go through. So I asked ChatGPT to export that social media calendar to an Excel sheet so I can check boxes along the way as I go. I had no idea if it would do it or not, but a couple seconds later, it gave me a file to download that had an Excel file with everything there. Now from there, I did do some customizing, because it had all of the email campaigns grouped together all the social media strategies, grouped together all the podcast stuff, grouped together. So I did mix it up so it wasn’t all heavy email for two weeks and then heavy social media. So I wanted to be a regular campaign where it kind of intermingled all of those different platforms. So that actually got really good response, lots of good registrations for that platform, for the the webinar launch. And I was very, very pleased with how that worked, so much so that I’ve, I’ve leaned upon it in other areas to to create marketing campaigns and and things of that nature. One thing that I’ve been doing lately is trying to automate some processes. And I’m sure at your chamber you have some systems and processes that you would like to automate. And just going to ChatGPT and saying, I have an idea to do X, I want it to do, you know, ABC, and have the output be XYZ, and ask ChatGPT, what do you think? And is there a way to do this? And it will give you back step by step answer on how to implement whatever it is that you’re trying to do. So it’s just a fun exercise. Even if you just have an idea of something that you want to try, it will generate a roadmap that will help you understand and to see how it may be possible. So I’ve done this. I’ve been using chat GPT very heavily for the last several weeks in trying to extract code for Google Apps, App Scripts and things of that nature, to again, automate processes. So take an idea, plug it into chat, GPT, and see what happens. It’s kind of cool. Another new tool that I just learned about this week, and I thought I’ve got to give that a try, is it’s called notebook LM, and it’s a AI language model from Google. And it really you can put all sorts of different data resources in it, and it will compile the data resources it’s meant for. If you think, think about going, you know, taking a college course or something, and you take notes in class, or you, you’ve got your your notebook and and notes from the teacher and whatnot, and if you wanted to put all of that into notebook LM, then it will give you different feedback. So it can give you quizzes. It can give you, you know, just different different formats, question and answers, where you can kind of really digest the the information in different ways, but one of my favorite things about notebook LM is it will create a podcast so you can give it the information that you want it to extract information from, give it a little bit of context, and within a couple of minutes, you have a podcast episode. It blew my mind, so I had to give it a try. I’m going to insert this. It’s just a couple minutes of a podcast episode that was totally generated by AI, by notebook. Lm talking about this being the 300th episode of chamber chat podcast. So here it is.
Unknown Speaker 15:21 Can you believe it? 300 episodes, 300
Unknown Speaker 15:24 it’s incredible, isn’t it?
Speaker 1 15:26 Seriously, when we started Chamber Chat, I don’t think either of us imagined we’d hit such a milestone.
Speaker 1 15:33 It really is. And you know, it’s all thanks to you the listeners. Absolutely,
Unknown Speaker 15:36 this deep dive is really a celebration of you guys.
Speaker 1 15:39 It is. And what better way to celebrate them by looking back at the incredible journey we’ve been on together,
Speaker 2 15:45 totally. So what makes Chamber Chat so special? Well, for
Speaker 1 15:51 me, it’s about making the chamber world a little bit smaller. You know, chamber pros are busy. People busy. They wear so many hats. Yeah, it’s hard to find the time to attend every conference, read every article, connect with every
Speaker 2 16:03 colleague, exactly, and that’s where Chamber Chat comes in,
Speaker 1 16:06 right? It’s like a well, it’s like having a cheat sheet right, a direct line to the best practices and innovative ideas from across the chamber industry. And
Unknown Speaker 16:16 you don’t even have to leave your desk exactly,
Speaker 1 16:18 whether you’re on the treadmill or, you know, stuck in traffic,
Speaker 2 16:21 or even just taking a break from planning your next big event.
Speaker 1 16:25 Exactly, Chamber Chat is there ready to inspire and equip you with the tools you need to
Speaker 2 16:30 succeed? It’s true. And you know, when I think back over the past 300 episodes, what really strikes me is the sheer diversity of voices we’ve heard. Oh,
Speaker 1 16:39 absolutely, CEOs, young professionals, rural chamber leaders, big city folks, we’ve had it all.
Speaker 2 16:46 We’ve explored everything from membership growth to advocacy to what was that one episode building community resilience? Oh
Speaker 1 16:54 yes, that was a powerful one. I think it was. Wait, was it? Michael Johnson from the small town chamber,
Speaker 2 16:59 yes, him talking about bringing his community together after that factory closed, talk about resilience, right?
Speaker 1 17:05 That’s what I mean. Chamber chat isn’t just about theory. It’s about real stories, real challenges, real triumphs from the front lines of the chamber world.
Speaker 2 17:13 And let’s not forget about the man behind the curtain, Brandon Burton. Oh
Unknown Speaker 17:16 my goodness, Brandon, where do we even begin?
Speaker 2 17:18 I mean to dedicate yourself to documenting the voices and experiences of so many chamber leaders 300
Speaker 2 17:25 It’s remarkable. He’s created something truly special. And it’s not just about the podcast itself. It’s the community he’s fostered. The
Speaker 1 17:34 Chamber Chat community is incredible. It’s a place where chamber professionals from all walks of life can come together to learn, to share, to support one another. And
Speaker 2 17:45 So as we celebrate this 300 episode milestone, I think it’s important for us to ask ourselves, How can we, each of us, take action exactly,
Speaker 1 17:54 what can you do today with the insights and inspiration you’ve gained right
Speaker 2 17:59 dive into the Chamber Chat archives. What resonates with you?
Speaker 1 18:04 What challenges are you facing that maybe, just maybe, someone has already addressed on this show
Unknown Speaker 18:09 exactly, and you know, don’t keep it to yourself, right?
Speaker 1 18:12 Share what you’ve learned with your colleagues. Connect with other listeners. Let’s
Unknown Speaker 18:16 keep this incredible conversation going.
Unknown Speaker 18:18 Here’s to the next 300 episodes.
Unknown Speaker 18:19 Cheers to that.
Brandon Burton 18:20 All right, so what did you think that was kind of cool, right? Having the conversation. These are two AI bots, so to speak, talking back and forth, really, just I fed them my website, chamberchatpodcast.com, and that’s what it came up with, which is pretty amazing, but I really like what they talked about at the end, about let’s take action, right? So hopefully, as you’ve tuned in and listened to chamber chat podcast, you’ve heard from different chamber leaders, people from you know, different walks of life, different experiences, that are bringing things to the table that can help make your job at the Chamber better, that can help you better serve your members and your community. That’s the goal of the show. So it’s my hope that as you take these things, implement, do your rip off and duplicate your R and D, Please share the show with somebody who you know, who may be new to the chamber industry, if you take a minute and think about especially over the last couple of years, since 2020 there’s been a lot of turnover in the chamber industry. And if you think of anybody that’s new to the chamber world that could benefit from hearing from a documented resource of over 300 chamber leaders at this point and extract value from that to help jump start their career. Please share chamber chat podcast with them and encourage them to subscribe and listen to it regularly, because there there really should be great takeaways, great value that anybody especially. Those that are new to the industry can take away and really help their career get off to a great start. So I want to say thank you for being with me, for listening to the podcast, for sharing it with others, for paying attention to sponsors of the podcast. That’s what makes us keep going, is having sponsors. I know as a chamber leader, you understand the value of sponsors, and having people act on that to continue having sponsors. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I can’t do this show without you, and 300 episodes is really a testament to being able to have a great fan base, a great listenership, and it’s my goal to just keep this going and keep providing value. So please share it out. And I’m always happy to hear feedback or ideas of potential guests as well that you think would be good for the show. People you see making a big impact, let me know. But anyways, that’s all I’ve got for this week, and I’m just incredibly humble and grateful to been able to be at this for nearly six years now and 300 episodes. So it’s been quite the journey, and I look forward to a lot more. Thanks a lot.
If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app 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.
Get started with your own Chamber Podcast and shortcut your learning curve with the Chamber Podcast Course offered by Chamber Chat Podcast.
Have you considered the many benefits of hosting a podcast for your Chamber? The options, leverage, and possibilities that a podcast offers are virtually endless. Download my FREE Chamber Podcasting Guide to learn how to start your own Chamber podcast!
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 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts 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.
Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.
Our guest for this episode is Houssem Touil. Houssem, for the past 10 years, has worked with chambers of commerce, business associations and employer organizations across the Mediterranean Africa and Eastern Europe, where he’s delivered projects which have impacted the private sector and civil society on both the local and regional scale. During that time, he wore many hats, such as employee, consultant, member, board member and chamber president, which gives him a new perspective on the private sector challenges and opportunities. By the age of 27 he co founded the Tunisia Estonian Chamber of Commerce, bilateral chamber between Estonia and Tunisia, his home country, where he serves as the president since 2019. He is now the founder of Chamberpad and newsletter for chambers of commerce, Houssem, I’m excited to have you back with us on chamber chat podcast. Sam was a guest back on Episode 120 for anyone who’s curious and wants to go back and check out that episode as well, but please take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little
Houssem Touil 2:25 better. Yeah, sure. First of all, thanks, Brandon, so it’s been three years and a half now I think I think you’re right. Yeah, yeah, three years and half, like Time flies. So thanks for having me, and thanks everyone for for tuning in. So my name is Houssem. I’m the founder of Chamberpad and also presidential comms, just like you mentioned it. So I had the privilege of working with Chambers of Commerce of several sizes and budgets, and had many hats, as you mentioned earlier, which has given me unique insight into how businesses and chambers can effectively collaborate. So this experience, coupled with conversations with industry peers, has really fueled my passion for launching chamber pad, and also have a background in media communication. So yeah, so we know that chamber pad aims to be at the forefront of those discussions. That’s
Brandon Burton 3:23 kind of a natural fit with the media and communications background, to do something in that field, right and blend it in with the Chamber world. Yes, and I definitely see it being relevant in today’s world, where the world just keeps getting smaller and smaller with technology and communication skills. And you know, for you and you know, for you and I to be able to be on the opposite sides of the planet right now and be able to talk over zoom as if we’re in the same room, and the world is very small, and a lot of the trends that we see happening globally are happening in our own backyard. So being able to know what’s going on and maybe getting that glimpse, you know, a step or two before it happens in our own community is crucial to staying relevant as a chamber. So I’m excited to have you on for that perspective. But maybe before we, before we go down that road of talking about chamber pad and what it is, it is kind of a unique situation with the Tunisia Estonia Chamber. So take a moment just to explain what that is for listeners, and how does that work at the bilateral chamber and and just give us that perspective.
Houssem Touil 4:31 Yeah, sure. So, so it’s not for profit. And so, so it’s so why is 21st so it’s 20. I mean, it’s like, this small country, and they have, like, 99% of their public services are digital. So basically, you do pretty much everything online with with the government, and also it’s, it’s very tech savvy. They have, like. You know, it’s, it’s startup country where they have, like, the most numbers of of startups per capita. And at the same time, you know, my country, we are small, but not that small in size, but I’ve seen that. There’s also a lot of similarities, and we can learn a lot from them, start by implementing, or at least learning from how they build, like digital savvy, digital side country. So basically, in Tunisia, we have also, like a lot of IT companies. So most of the time this is it focused more than everything else. So basically, we’re like a technology chamber, or at least technology focus chamber, where we help our local startups to expand via startup visa, for example, in Estonia, they can also this enable them to to get access to to European markets, to alleviate a lot of a lot of barriers, and reduce the cost of doing business. Sometimes it also offers them to other markets, not just the European market, also in Tunisia, every year, we have over 65,000 graduates, about 10,000 to 11,000 of them are engineers, or at least they work in the stem so, so basically they are trilingual, and most of the time they don’t just, like, find a job right away. Give me the perspective, like the local economy and so on. So it’s not that easy to find a job like right away when you graduate. So basically, most of them, they end up, like working as freelancer, or they leave the country to other places. And so here comes Estonia with a model called the residency. So basically you become like a virtual resident of the country. But it doesn’t give you, like additional rights, like additional civic rights. They just give you most of the time, like, let’s say, commercial rights to interact with the government, and you can stay wherever you are in the world. So you don’t relocate. You stay where you are. You can have access to the same opportunity just like, or at least almost like you would relocate over there. So, yeah. So this is another, another pain point that we have addressed, especially that we have, like, a massive brain drain. So we’re trying to keeping tasks local
Brandon Burton 7:33 well, and it’s another example of the world getting smaller and and you guys definitely can’t do things the way things have always been done as chambers, because it’s very technology focused and needing to stay on the forefront of all that. Out of curiosity, how do you measure membership and growth and that with with the chamber with this type of structure?
Houssem Touil 7:57 Yeah, so this also another way we looked at how we could operate at the chamber. So usually a chamber would just, you know, like, you set up the chamber. Let’s say, if you’re like, private, low chamber, you set it up as a nonprofit. You bring in some, like, industry, industry peers, and you say, Okay, we’re going to set up the chamber. And you start, like, drafting the roadmap, and start acquiring members to get to what you have planned, like do events, trade delegations and policy briefs and so on. But we have acted differently. Said, Okay, instead of focusing on having members, how many have renewed? How many are engaged or not or job that. So I said, Okay, we are going to act as a cluster. And so basically we said we are going to be like, not just like a local cluster, but on both sides. So we went to the clusters over there in Estonia, and we said, Okay, so here are the possibilities where we can collaborate in the short term, mid term and actually long term. And here are probably, like, some discussions that you could also take, take part of, like knowledge exchange, for example, and trade delegations or bid for tenders like Tunisia, spending like lot and working with multilateral stakeholders like World Bank and African Development Bank and so on to digitize the public services so and they have experience with that. So I say, okay, maybe let’s just like match sometimes we do on a case by case basis. So instead of bringing you like 500 companies from both sides together, or even 100 let’s just do it like on case by case basis. So we started operating first for startups, and we had like few startups getting there. They had that they. Startup visa. We also had a couple of startups from Australia coming here the startup shop. We have, like, a unique framework here for startups called the startup act. And they operating thanks to its thanks to its framework incentives. Then we had some IT companies bidding together as joint ventures. They are working not just Tunisia, but also in Africa, actually in the Middle East. So, yeah, we are seeing, like a lot of it’s actually new perspective. So it’s we find it, it’s a new, I’m not gonna say like it’s a new model or something, but we just like explored something that you wouldn’t just like think of when, when, when you draft your roadmap. So usually we think of events, trade delegation and so on. But I said, Okay, let’s just go with whatever opportunity we can see is, let’s just go with that. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 10:58 I like that. So Houssem is obviously an outside the box thinker, which is why we wanted to have him on the show. Today, we’re going to focus most of our conversation around Chamberpad. This is a new newsletter that hose him has founded and put out into the world. So we’re going to learn about what it is, what the purpose is, and everything about it. As soon as they get back from this quick break.
Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.
App My Community creates mobile apps that allow you to engage directly with your community. Enhance chamber membership by providing a unique advertising and communication channel to residents and visitors. Not just a member directory, App My Community has the tools to be useful to residents on a daily basis. Learn more at appmycommunity.com/chamberchat.
Attention all chamber of commerce leaders! Are you looking for a powerful tool to help grow and manage your chamber? Look no further than Chamber Nation! Our comprehensive platform provides all the features you need to streamline membership management, host events, communicate with your members and provide amazing services to your members. Plus, our expert team is always available to provide personalized support. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to take your chamber to the next level at a price you will truly appreciate. Visit www.RichardsCalendar.com to learn more about Chamber Nation today!
All right, Houssem, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we see the world getting smaller and smaller. There’s great value in getting perspective from people and other other parts, other regions of the world, just to see what’s going on there and see what we can apply in our own community. Tell us what is Chamberpad. We talked about it being a newsletter, but I know it’s new. I think you’re what four, four newsletters into it and, and I will say, from a content producer myself, sometimes our best stuff comes out early before we have a big following. So I’m going to urge everybody to start following Chamberpad right now so you can get all the good stuff. But it’ll, it’ll continue to be great, I’m sure. Yeah, tell tell us what it is and what it all it entails, and where the idea come from. Yeah,
Houssem Touil 14:06 like that. But you know, like when you start at the beginning, you’re like, you put yourself, yeah, you put
Brandon Burton 14:11 your best foot forward. You got great content, and you’ve got a small so you gotta, gotta grow it and get in front of more people.
Houssem Touil 14:19 Yeah? You can relate, yes, yeah, and so. So Chamberpad is, is a newsletter designed specifically for the chambers of commerce ecosystem. So the staff, the executives, the board members, the volunteers, the members also, and also the service providers, the policy makers and so on. So anyone who is like on the could be around, like the Chamber of Commerce ecosystem. So, like, I’ve seen, like a pattern I saw, like a gap in the market where chambers needed, like, easily digestible. Or centralized source of information. And so this comes as frustration as the chamber President myself, so I find, I mean, I know that, like, the perspective sometimes could be different, because it’s just like between two countries. So basically, you can have like, top two, three news outlets between two countries, where you could just, you know, see the news everything related to to the government or private sector or whatever. But this, also, I have another hat, which is working with chambers in from all sizes, different culture, different countries, different cultures. So basically, you are like, you know, sometimes you you find yourself in information overload, so or overload that you don’t know where to get your information exactly. You can see, can go through, you know, like your Twitter or x spread. You can go through your Facebook timeline and go through the LinkedIn news feed, and basically you wouldn’t be able to digest, like, all of it. So basically, we said, okay, let’s have like, one source of information. And I started thinking more into it to see, like, how relevant it is. So started like, let’s say, tracking how many news there are related to all of this, like, related to to the chambers, to the employee organizations, to Business Association and so on, versus like there is, on average, about 14,000 euros per month only related to to chambers and and, yeah, and this is actually just in English, so it’s not like, also like, try to imagine how many this could be in other languages, like in French or in Chinese or in Arabic and in Spanish or Portuguese. So I guess it’s going to be more like just in English, just like 14,000 and so say, okay, maybe we can do something and be so the first, first idea would be to become aggregator. But also that wouldn’t solve the problem, since there are actually 14,000 years. So I wouldn’t read 14,000 years per month, because the context is extremely different. So I said, Okay, so maybe do like a digest, like every week you spend the whole week, like hustling, doing whatever you do with requiring members, visiting your member, advocating on their behalf, you know, talking to the media, doing events or whatever said by the end of the week, or at least. So basically we release every Thursday. They said, by the end of the week, you’ll get the top news and the top events and the top publications, and now also the best latest Podcast, episode, chamber, chat podcast, yeah, that you can listen to. So it’s not just about reading it, but also listening and any I mean, I find that format better than actually doing an aggregator, some, something like Hacker News. I don’t know if you know what I can use. No, I’m not familiar with that. Yeah. So it’s like, you know, in circumvent there’s like, there’s like, hacking news. It’s a platform where, like, hundreds and hundreds of news drop every day, almost, about technology and so on. So I said, I mean, you gotta spend like, your day in front of hacking news to read in years. So basically, you went to the anywhere. So I said, Okay, this to just do the newsletter and take it from there. So we set up like a roadmap, and I said, okay, like our missions to provide actionable insights, trends, events, best practices to chambers across across the globe. So whether they are a local chamber in a small town or a large international network, they could be a continental chamber or State Chamber or whatever. So yeah, for now, we’re just newsletter but and we’re also have like subscribers from North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and also even from the Caribbean. So yeah, I mean very much this is like exciting times, and very much looking forward to where this is going to take us. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 19:32 no, I love the idea for it and and, like you said, to be able to try to curate these different articles and news outlets from, you know, worldwide, from the global scene. And it would be quite the undertaking to really dive in and do that all, but as you come across these things of interest, to kind of keep note of it and put it together. And what I like is it’s an easily digestible newsletter. So you’re not seeing just article after article, but you you have it broken down. Right at the top where it says, like, for example, this week there were six news articles that you referenced, three publications, one podcast episode, and four events you know around the world, yeah. And then you have it broken down by those categories, and like, bullet points and links to the full articles or registration for events and things like that. And I don’t know just kind of future casting this, I see you could become that source where people are coming to you with articles and information. You know, here’s something for the newsletter. You know, our Chamber’s doing this, or our, you know, National Association of chamber in certain countries doing this, or whatever it may be, just to put it out there in the newsletter. I think it’s a great platform. And glad to see somebody’s picking up the ball and running with it and doing doing this. So, yeah, kudos. Kudos to you the idea.
Houssem Touil 20:51 Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, we already started having some people reaching out, actually. So they reach out even by the email that they find at the bottom of the newsletter, or by link there, I’ll say, oh, you should actually put this. Or why not look at this? So, yeah, basically, so feel free to send, I mean, yeah, we’re happy to to include it,
Brandon Burton 21:15 yeah. And I think for a busy chamber executive or chamber staff to be able to to get this email every Thursday. Open it up, and you can scan right through it, see what what things are of interest to you and what’s relevant to you. Click on that. And I know, you know, lots of people get different emails from various organizations, maybe like Harvard Business Review. I know they do like a weekly email, and people really look forward to those because it has so much valuable content in it. And that’s how I see Chamberpad being, is that resource specific for chamber executives, chamber staff, to be able to see what’s going on in a lot of different markets all at once, and you can go back and reference it. It’s got all the links there. So you’re not needing to search worldwide to find these things, but it’s being curated and presented to you. So nice job. What else would you want to share about Chamberpad for listeners, just to get them into it, to get them to understand what it is and where it offers value for them. Is there anything else that you’d add?
Houssem Touil 22:24 Yeah, sure. So so far now we started as as a newsletter we read by chamber leaders from 29 countries so far, and and what we what we plan on doing, is actually to become one stop shop for all affiliations related to chambers. So this is just like the digest you get to just digest of 10 years. But eventually, we’re planning on starting doing our own webinars, for example, in the beginning, we have also started to initiate discussions with chamber industry events, where we are could become media partners for the events as well. We’re also working. We’re about to roll out our platform so it’s the same address, like chamberpa.com is the same for now, you can just go there and subscribe for the newsletter. We will keep the newsletter, of course, because we all need to keep the weekly digest over there. But also, we are going to start doing interviews and promoting. You know, most of the time we have to promote economy. So we just hear about the top economies most of the time, always doing what, but we often forget about all the others in all the great job that they are doing. Some subjects, for example, like the free trade agreements, like if your chamber, for example, you have members who export, let’s say, like, fruits and vegetables. You would want to know about another your chamber peer in another country which says, you say, hey, both are our country are actually have a free trade agreements, and fruits and vegetables are actually included in that. So we have either eliminated tariffs, or we have actually reduced the the tariff rates. So basically, you as a chamber, you would actually tell say, Okay, why don’t you just like, go to this country, listen to this webinar, lead to everything they have to tell you about how you could export to their countries, and thus you make more money, you hire more people, and also you stick with the chamber. So basically, it’s it’s sometimes I see that maybe can talk about it later. A place like future for chambers and so on. But sometimes you can just, like, do it all as as the chamber executive yourself, like, you know, you can just do everything, right? Sometimes someone has to do something for you resist
Brandon Burton 25:15 the temptation, right? Yeah,
Houssem Touil 25:20 yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, it started, I mean, like, you know, I’ve been listening to your your podcast for three years and a half now, and every time, you know, I get, like, new perspectives from new people. Sometimes, you know, it’s sometimes it could be related to, to the place where they are operating from. Or sometimes it could be like subject. So yeah, like we can do, we can do, like webinars on specific subjects, but basically they’re going to be around countries. And we’re very thrilled to be like partners with chamber chat podcast. I mean, it’s like, really my favorite podcast, like every week goes into it. So basically, we have that you listen to Brandon every week, but also you read what her writes to you every week. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 26:08 goes hand in hand. I love it, yeah. So you’d mentioned earlier you have a marketing communications background. So how is that? Have you been able to lean into that as you’ve launched chamber pad?
Houssem Touil 26:26 Yes, very good question. So, so you need so when you look at for example. So I said earlier, would be like tracking the number of news that we find, like every week we also, let’s say, like since the opportunity and checked, let’s say the trainings related to related to chambers, what they are talking about and so on. I’ve seen that most of the time they’re still operating in the same way. And what do I mean by that? I mean from immediate perspective, like for now, when you go through all kinds of reports, you can go to reports just related to like certain sides of chambers, or in certain continent for chambers, you will see that many say that they have reduced engagement rate, while others say that they they have like, more members dropping than actually renewing. Others said that they were actually seeing like spike in membership. And we said, Okay, so maybe I should, like, you know, initiate some discussions with some people, and try to see why, like what’s going on. And sometimes what what you get is just you find that these people, they communicate with different generations at the same time. So they communicate with my generation, the millennials. They communicate also with the Gen Z. They communicate also with the boomers. And so I think that chambers, right now, should become a media machine. I mean, at certain time they become a network. Actually, they started as a network. And, you know, actually started about, like, over 400 years ago in the port of southern France, Marseille. They’re just, you know, they started, you know, like going to the port over there, and they had, like, issues with the pirates in the Mediterranean. And then they see the occasion, and they find out that traders, merchants are meeting with each other. So basically, they also see the occasion to start doing business together, and then later on. So So it started as a network, and then from the network key to move to a network as a powerhouse. And you know, you go, you become member your chamber is going to defend you. They’re going to, you know, voice your concern to the local, state, federal, nation, whatever authorities your concern and and now I think that they should become actually medial nation. And this is, this is not an option, because the world has changed a lot, and even with covid, like covid is actually despite, like, all the negative downsides of covid and so on. But I think that it has also, like, accelerated the future, and it has actually brought it to open doorstep. So I think, yes, chambers should become media machines.
Brandon Burton 29:46 I love that, and I’m going to take that as an endorsement. You know, recently launched the Bringing Local Back platform that was part of the vision is chambers being a media machine and establishing a platform that makes it easy. Easy to put your content out in your community, to really showcase your members, to really be that go to source for information in your community. So I love that testimonial of it, because that is the that’s the idea about that, that bringing local back campaign. So thank you for that. Sure. I like asking everyone I have on the show for any kind of tip or action item that you might have for listeners who are looking to take their chamber up to the next level. What would you suggest for them?
Houssem Touil 30:33 Oh, yeah, actually, there are quite a few. So first of all, maybe actually start to embrace AI like, you know, AI is not like chatgpt, it’s not clothing, it’s not perplexity, and it’s not Canva and like the magic writer of LinkedIn, or whatever it’s, it’s much more. I mean, it’s this, it’s part of this. It’s empowering, like content creation and all of that. But there are also other things that you should actually embrace in AI, for example, something like automations start to automate. And actually, I think that I’ve said this in the first episode with you, I think said automate. And actually, even three years later, I still talk to my peers, and most of the time they don’t automate, yeah, but actually automate. Automate often. Like, there’s so many things that you cannot automate for sure, but things which are repetitive make it automated, make it autopilot, like, save even like five hours per week or 10 hours per week, or even as low as two hours per week, like, just automate your workflow, like, try to gain some time, automated repetitive tasks and to get more space for creative work, for example, or to have more members, or to talk more to to your to our existing members, also at the same time, maybe you should actually shift more of their member engagement strategies online, for example, like, you know, we live like in digital era, and sometimes remember, expect real time expand real time updates, sometimes like some personal content. I know that it’s not that obvious to do it for certain types or sizes of chambers, but do as much as you can from where you understand, like, for example, I’ve seen some chambers they said, Okay, we are going to do like, virtual secretaria. So basically, don’t call us on the phone and tell us what, what you need and so on. Like just, there’s like, there’s like a chat bot in in the website, you can just talk to it, and if it is something that you know, like your interface, you chat with the interface. If it doesn’t give you the proper answers to what you want. This is actually when would be able to get access to a phone number and call us, but you can also send us an email. I mean, try to automate as much as possible, also with different engagement stores, I found that some chambers, for example, they do work with us consistently. I know that, for example, some chamber in in small town doesn’t mean I mean they probably they, they cannot do that because, you know, they can just like, do an event, like, every once in a while, and that’s enough. But if you’re like Metro Chamber, like very big city, you cannot, like, reach everyone at the same time and bring them together on site. So have something like, you know, give them real time date. I mean, they don’t need to get to wait for your monthly newsletter to tell them what you did for them, like, do it real time. Do it Real Time. I mean, they will feel that you actually care more about them, that you are more present than you actually wait for it. And do you know it’s just like another thing that you just another thing yet to check at the end of the month, and said, Okay, this news database, what we’ve been doing, like, No, do it real time.
Brandon Burton 34:31 Yeah, I like that. Doing it real time and also recording it, having a library of these real time, going back to being that media machine, right? If you can provide asynchronous information where somebody can digest it on their own time, instead of needing to be at the meeting or at the luncheon at a specific time in person, they they have the option to catch it virtually, or if they can’t see it today, but they can watch it tomorrow. Then that’s even better, because you’re getting more exposure to more people that way. Your your your thought about automation too, I think is spot on. I’ve seen it’ll free up time and the give give room for that creative work, like you mentioned. But it also makes your systems that much better when you can automate processes, because the input every the data that’s coming into, it’s going to be the same. And just a simple example, as I’ve seen with some chambers, is they input membership information, for example, the contact name, depending on who is entering the information in, they might include a prefix of Mr. Or Mrs. You know, Jones or whatever, and then the next person who’s entering in membership information just as first and last name. So then you have inconsistencies in your data all over the place. So having a system and automating it’s going to clean things up a ton and make it so much easier to process that data in a meaningful way. Well, Hussein, before we let you go, you alluded to it earlier, but as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Houssem Touil 36:22 Yeah, so, so, as I mentioned earlier, so chamber stars as network and then as advocacy powerhouse, and now they should become media machines. But actually, in order to become media machine, you should be able to I think that instead of like everyone doing their own thing, you know, aside, maybe you should have something that we have our own key message, the same key messages that we deliver like we harmonize all the benefits that you get from joining channel. But also, at the same time, we should also harmonize the key messages of what could not work in your favor if you don’t join as well. Because, for example, if you have some kind of issue, sometimes you just cannot solve it on your own. We we sometimes forget that channels of commerce also have mandates depending on the countries they’re operating from. So sometimes, if you want to deal with the government, for example, on a certain issue, you cannot do it on your own, only vi chamber. So you have, for example, you want to advocate to change some regulations, for example, which are harming you. Or maybe you said, Okay, I have suggestions for something new, which actually we could implement, which kind of bring us more dollars and hire more people, and especially keeping both local. So you can only do that with your chamber. When you look at the world’s biggest companies, actually, what they do is just, you see that everything is online, but no like, they have like public affairs team who actually or which actually work with chambers to actually negotiate with the governments and so on to implement new kind of regulations. So, yeah, I think that it’s like Bill Gates, or, I don’t know who said it before, like, if your business is on the internet, then it will be out of business. I think that should, like, harmonize the set of key messages which go like, if your business is not chamber member, then your business will go out of business. So, yeah, I think yeah, that’s it. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 38:57 No, that’s great. I appreciate that. I want to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and connect to learn more about what you’re doing, but probably most importantly, how to subscribe to chamber pads. They can get this news, this curated news, sent to them each week. What’s the best way? Where would you point them to do these things? Yeah,
Houssem Touil 39:21 sure. So you go to chamberpad.comso basically, you will, it’s a landing page. The first thing you’re gonna see is to actually just insert your email and subscribe, and later on, you can start reading, have access to all the archives. And every week, like every Thursday, you will you will have, like the weekly digest every week, every Thursday in your inbox. You will also find my contact information within the newsletter, so you can find my full name. We send 12. It’s the same on LinkedIn, and you can. Also find my email. It’s my initials, so ht@chamberpad.com,
Brandon Burton 40:07 that’s perfect, and as normal, we’ll get all this in our show notes for this episode to make it easy to find and subscribe and get people in contact with you. But Sam, this has been great having you back on chamber chat podcast, the partnership going forward with with chamber pad as well. And wish you best of luck going forward and and seeing it grow and see see where it goes from here. So thanks for being with us today.
Houssem Touil 40:33 Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me.
Brandon Burton 40:36 If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app 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.
Get started with your own Chamber Podcast and shortcut your learning curve with the Chamber Podcast Course offered by Chamber Chat Podcast.
Have you considered the many benefits of hosting a podcast for your Chamber? The options, leverage, and possibilities that a podcast offers are virtually endless. Download my FREE Chamber Podcasting Guide to learn how to start your own Chamber podcast!
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 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts 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.
Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.
Our guest for this episode is Craig Turner. Craig is the visionary Founder and President of Momentum, the Business Growth Agency, Momentum for Chambers and Momentum AI. Momentum excels at driving ROI for companies through their innovative approach to chambers of commerce, memberships and sponsorships. Additionally, the agency offers top tier consulting services, Ambassador training and comprehensive member benefit programs for chambers a trailblazer in the field of AI. Craig is a sought after consultant providing cutting edge AI training and solutions to chambers and small businesses. His expertise in AI has made him a prominent speaker on the subject, captivating audiences with eye opening but practical educational insights before launching momentum, Craig spent eight years with the Buffalo Niagara partnership, the Regional Chamber of Commerce, where he led governmental affairs and business development. Currently, Craig chairs the Niagara USA Chamber of Commerce board of directors and also the chambers Advocacy Committee, embodying the ethos of I’m not just a president also I’m also a client. Momentum is an active member in chambers of commerce across western and central New York, Southern Ontario, Central Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. But Craig, I’m excited to have you on the podcast today. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to tell us something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Well,
Craig Turner 2:43 this is fantastic. Bryn, I really appreciate you having me on and the opportunity to chat about all the stuff that we do with the chambers, and especially you mentioned we’re going to talk about. AI, yeah, you had asked me to kind of think of something interesting to talk about, and I want to, let’s see if I can hold this up for the video. So this is a novel. I’m a novelist. I’ve written eight novels, and I got another one coming out soon that I think chamber professionals are gonna like. I’m holding up a novel called The campaign. And if you can see the cover, if you’re listening on audio, it’s CA, MP, and then AI is capitalized in the middle of the word campaign. And I wrote this book in 2020 and 2021 and I published it in early 2022 This was before open act. Open AI made chassis, PT, accessible to the world. So this is when AI was still kind of hidden behind the curtain. So the book is about mankind’s first foray into running an AI for political office, which, interestingly enough, a story came out earlier this year that someone in Colorado is trying to do that, because I’m so steeped in Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce is woven throughout the story. And in fact, the pinnacle event in the book is a Chamber of Commerce event, which I love to tell this story. What the interesting thing is that what I didn’t realize is that when I was writing this book, was that, you know, two, three years later, I would be steeped in AI and training and speaking and sitting on the chamber podcast talking about AI. So it’s kind of a full circle thing that I, that I, you know, personally, I appreciate myself.
Brandon Burton 4:19 Yeah, very meta, right? Writing about it now you’re in it, right? That’s that’s cool. Well, tell us a little bit more about momentum, just all the different facets of it, what you do, how you work with chambers, what you offer, just to kind of, you know, put it in a nutshell, so people who are hearing about momentum for the first time can have an idea of what you
Craig Turner 4:40 do, absolutely. So I’ll go back. I’ll go back to the mid 2000s actually, when I started working for the chamber. So I ran government affairs. That’s what I was hired to do. I was a lobbyist, and, you know, ran the committee. About halfway through my tenure at the Chamber was the great recession. So 2008 2009 2000 10 and I gave our board a lot of credit at the time, because they said, Look, people are going to hit harder Financial Times. They’re going to start coming back to us and saying, Why am I giving you $1,500 what am I? What am I getting for this money like they never have before? That was always the good community citizen before. That was your chamber member. So we put together teams, seven people. We met with 400 companies during the during the Great Recession, and the goal was to we had a six page survey. Now you weren’t supposed to give the six page survey. You were supposed to be conversational, but you were supposed to come back to the office and find three to five things to help that company with based on your conversation and the stuff we on Earth was unbelievable. We never would have had done some of the things we did. One of my favorite things, I talk about a warehouse on the east side of Buffalo. We said, You know what can we help you with? And he goes, You know what? He goes, there’s a bus stop right in front of my front door, and people gather around it. My clients complain that they can’t get in and out of the building. Can you do something about it? And we said, I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll try. So we called the right people, and next thing you know, they moved the bus stop 15 feet down the sidewalk. I’m like, have we How could we possibly have known that? But think about it, that guy’s a chamber member for life, because we were able to do that for him. And to this day, I still drive over there, and I’m like, Yeah, we did that. Look at that bus stop. Um, but that being said, we had an 88% retention, membership retention rate during the recession, when I went to the ACCE conference that blew everybody away. So eventually, when I left the chamber, I’m like, This is my business. I’m going to help, except I’m going to flip it my clients at momentum. What we do is we help them build a strategy for their chambers of commerce, and we manage it throughout the year, because we know that most companies do not have someone on staff doing this every day. So it works in primarily two ways. Take here in Buffalo Niagara Falls, where I am, a company a client might be involved with four or five chambers I manage. We manage all those relationships. We tell them what events to attend. We tell them where to put sponsorship dollars. It’s part of the, you know, the kind of the holistic view at their their chamber membership. It also works for market entry. The client can say, hey, we’re opening in a warehouse in Kansas City. Well, I know the people at the Kansas City Chamber, we can walk right in and start to do business on day one. Because, you know, I spend most of my time building relationships, like I’m doing today with chambers of commerce across the US and Canada. So I’m rolling this out on LinkedIn, and all of a sudden the chamber started to come and say, Hey, we really like what you’re saying about member value. Can you come consult with us? Now? What’s neat, I never saw that coming. I had to go back. I had to redesign the website. I had to change everything. But yes, now we have a full suite of services for chambers that include Ambassador training. Is probably the one we’re most well known for. We do you know, strategic planning, consulting and those kind of things too. And then the third part of it is enter AI, which we started to talk about earlier, about two years ago, when open AI made chatgpt available to the public. I said, I’m in. We’re gonna we’re gonna dive as deep as we can into this for ourselves, for our own company, so we can use it to grow our company. But what I said was, look, I know the my audiences, the chambers themselves, and typically, small and medium sized businesses do not have time to do that. So I’m going to learn everything I can. I’m going to curate the best stuff, and I’m going to share it with the community, which has turned into trainings and everything. Well, that turned into trainings, it turned into speaking, it turned into programming. I mean, that’s the big one that I didn’t again. I did not see this coming, and just a few months ago, we launched our AI platform for Chambers of Commerce. So now, if you look at like my business card, we’ve got momentum for business, momentum for chambers and momentum AI all represented on there, and they all tie together.
Brandon Burton 8:50 Yeah, fascinating. Well, I’m, I’m excited to get into the conversation today. I know AI is a hot topic. There’s Buzz, as he said, for the last couple of years, since ChatGPT rolled out the or I guess when open AI rolled out ChatGPT, it’s really kind of taken the world by storm and been a huge adoption rate for ChatGPT, but also AI in general, and I’m excited to dive in and really get into demystifying. Ai, as soon as they get back from this quick break.
Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.
App My Community creates mobile apps that allow you to engage directly with your community. Enhance chamber membership by providing a unique advertising and communication channel to residents and visitors. Not just a member directory, App My Community has the tools to be useful to residents on a daily basis. Learn more at appmycommunity.com/chamberchat.
Are you struggling to manage your chamber of commerce and build a thriving commerce community? Chamber Nation is here to help! Our all-in-one platform allows you to easily manage member information, events, and communication. Plus, our community engagement tools help you connect with local businesses and residents to drive economic growth. With Chamber Nation, you’ll have everything you need to succeed. So why wait? Visit www.RichardsCalendar.com to learn more and start building.
All right, Craig, we’re back. So as I mentioned before, the break today, we’re going to be diving in about how to demystify AI and I know you and I have been connected through LinkedIn and just knowing each other for some time now, and back and forth. So I see these things that you’re rolling out, these experiments that you’re doing with AI and and some cool things, like you did an experiment where you had aI talking to AI and just having a full on debate and really interesting things. Not that it’s necessarily the practical thing you know that you’re going to instill at your chamber, but it shows what some some of these capabilities are. But as you, as you’ve been, as you’ve jumped into AI, you know, with both feet, what are some of the things that stand out to you? And then as a chamber, to help a chamber wrap their head around how to apply AI and really demystify it
Craig Turner 11:59 absolutely, and I’m glad you’re using the word demystify, because that’s, as I’ve learned over the past two years, that is a big part of the process. There’s two ways to look at this. One is the training and the tools and teaching people how to prompt that stuff’s easy. I mean that that’s our bread and butter. We’re trying to spread it as far and wide as we can, and really, we give people a few a few prompts, they can accomplish an awful lot, but it’s that other piece of it. It’s the real world attitudes towards it. So I always say that when you’re teaching somebody AI, you’re teaching them the practical application, but you have to overcome fear, you have to overcome indecision, you have to overcome doubt, and you have to overcome bad press. And it happens, I will post things on LinkedIn, and I’ll get people to push back and say, was that AI or, you know, I don’t know that. I trust that if it’s AI. And the thing is, and I emphasize this all the time, AI is a tool, right? It needs the human input in order to work, I can take a nail and whack it with my hand as much as I possibly can. It’s not going to go into the piece of wood. But if I take a hammer and I pound it in, the nail is going to go into the piece of wood. And this is all AI is, are there bad actors out there? Yes, absolutely. There are, same as, you know, 25 years ago, when the internet started to get in everybody’s hands. Maybe that was longer ago, but, but when the you know, there were bad actors, and they’re still bad actors, does that affect us? Yes, you know, on some levels, it does. But is it a tool that I can use on a daily basis to really save time and money and resources? To be truthful, I say it all the time at momentum, we are now saving 25 to 30 hours a month. I mean, that’s huge that I get that time back. I took a process just earlier this week. I took a process that typically took me three hours. I had it down, I had my systems in place and everything, and it got me down to three hours. I used AI earlier this week, and I got it down to 30 minutes. Wow, I am. You see on LinkedIn how busy I am. For me to buy two and a half hours back into my calendar is absolutely unbelievable. It’s like gold. So, so this is where, you know, yes, I understand people think I start all my presentations with with a picture of the Terminator, and I say, before we get into anything, AI is not taking over the world, all right, AI is a tool that you can use. It’s like any machine that’s ever been created in the history of mankind. It needs a human to put good input into it to get good results. And working together, we’ll save time, save money, save energy, save frustration, and you know, for to take it now, as you, as you said to the chambers, I think it’s critically important for the chambers to know this, the audiences for the chambers are, you know, getting younger. Some millennials, the Gen z’s, are coming next. These are tech savvy people that are going to look to their chamber to say, you know. As I’m growing my business, how can I incorporate tech or I already am I expect you to also know. As much as I do, this is going to be critically important for for chambers to know. And most of, most of the the people that go through our training chambers or businesses otherwise are typically. They haven’t really done anything with AI at all, or they’re dabbling. That’s what most of it is. I’ve done it. I used it to write some tweets, or I used it to, well, I like to show them. And again, you pointed out my LinkedIn, and I share everything I’m thinking on LinkedIn. There’s it’s so much more powerful than just writing tweets, and we’re trying to encourage people to do that.
Brandon Burton 15:39 Yeah, I think one of the LinkedIn posts you’re talking about going on a hike, and you’re writing a book as you hike, because you’re giving these prompts and thoughts into your the I’m not sure exactly which tool you’re using, if it’s chat GPT or something else, but
Craig Turner 15:53 yeah, chat GPT voice is probably the most important tool I’ve ever acquired as A professional, I do a lot of road trips. I’m in the car all the time that, you know, I’m in Pittsburgh. My son goes to school in Pittsburgh. I belong to the chamber at the airport in Pittsburgh, and I spent a lot of time going back and forth. That’s a three and a half hour drive for me. It used to be listening to music and staring out the window. Now it is literally three and a half hours of continuing to do work, and it’s, you know, you get feedback on things. I say it all the time. My favorite prompt is, I have an idea for X, Y and Z, all right. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I have ideas coming all the time. I have an idea for X, Y and Z. What do you think? So? Chat, GPT, voice will take that and it will return me a thought on it, if I like, you know, some feedback on what I said. If I like it, I’ll say, Okay, make me a three month plan to roll that out, and it will lay out the strategy for me to roll the whole thing out. I might not use it tomorrow. I might not use it till next year, but like any brainstorming, it’s out of my head. It’s on paper. Well, on paper in quotes, but and I have a plan to go forward on how to do it. So this is what I spend my time in the car or on walks, and it’s just been, it’s just such an incredible tool. And that time is not I’m one of these guys that works all the time. I work too much. I work at work incessantly. And there would be times when I want to go take a five mile walk, you know, and on a sunny day in the afternoon, well, I would feel too guilty just leaving the office and going and walking for five miles, even on a sunny day in Buffalo and but now I don’t feel guilty. I The one day I had a meeting in Niagara Falls. I checked out. I walked around Niagara Falls for like three hours. I put had my earbuds in, and I probably got more work done walking around Niagara Falls than I would have sitting in my laptop.
Brandon Burton 17:49 Yeah. I love how you say, AI is a tool, right? And the example that the nail, and, you know, the hammer, the nail, the hand, yeah, I think of when, when Google rolled out, yeah, you said somebody might say that they don’t trust AI. If this is AI generated, I don’t trust AI. That’s like saying 2025, years ago. Well, if you got this result from Google, I don’t know that I trust it. I want to pull out the encyclopedias and do all the research myself. You know, like that’s and it seems archaic to say that now, knowing that we see, you know how effective Google is in a search. Well, AI is like Google on on steroids. You know, there’s
Craig Turner 18:27 a meme, there’s a meme I use that I posted fairly often. I actually put in my training recently. Is a because your question, it goes a little to what you’re saying. Goes a little towards the boss employee relationship too, because there are bosses that don’t trust AI, and they are actually handcuffing their their employees to be as productive as they possibly can be. And the meme that I use, it’s a picture of a model, model T I have an antiquated it’s in sepia tones and everything. And there’s a kid standing next to it dressed in 1901 garb, and he’s got a briefcase, and the caption, or the post that I put with it is okay. I want you to take these papers over to the next turn, the next town, but I want you to walk. I don’t want you to take one of those newfangled horseless carriage automobiles, because that would take you a half hour to get there back. This is going to take you six hours to get there back, but I want you to take that route instead, and that’s what we’re doing when you’re telling your employees you can’t use AI. And you know, when people worry about the, you know, the the authenticity of it is, if you’re, you’re, you know, you’re, you’re writing something. You’re putting your name on something you didn’t write. I always tell people, don’t put anything, don’t put your name on anything you didn’t write, whether it’s AI or elsewhere. But the reality is, what they’re forgetting is, it’s the engineering, it’s the prompt engineering. So I may create a piece of output. That, you know, a white paper is a good example. I may do a white paper. I hate writing white papers, and for me, to be honest, most white papers are for SEO. They’re for Google clicks. All right, so if I’m going to write a white paper, I don’t need my name on it. It’s just, it’s a product. I write the white paper, I put it on there, and it starts to get the it starts to get the SEO. Now, is there an ethical piece there that I wrote a white paper with AI and put it out there? No, I’m a prompt engineer. I used prompt engineering. I used AI, and I wrote a really good instruction for the AI to come out with a worthwhile piece of information at the end. That’s what it is, whether I wrote it or myself or not. You know, I’m an author. It was, it was a tough hill for me to climb, to yield any writing to AI, even even tweets and things. But the reality is, I had an epiphany one day. I’m like, Look my books, my blogs and my LinkedIn posts, all me, all human. I said, That’s what I want to put my name on. I said, all that other stuff I have to write press releases and tweets and again, white papers and things like that, website, copy, turn it over to AI, just, let’s be an engineer instead of a writer. And what really got me there, and this back to the boss employee relationship is, you know, in my case, it’s my clients. What did my clients hire me to do? Did they hire me because I’m an author, or did they hire me to find solutions to help grow their business? And that’s what it is. And if you’re an employee and your boss is kind of not letting you do this, this is when you go back to your boss and say, Hey, okay, I have this task that I have to do. It took me an hour last week. If I use AI, it can take me 30 seconds, instead of an hour, that’s 59 and a half minutes, that I can go do other stuff, including calling our members and seeing they’re okay, go and get new members. And that’s where the differenti the differentiator comes in, is that it’s not you have to get out of this mindset that it’s plagiarism or it’s unethical. It you’re an engineer. You weren’t hired to be a writer. You were hired to find solutions. My solution is I can do something in 30 seconds that it used to take an hour to do,
Brandon Burton 22:08 right? But, and with the prompt engineering, you get results, and then you can always adjust it. And just a couple examples, is I had a marketing campaign recently I was putting together, and I told chat GPD, this is what I’m trying to do. And can you give me a marketing plan to roll this out? And it sent me a, you know, several bullet points, you know, this stage of this, and this stage of that. And said, Okay, this is great. Can you put it in an Excel format so then I can track it as I do each thing and then, and I didn’t like everything in it, so I took some things out, I moved some things around, change the order a little bit, so I made it mine. And then another example, just earlier this week, had a need for a contract. Went to chatgpt and said, you know, here’s what I need, and and it spits it right back out. Now, am I going to use that just exactly how they gave it to, how chatgpt gave me? No, I’m going to look at I’m going to adjust it for me, and I’m going to have an attorney review it before handing it over to the other party. But it’s a starting point. And had I just gone to an attorney and said, Here, make a contract for this, that fee is going to be way higher than having a starting point already with what chat GPT provided
Craig Turner 23:15 and it and it, you know, you have to think about your own personal brand when you do it too. A great example is LinkedIn, because people are getting more savvy about what is written by AI. Because most people don’t train their AI, I will tell you that my AI, if I ask it to write like me, it’d be pretty close. Now most people don’t do that. So on LinkedIn, people will write their post with AI. Well, people now know what’s what’s AI and not so you have to think about your personal brand. If you want to put something out there and Brandon, I’m sure you’ve seen it. You you ask chatgpt to write you a LinkedIn post. It puts these ridiculous emojis all through it, right? Everywhere? Yeah, people just cut and paste and put it in well, does your is that good for your brand? Do you want people reading your posts and saying, Oh, he just did AI, that’s a decision you have to make yourself, or is it just about getting the post up every day to for the consistency and everything that’s that’s something that that people have to figure out. I I’m not a fan of just posting LinkedIn, if it like I said, my LinkedIn post, I write my own post intentionally. But, you know, you can see it. You can see it, and
Brandon Burton 24:20 depending on the purposes, it may be very appropriate to write it with AI so your followers can see, wow, Greg knows how to use AI. So there is a time for that. Now, as we put the focus on chambers, what would be some real world applications for a chamber to kind of help them wrap their head around again, demystifying AI, they see it. This is a tool. How can a chamber apply AI, beyond putting out your social media posts or maybe writing your newsletter? What? What are some ways that AI can be incorporated?
Craig Turner 24:53 Sure, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple examples, the first of which is, I will confide to you. And all of your listeners,
Brandon Burton 25:02 just don’t tell anybody else, right? Yeah. So
Craig Turner 25:05 at the Niagara County, Niagara USA chamber, we are running a massive small business expo in November. We’re really excited about it’s the first of its kind, and we’ve got, we’ve just got a lot of buzz around it right now. The entire thing was created with AI. Again, I’m, you know, and I steered it, and I’m the Chair, I’m not the staff, so I don’t have time to sit around doing events and stuff. So the program was created with AI, the marketing materials was created with AI. I’m doing an AI presentation there. It was, like, every everything we did that to get started now, like you pointed out, was that the final was that the final product? No, of course, it wasn’t. And then, of course, us humans had to go book all the speakers and everything. But, but to instead of, you know, sitting around and brainstorming, we got something on paper first. We we eliminated the blank page. Got something on paper first, and now we have this beautiful event that we’re putting together that we’re really excited about. So that’s a good one. That’s a great example, because it was one of the things I see with AI is people are afraid to ask for too much. All right, it’s not your executive assistant who’s going to go home and complain about you. Ask whatever you need, and ask for a lot of it. So we give us the whole event design, the whole event for us. And we got outside the box, thinking in there and everything. It’s incredible. So like I said, it’s in that case, the example to the answer your question, What can a chamber use it for? It’s attack that blank page. The blank page is the hardest thing to overcome. You would take the blank page now you’ve got something to give to your team and say, What do you think? So that’s huge. Second example I give you so chat GPT now, Google just released their version of it earlier this week. Is called gpts. Okay? Chat GPT has what they call gpts, which are bots, basically. And what it is is you train you. If you have a process that you do over and over and over again, you can take a chunk of that process and have aI create a system so that all you have to do is, like, enter the most pertinent information and it does it. You don’t have to prompt it every time. So as a great example, and this is free in the GPT store. You can, you can use it if you want to. I’d love it if you did. I created a GPT that does meeting minutes. You can input your your rough notes, and it will create as close to publishable meeting minutes as you’re going to get. You’re still going to edit everything, obviously, but, but it gives you the formatting and everything. And I tried to do that because, again, with chambers, how many meetings do you have a month that you have to do meeting minutes for? If I can, if I can save you a half hour every single time, imagine how much you can get done with that time. But what’s cool about this is, if your writings need enough, you don’t even have to type the notes in. You could take a picture of your page and it’ll do the meeting notes for you. So that’s in the that’s called the minutes maker. I think it’s in the GPT store. We can, we can share that information later, and anybody, anybody can use it. It’s free. But think about your processes that you have at the chamber, and how you can create a bot or a GPT to take some of the sting out of those processes. The other one, the other one I created, I call it networking follow up connector. And basically what it is is I come back from a networking event. Because we all know that the toughest part of networking is follow up. Come back from a networking event. I do a quick I can do a list or a database of the person I met their company. And then it asks for a, you know, one fact about something you talked about, you know, they like rock music, or, you know, they ride in the charity bicycle race. So you put those in, you hit submit, and it gives you the whole list. It gives you a quick blurb that you can cut and paste into LinkedIn for a connection request based on your conversation and everything. It takes 15 seconds, right? And that’s, that’s, that’s in the the in the in the the GPT store too, as well. So, so then, you know, then you get into higher level applications such as data analysis. And, you know, once you and there’s an important piece here, all right, chatgpt and AI, okay, you could do a lot of stuff with it, just the way it is. All right, you can get insights. You can get it’s all based on the internet. All right, the real power of this is when you put data into it, because then you can, you know, then you can manipulate that. And I like and part of the back to that fear conversation. One of the things that I always point out is is we’ve all been using AI all this time, and I’m, if I’m writing a text on my iPhone, and AI is suggesting what the next word should be, that’s AI, the auto complete is the next word, and basically all it is to. Get over that fear of it. All it is is using the data available to predict the next step. That’s what AI is, using the data available to predict the next step. If you don’t input any data, it uses the world’s data the internet. If you input your own data as like on an iPhone, or, you know, on your phone as you’re texting, it’s predicting based on your behavior, your activity, what the next word is? The next, the power of AI for chambers and for businesses is, you can input your own data. You could put your member list and, say, extract this information. You could, you do that. So this is, this is teeing up to where, where we’ve gone. Is momentum, which back several weeks ago we launched the momentum AI platform. And basically what that does is we have an AI that you can send to new members. And basically when a chamber subscribes, we have we train the chamber on 2/3 we train the AI in two things. We train it on your chamber. So your mission, your vision, your committees, your events, everything, and then we train it on what we call the momentum way of doing businesses, which is whatever everything that I described at the at the beginning, when your member puts their information in, which is, you know, what are you trying to accomplish? What do you need to meet? And they hit, submit, it returns to them automatically based on those three databases together a customized strategy to make the most of their chamber membership. So it’s everything we do at momentum, but put into an AI format to make sure more people can do it. What’s cool about it beyond that? First of all, there’s a wow factor there. Nobody’s nobody’s joining their chamber expecting to get an AI strategy on the first day that they joined. But what’s cool about it, for the Chamber’s perspective, is because we’re giving them an AI, we’ve gotten them to now fill out a form that that form goes to the chamber, so now you’re able to collect all this data on your on your new members that you might not otherwise be able be able to get. So So that’s like taking what your question, what can chambers do with AI to the next level? That’s not something we can do just in chatgpt, that required programming and everything, but, but it’s, we’re excited, and it’s, it’s taken off,
Brandon Burton 32:15 and that really gives, puts the credibility of the chamber through the roof, too. As you mentioned earlier, these millennials and Gen X, you know, these that are coming into our Gen Z, I guess, that are coming into the workforce now that have these expectations of I’m already using tech. I’m already using AI in my business. I expect you to as well. And then their first interaction with the chamber, they’re interacting with AI and getting custom information back, and then for the chamber to collect that data. And, like I said, like having data to give back to AI is huge, and being able to leverage it. So, I mean, you sold me, Craig, you sold me.
Craig Turner 32:54 And that’s and that’s critically important, because, and here’s the way I break it down. I give tough love. Actually, I posted on LinkedIn this morning. In fact, you ever see that meme with the guys with his girlfriend and he’s looking back? Okay? So I posted that, and I said, this is my worry with chambers. And basically what it is is this is so important right now. AI is so important. I even tell people I think it’s more important than workforce at this point right now, but it’s so important that businesses are looking for the information. All right, if I’m a chamber and I I have companies that are my members, the last thing I want right now is that business going somewhere else to get AI training and get AI information and thought leadership, because you know what, if I’m paying $350 for my chamber membership over here, but I just paid 30 bucks to go to an AI training, I can guarantee you, the AI training is going to change their operations. It’s going to change their lives and make it easier. And I’m going to start going, why didn’t I get that from my chamber where I’m a member over here? I’m telling every chamber run an AI program, right if you haven’t run one already, run one right now. And it can be thought leadership. It could be practical application, whatever you want to do, just make sure that you’ve attached your chamber name to AI right now. However, you can before someone else in the community picks up the picks it up and runs with it. You know. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 34:18 great advice. If you don’t mind. I’d like to lean into that just a little bit more. Your comment. About AI being more important than workforce, that stands out to me. I just finished, you know, wrapping up the chamber of the year finalist series that I do here on the podcast. And almost every chamber of the year finalist has some sort of a workforce initiative, and to say AI is more important than workforce, I wanted to hear more of your thoughts on that, and have chambers, really, you know, tune in as you explain what you mean by that,
Craig Turner 34:48 absolutely. And I don’t get me wrong. I don’t deny the importance of workforce. And I, and I the chambers that you, that you’ve interviewed and work with, I’m familiar with a lot of some of their workforce program I’ve. Steven workforce here in western New York for the last 25 years. But there are realities in workforce, right? There’s only so many people to do these things, and companies I think, really need to start just, just this morning, I had a conversation with a guy in logistics and warehousing, a colleague, and he was talking about, we’ve got demand, we’ve got space, we’ve got we got technology, we just we don’t have the people to do it. So when a company comes, and it’s a great example, because he’s not even talking about, he’s not even talking about new business, he’s talking about a company that’s already a client growing saying, Okay, I need another 30,000 square feet of warehouse space. I have the space, I have everything unique, except I can’t take care of that space for you because I don’t have the people. So the reality is there, and again, I’m not, we’re not talking about technology stealing jobs, all right, this is something we’ve been talking about for 20 years with the travel agents and whatnot, but, but the reality is, there are jobs that if nobody wants to do them, they still need to get done. And you know, the cost of running a small business continues to rise. You know, even minimum wages are rising, so that’s driving up your cost of personnel and everything. There are lots of solutions you can do with AI. AI will change your your operation. I was at a chamber event last week in Pennsylvania, and it was a joint chamber event between a between a few chambers. Two of the of the chambers came up and told me that my training changed their life. I mean, that’s huge. I’m not saying that to pump us up or drive people to our training. I’m just saying it blows my mind, because people are consistently coming up and saying that I’m not really teaching them anything, that in the end, if they, if they took some time and got on and just played with chatgpt themselves, that that they couldn’t figure out on their own. But sometimes it takes somebody like me to open their eyes to say, you know, with a few My training is typically a lot of practicality. But of course, I throw a few wow factor things in there, where people are like, Wow. I didn’t realize you could do that. Well, yeah, well, try it. You can. So, so that’s where I am. I think the workforce programs are absolutely critical. We need to continue to train the work for the workforce of the future, to match the jobs of the future. But AI is a solution for many, many businesses, if not all businesses and the chambers to tackle some of these workforce challenges in a meaningful way. And it’s not again, we’re not replacing jobs, but if I got this, I’ve got this task, and I could take 50% of it and turn it over to AI, how much time does that buy me back in the day to continue to to add to other things? So yeah, I know that’s a bold statement, because, you know, workforce chambers bread and butter, but, but the good thing is, I’ve been involved with workforce initiatives, and they go for years and years and years and years. AI, you run a three part webinar series, you’re in the mix?
Brandon Burton 38:03 Yeah, no, I appreciate the clarification on that. I figured it was going to be somewhere in that direction. But I think if any, if the pandemic taught us anything, is it really revealed those jobs that people don’t want to do, and chambers across the country now are seeing that shortage in workforce in certain segments, and that’s where AI can come in and be the answer to so many of these things in regards to workforce so
Craig Turner 38:29 and I believe I understand it’s a lot to keep up with. That’s why I said my I’ve taken on the role of curating all this. I mean, you see AI everywhere you go. I mean, everybody knows chatgpt and Gemini and co pilot and Claude is another one that people use and meta and act, or meta and x. So those are like the big six that people use for day to day prompting. But if I open, you know, when we finish the Zoom call, you’re going to get an AI output. When I open a PDF, it says, Do you want an AI? An AI summary of the PDF. It’s every time you, everybody’s using it, and it’s every time you open a thing. I mean, the the images. I mean, you’ve seen my LinkedIn. You know, I don’t post about an AI generated image. But what I love about that is I could do whatever I want. I use this image of a I have a lot of clients in logistics and supply chain. I use an image of the prompt was, give me a picture of a of a bustling port, ocean port, from the perspective of the stevedore. All right, it’s beautiful. It’s this picture. It’s from the inside of the crane. The port is a giant ship, sunny day. It’s a beautiful picture. And when I do, when I do the training on image generation, I say, look, here’s the thing. Stevedores, when they’re in the crane, are not paid to be taking pictures. They’re paid to move freight. So probably this image that I have, the picture does not exist anywhere on the planet, but it was the. Image that I needed and I wanted, I was able to design the exact image that I want. I mean, that’s, you know. So you got images, you got music, you got editing, you get video, videos, you know. And watching the video, evolution of video closely, especially with an election going on, because there are some dangers to it, but, but, yeah, it’s everywhere you you go and typically, and this is the advice I give, typically, any, any of these platforms have a free version and a monthly paid version. So I say, try as many of the free versions as you can see. What works for you Brandon might, might be different than what works for me. Try the free version if you like it. Move, you know, then think about the other one. So there’s, there’s a handful of them that I have gone and gone and bought the paid version because I knew I was going to get that much, that much use out of it. But it’s hard to, it’s hard to navigate all of this. So, so I’m going to keep trying as best as I can to get good information into people’s hands. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 40:55 that’s great. As we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask you for a chamber listening, who wants to take their chamber up to the next level? Imagine that’s why most of them do listen. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them to try to accomplish that goal?
Craig Turner 41:10 Sure, and there’s two. I give two answers to that. One of one is the obvious one, because we just spent all this time talking about AI. You have to be a leader in AI. And again, there’s, there’s the practical aspect of it, where you can train people, and they’re guaranteed there’s someone in your membership that does you know that would do an AI training for you? Get it on your calendar. If you haven’t already, I’ll do it. And if you if I would go ahead and do it. And if you don’t call me and I’ll set one up for you, it’s fine. We run regular ones anyway, that we just kind of lump chambers on to so that they don’t have to host their own. And it can be thought leadership. That’s where, you know, educate your executive your president, your executive director, on AI, bring in some experts. Run a run a panel. Run a thought leadership panel, just to kind of position yourself your brand near AI, because it’s going to be so important and it’s not going away. I mean, that’s, I mean, I always when people think it’s a fad or it’s going to, you know, it’s eventually going to tap out. I mean, Volkswagen put chatgpt in their 2024, models. All right, it’s a unit for voice chat GBT. I mean, it’s not, it’s not going anywhere. It’s only going to get stronger and more important. So that’s the one. That’s the obvious piece of advice to sum up our our conversation. The other one that I’d say is, I, you know, I do believe that it’s going to becoming more and more important for chambers to get granular, more granular with their delivery of member value in that companies are trying to and again, this is especially as we get into the millennials and the and the Gen Z. If you don’t have a teenager right now, or a college student, they like to know why before they make a decision, they just do so you’re gonna have to answer that question as they get into leadership positions, because they’re gonna because they’re gonna want to know why they’re spending, you know, an hour at your committee meeting. They’re gonna know why they spent $350 on the on the membership, and it’s a lot of work to explain that to a lot. You know, you’ve got chambers with four or five people taking care of 1200 members. It’s a lot, it’s a lot to do. That’s why we created the AI platform to help to help do that, but, but unfortunately, that’s what it is. And even back when during the recession, when I told that story, it was largely the small and medium sized businesses. But now I’m seeing more and more. It’s the bigger businesses too. I’ve been giving you $25,000 a year for the past 40 years, but a new CFO comes in. Why are we giving you $25,000 a year? What are we getting for it? You got to be ready. You got to be ready with an answer for that question. Yeah, for sure.
Brandon Burton 43:51 Well, Craig, this question maybe may have an obvious answer, but as we look to the future, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Craig Turner 44:00 I Well, yeah, I think the purpose is is even more important now I said companies are busier and busier than ever, which means they have less and less time to do things other than run their business and and try to succeed and thrive. The chambers fill a role there in being the, being that voice of business, and being the source of education, even what I say I’m doing on the AI stuff, you know, the chamber to learn everything. That’s the the asking me of a chamber, you have to know, you have to be able to answer a question on any topic somebody, somebody brings you, so you have that body of knowledge that you can share with your members who don’t have time to get the knowledge on their own. I think that’s a critic. That’s a critical piece of it. You know, the other thing is, there is it’s becoming, I’m seeing it become more competitive, and I think chambers have to rise to that occasion. And it’s not that, it’s not chambers competing against other chambers. We’re going to. Region versus a county or whatever, but it’s you’ve got your chamber, and then you got this group over here, and this business association and this group and this group and this group, and everywhere I go, everybody talks about this, this challenge, the two ways to do it are to be better and stronger and basically take the other ones out because you’re because they just can’t compete with you. And the other is to be collaborative. I’d love to see collaboration. For so many years, it was okay. I’d collaborate with I’d love to collaborate you on an event, but who gets the $15 ticket and who gets the $100 sponsorship? No, just collaborate. Figure all. That’s the other if I if you bring a sponsor, it’s yours. If you bring sponsor of yours collaborate, cast a wider net. And I think, but I think that that existence in a increasingly competitive environment is is huge, and you have to be thoughtful about it. And you know, back to the AI thing, seminars, webinars are chambers, bread and butter, educational seminars and webinars. Well, you need to bear in mind that most topics, I can go to chatgpt and get an answer on anything I want in 30 seconds. So you have to up your game on these educational topics in that it’s not just about giving information. It’s about providing a perspective and a path forward and something where, where somebody’s going to go spend an hour with you. You want them leaving saying, Yeah, that was an hour well spent. So I think that kind of thinking is really going to be important as chambers exist in this competitive environment, but I don’t think they’ve ever been more important before than they are right now.
Brandon Burton 46:37 Yeah, that’s great. I love the answers, Craig, I wanted to give you a chance for anyone listening who may want to reach out and connect with you, possibly have you do a training for them or work with you somehow. What would be the best way for you to point people to connect and reach out to connect with you? Sure,
Craig Turner 46:55 best. There’s two things I’m as you’ve heard several times during this interview, I’m very heavy on LinkedIn, so you can get me on Messenger. If you do want to reach out, connect with me. Don’t follow me. Connect with me. If you follow me, I’m going to turn around and send you a connection request anyway, on LinkedIn and Facebook, I have AI for Chambers, exclusive groups where I share content and and prompt ideas. I set them up to kind of be like my Hey, I had this idea today, and I’ll share it so but get me on LinkedIn. Otherwise, very easy it’s Craig@Momentumhub.ai if you want to email me directly. I mean, I’m an email guy, still.
Brandon Burton 47:42 Very good. We will get that in the show notes for this episode make it easy for people to connect with you and learn more about what you have to offer and how you can help elevate their chamber. Awesome. Craig, this has been great having you on the show. I’m grateful for your insights and perspective that you brought, and I hope it helps move the needle, and especially as we look at the workforce issues among chambers and communities, to be able to help fill those gaps and to help chambers stay relevant as they move along into the future. But this has been great, and I really appreciate you. Craig.
Craig Turner 48:14 Well, thanks, thanks. Thanks to you too, Brandon. I do appreciate it. And but you know, best of luck with the Chamber chat podcast. I love it. You could tell I love this stuff, though. So
Brandon Burton 48:27 If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app 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.
Craig Turner 48:57 Hey, everyone. This is Craig Turner, founder of Momentum AI, I want to give a great big shout out, and thank you to Brandon Burton and the Chamber Chat Podcast for an incredible conversation today we touched on something game changing for chambers. That’s our Momentum AI platform. It’s designed to create customized, personalized strategies for your members, showing them how to make the most out of their membership with you. Whether you’re looking to boost engagement, retention or growth, this platform is your new secret weapon, and for all you Chamber Chat listeners, we’ve got a special offer just for you when you sign up for Momentum AI, use the code Chamber Chat C, H, A M, B, E R, C, H, A T, to get 10% off your initial subscription no matter what level you choose. Let’s harness the power of AI to supercharge your chamber and your members, head over to www.momentumhub.ai to learn more and get started today.
Bringing Local Back is a new, innovative platform that enables Chambers to be the hero in driving commerce in their communities. Secure your seat in our August 30 webinar to learn all about this program and see what kind of power it offers to your organization.
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 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts 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.
Our title sponsor is Community Matters, Inc. With nearly 20 years in the chamber industry and over 100 media awards presented to their chamber partners, community matters provides the R&R that every chamber needs, revenue and recognition.
When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!
Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.
Becki Womble 1:03 I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.
Brandon Burton 1:44 To learn how Community Matters can support your chamber with your next publication. Please visit communitymattersinc.com/podcast To request your free media kit and request a proposal to find out what kind of non-dues revenue you can generate.
Learn how you can partner with Community Matters, Inc. to produce your next Chamber Directory, Community Guide or Map.
Our guest for this episode is Kaytee Lorentzen. Kaytee is the Director of Communications and events at the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce. She spearheads the Chamber’s multifaceted marketing communications initiative engaging with a diverse array of stakeholders including Chamber members, the public media board and staff members. Her role involves closely collaborating with every department to craft coherent and compelling communication and marketing materials that cater to their unique needs. Beyond communications, she meticulously organizes and oversees the myriad of events that the Chamber orchestrates ensuring that they align with the organization’s objectives and standards. Kaytee has been a part of the chamber team since May of 2021, initially as a marketing and communications coordinator before stepping into the role as marketing and communications manager in January 2023, and subsequently evolving into her current position in September 2023. Before joining the chamber as a staff member, she was a member of the chamber with her photography business for four years. Kaytee holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a concentration in photojournalism from Ball State University. She’s a graduate from the Indiana chamber Executives Association, who’s your chamber Academy in June 2022, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Purdue University. And Kaytee, I am very excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I would love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Kaytee Lorentzen 3:37 Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Brandon, for having me on. I’ve been listening to your podcast ever since I have been a chamber professional. So I was super excited to get this opportunity. You helped me grow into this position. So I appreciate that. And everyone that’s been on the podcast as well. Just a little something interesting about myself. That isn’t in my bio. If I had a you know, a separate universe life, then I probably would have been a detective. I love true crime stuff. It’s kind of weird. Much I Love it. But even growing up I was, you know, doing forensics, trying to figure out fingerprinting and putting clues together. So that is what, but I would be in a different life. That’s
Brandon Burton 4:21 That is interesting. And there’s something to that the thrill of solving a mystery. You know, my my wife, she works at our kids elementary school. She’s the front desk receptionist and every now and then she’ll come home from work and say, I should have a detective badge. Like my GED today, you know, usually it’s some you know, kid in the neighborhood that’s caused some mischief, and they get caught on a ring doorbell camera or something. So the police will bring it to the school and say Do you recognize this kid? So she solves the mysteries. But there’s there’s something to that at the thrill of solving a mystery for sure. Oh,
Kaytee Lorentzen 4:55 yeah, like watching it on television shows I’m all about okay, I wonder if this happens. Next. Right,
Brandon Burton 5:01 right. Well tell us a little bit more about the greater Bloomington chamber just to give us an idea of the size staff scope of work. The tight you know, what kind of work you guys are involved with just to kind of set the table for our discussion. Yeah,
Kaytee Lorentzen 5:14 absolutely. So the greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce is located in Bloomington, Indiana. We are the home of Indiana University. So go Hoosiers, which is very ironic considering I go to Purdue University for graduate education. We Are Rivals so that’s really fun to be a part of. But the greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, we have six full time staff members and one part time staff. And all ton of interns. Currently we have one high school intern to undergrad scholar intern. So they’ll be with us for all four of their undergrad years, and two grad fellows which are also going to be with us for their whole grad program. So that’s how many we have a ton of people here. And we have about 850 members currently, Bloomington itself, the size is about 80,000 people. And then Monroe County, which is the county that Bloomington resides in is about 140,000 we say we are the greater Bloomington So yes, we do have a lot of Bloomington businesses but also more Monroe County and surrounding.
Brandon Burton 6:25 Very good that that definitely helps to give some perspective and even going through your bio just in the marketing communications as you’ve had different roles, shows you guys are you’ve got to you’ve got a good amount of staff and get a good team there to work with. So that’s awesome. Well, our topic that we’ve settled on for today is very relevant and timely for all the buzz that’s going around right now around chat GPT and AI and generative AI and so we’re gonna dive in deeper in that discussion today. Katie has done some some great presentations on this at different conferences. So we’re going to kind of tap into her her wealth of knowledge to be able to share some of that, with all you chamber pros as we as we move forward in this conversation. We’ll dive into that as soon as they get back from this quick break.
Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.
App My Community creates mobile apps that allow you to engage directly with your community. Enhance chamber membership by providing a unique advertising and communication channel to residents and visitors. Not just a member directory, App My Community has the tools to be useful to residents on a daily basis. Learn more at appmycommunity.com/chamberchat.
Are you looking for a way to grow and manage your chamber of commerce more effectively? Look no further than Chamber Nation! Our innovative software provides everything you need to streamline operations, engage members, and increase revenue. With features like event management, membership directories, advanced membership tools, mobile apps, community kiosks, and financial reporting, Chamber Nation makes it easy to run your chamber like a well-oiled machine. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to take your chamber to the next level. Visit www.RichardsCalendar.com to learn more about Chamber Nation today!
Donna Novitsky 9:03 Howdy. It’s Donna Novitsky here, CEO of Yiftee. Fun fact about local businesses, did you know that small businesses employ 57% of the US is non government workforce. Many of these small businesses are your Chamber members, we are here to help you help them. As you heard last week, we do digital gift cards for 500 plus communities and we call them community cards. Our chamber partners get a custom gift card branded for you that works exclusively in your member stores. The program is free for you and free for your members. We even give you reports so you can tell them how much business you brought them. Sign up for a live Zoom demo with me or one of my teammates yiftee.com/demo or email sales@yiftee.com. That’s why yiftee.com. That’s it for now back to the show.
Brandon Burton 9:57 All right, Kaytee, we are back And so I’m excited to learn how you’re using generative AI and just AI in general, as a chamber professional, where you see the use cases and where it’s helped to save you time make your job easier. And does it save you time at this point? You know, or is it just the learning and everything, but it ends up making your job easier. I’d love just to hear how you’re integrating this. And hopefully spark some ideas for listeners maybe want to explore some of these aspects of utilizing AI at their chamber.
Kaytee Lorentzen 10:32 Absolutely. So first and foremost, like artificial intelligence is just this plethora of things. So it pretty much all ultimately is intended to make computers do things that when done by people are described as having indicated intelligence. So I was very skeptical at first, I’m not one of those people who typically jump on bandwagons. So in November of last year, or sorry, to it would be November 2022. At that point, when it came out, I was like, I don’t know about this chat. GBT, it kind of seems a little not in my realm. Then I tried it. All I did was just asked a few questions. And I was like, wow, I just opened the door to something that’s going to make my life so much easier, just by asking it simple questions. And the more I’ve been using it, the more I have learned how to write the prompts that are necessary for it to generate the kind of answers that I’m meeting. So for example, the one thing I use it a lot for is just rewriting a lot of our website copy. It sounds very dated, and some of its not customer focused. And that’s more of what it needs to be. You want it to say, like I asked it, this is what we currently have on our website for our membership benefits. Can you rewrite this in more of a customer focused realm or point of view, and also give some examples of why it’s important for somebody to join the Chamber of Commerce. And they will give you a full list like, a lot of the time, if you ask it for list, it’ll give it to you. And now that I’ve used it so much, it thinks that I like list all the time. So it will continuously give me list until I say please stop putting into the list. I just need a paragraph. Yeah. And then it typically apologizes. It goes, Oh, I’m so sorry. Let me fix that for you. Right, right. The big thing that I’m doing right now is just rewriting a lot of our website copy. I’ve also used it for social media copy. I’ve even asked it to create social, like a social media plan. Small Business Week was something I was like, Okay, I want to do something different. I don’t just want to say, yeah, it’s Small Business Week, let’s celebrate small business. Let’s actually make some sort of content with it. And so it was able to give me five different days of social media content that all I had to do was just pretty much copy and paste and find some graphics and photos to go with it. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 12:59 So talk to us a little bit more about rewriting the website copy. Are you literally are you copy and pasting paragraphs from your website, login in chat? GPT? Are you able to give a link to the website and say, scan this page? And tell me how how does that interface work for those listening?
Kaytee Lorentzen 13:15 Yeah, it depends on what program you’re using, and what version of the program you’re using. I know, some websites will do that. But not all of them, like I primarily use to actually btw and chat GPT for. So I use the paid version. But I don’t put a link in there. I literally copy and paste the exact information so that way I like because a lot of our content is pretty long website page. So I just was like, No, I just want this section rewritten in this point of view, and then obviously, the main thing is, I always say, double check, it’s work. Because you never know what is gonna pop out and you want to edit it. I don’t ever think that you should copy and paste directly from whatever chat GBT or you know, whatever generative AI system you’re using, you need to go in and, like have oversight, it gets you 80% of the way there. But you need to go in and edit and finesse it and make it more your voice.
Brandon Burton 14:16 Yes, so you shared your experience in November of 20 I guess it’s 2022 right when chat GPT was made public and available for everybody to use. And I remember going to Thanksgiving dinner my brother in law was like Oh, you gotta check this out. And he’s he’s a very loud in your face kind of person anyway, so he’s shoving his phone everybody’s facing you ask it a question and just very excited about it and like, Okay, calm down. You know, so I asked him a few questions and and really the responses I got back because I was asking business related questions. You know, how can I create a social media posts from my podcast or tell me about a chamber of commerce, like what Chambers of Commerce do and just that feedback I was getting from it initially. You needed to verify, you know, the stuff it was kicking out. And granted, this is Chad GBT three. So it wasn’t it hadn’t scanned, you know nearly as much of the of the web and things like that. But an example of just this last week, I’ve got a daughter in fifth grade, she came home with a math problem in her homework that she wasn’t able to figure out. And my, I think it was my son who’s a senior single as chat GPT. And, like, first of all, it seems like cheating or, and then your homework to plug it in. But like, we worked through the problem, got the answer? And then I’m like, I’m gonna try this, you know. So I asked chat GBT exactly how the question was on the homework. And immediately it spit back an answer. And it wasn’t the right answer. So I gave it some clarifying, you know, prompts along with it, then it apologize, spit back and other answer, and it never came up with the right answer. And after verifying, like more and more of the criteria with it, it kept apologizing, but then we kept giving me the same answer over and over. And like, okay, and this is still catch up three GPT 3.5. So it wasn’t the paid version, maybe that would have gotten me better results, but goes to the point of you need to verify you can’t just trust everything that it puts out as being doctrine, like you got to, you got to really read it, you got to make sure it’s accurate. And some may say, Well, does that really save you time then? So how would you approach that with if you need to verify everything? How does that aspect work and time saving, or you know, the application into real world scenarios?
Kaytee Lorentzen 16:36 I think it varies on what you’re planning on using chat GPT for so if you’re using it for research, that can definitely still take you some more time, it hasn’t been able to scan everything, and it’s still learning, it’s still, you know, it’s still a child, and it’s learning new tech. Yeah, it’s still a baby, it’s still trying to figure out what it’s doing. But for me, I use it more for things that I know are fact based, like hard numbers type of thing. I use it more for like the colorful language. For an example, there was one way someone emailed us and I was trying to explain to them, I don’t think you understood what I was trying to say. But also saying it in a much better way. Because right, there are some times where your brain just you know, when that clicker icon just keeps going on a blink word screen. That’s how I felt with this. I was like, I don’t know how to say this. So I just asked chat GPT. And it gave me a much better way of writing it. That actually was exactly what I wanted to say. But I just didn’t have the words or the sound mind at that point. I think it was like 430 on a Friday or something. And it put it all together and flowed nicely. So that was something I more use it for is earliest for chatty BTW I use it more for that aspect. Even if you asked it to give you a source, sometimes it makes it up. So but at least if you can look up and see if that source even exists. And that sometimes works. I think I’ve only used it a few times with statistics. And then what I’ll do is I’ll just copy and paste this statistic that it gives me and look up where it is in Google. Yeah, just to verify, make sure that’s fine. But yeah, it varies, because I’ve also heard similar situations with homework, where someone it was I think it was NPR that I was listening to. And they were saying, Well, my daughter was doing homework. And they and I’m a history major. And it asked if this particular person in history was pro separation of church and state or against it, and it gave the wrong answer. And they were like, That’s not right. So I if you ever ask it fact, based information like that, then I would at least just copy and paste what it gave you and ask it as much question as you can to get where they got it from, quote unquote. And then you can find it on the internet pretty quickly. So
Brandon Burton 19:10 is there a value to giving it feedback to say that’s not a correct answer? Or yes, I’m gonna challenge the answer a little.
Kaytee Lorentzen 19:18 I think so because it’s learning based off of what you are giving it as well. So like if you there’s even after every single prompts that it gives you, was this, what you were looking for? Was this not and then there’s a thumbs up, thumbs down and you just put that in there it actually is teaching it. That’s another way that it’s learning on giving the correct answers. So if other people start asking similar questions or something like that, it’s it’s now learning based off of our responses, right, right.
Brandon Burton 19:49 And I think you know, although some of the information you get may not be totally accurate need to verify if you’re having some writer’s block going on or looking for ideas Just to be able to put a prompt in and receive, you know, a ton of ideas and, you know, pretty much instantaneously, things that will get those creative juices going in your mind, again, that I’ve heard it said that it’s not to replace your own thinking in your own mind, but it’s to supplement it’s to add to what you’re already doing. Yes. Yeah. I know, in an example that I had, there was a chamber professional that I mentioned, how much they enjoy the podcast, and you know, very nice email about what they have appreciated. So this is great. Would you mind putting this as a review on Apple podcasts? And they try it and try it couldn’t figure it out? Like, can you tell me how to leave a review? Like, let me ask Chet GPT. So I just did, how do you leave a review for by and just copy and paste it? And I could have typed the response and said, Here’s how you do it. But to look up each, you know, the website and give a link and here and there and back and forth? Just that plug it in chat? GPT it was all right, copy, paste, send and it was done. And it was easy. It was easy.
Kaytee Lorentzen 21:05 Yeah, as long as you just review it and be like, Yeah, that’s exactly how you do it, then you can just copy and paste, which is nice. And that’s kind of what I’ve done. Even for scripts for videos that we do. I’ve asked it to make it you can even ask it. Can you make this more of a TED Talk style, and it will completely read rewrite it? I did that actually the first time I presented this at the Indiana chamber Executives Association Conference. Hi, how do you write my intro? I didn’t like how it was like, have a we tried TED Talk style? Yeah, very different. It was, it almost felt like when you were reading it out loud, exactly how it starts. Right. Any TED Talk? So
Brandon Burton 21:50 maybe let’s talk about that a little bit about the prompts that we put into to any AI, generative AI assistant. What kind of things do we need to consider? Because I think we’re very much a lot of the public is very much still in the mindset of Google, right? You put in? What is this? He put in a question, get a response. So talk to us about a prompt, and maybe becoming a prompt engineer, so to speak.
Kaytee Lorentzen 22:17 Yes, yes. So that is something I’ve definitely been trying to hone my skills on, is learning how to create the best prompts. I always say, garbage in, garbage out. So whatever. If you give it like subpar information, it’s going to give you a subpar answer. So you want to make sure that it has as much information as you can possibly give it. Like if you’re trying to make a all do something pretty simple, like a social media post, if you tell it your audience exactly who it’s supposed to cater to, you can even tell it more of like your customer persona, it will give you a much better answer and a less generic answer, it’ll become more personalized. So that’s a lot of the time why I copy and paste a lot of our content when I’m asking it to rewrite it. So I say take this and move it to something more like this other thing. So that could be you know, saying it needs it needs to have more colorful language, can you make it sound more professional, this needs to be more towards small business owner, not necessarily the big business, so you can change up exactly what you’re wanting it to do. But the more specific the better it is.
Brandon Burton 23:37 Yeah. So as you’re given that response reminds me I had recently read a book called The AI whispers method. And it it’s a, it’s an AI generative fiction novel. So it takes the whole hero storyline and plugs it into to teach you how to use AI. And it talks a lot about generating prompts. And even asking, like, for example, with Chet GPT, to act as a math teacher or act as a math professor to give me an answer to this problem or act as a sports historian and tell me why, you know, this scenario is happening or so being able to get that context of act as if or act as a different, you know, expert in different fields, it’s able to tap into different resources and really understand what it is that you’re looking for. So as I played around with that there’s a lot of power in the act as prompt when you plug that into chat. GPT
Kaytee Lorentzen 24:45 Absolutely. That’s actually something I do for our customer journey type of thing. I said to chat GPT act as if you are a brand new business. You’ve never heard of the Chamber of Commerce. You We are interested in it because someone mentioned that it’s a great thing to join, why should they join? What are their pain points? What are their objectives? What are the rebuttals to those objectives? So you can really start tailoring your content to better address their pain points and why you’re the solution to their problems.
Brandon Burton 25:19 Right. I love that. So let’s, let’s maybe circle back a little bit more to the generative AI. Discussion. So you mentioned you, you’ve used it to rewrite website content, you use it for social media posts. What other applications are you seeing in the chamber world, specifically for using generative AI? That
Kaytee Lorentzen 25:40 is a fabulous question. So for me, I have been using it more obviously, for the marketing aspect of it. I’ve even asked it to write event descriptions. So what makes people come into the event more? What makes it more appealing, besides just saying, you know, come to this chamber event at this day, on this time at this place, we look forward to expanding your network hope to see you there. It sounds the exact same every single time. So how do I change it up and make it sound more exciting? What makes that chamber member have to be at that event. So I use that a lot for to change up the descriptions. I’ve also asked it to make correct like full social media campaigns, not just the captions itself. Also, like I mentioned earlier, the market research different emails to members. So like how, like, if you’re saying I want people to fill out this survey, what makes someone fill out this, if you ask to attribute it, right, this email, enticing people to fill out this survey that doesn’t. Obviously, we’re all nonprofits, we don’t have a whole lot of money to give out as an incentive. So without incentives, I’m creating different types of plans for customer journeys. The one that I’ve used the most often is writing up ours, we have a sponsorship book that we do all at one time, kind of like why GM does. And so I’ve asked it to rewrite our sponsorship book and why people should sponsor it and why it’s important to sponsor it. And then lately, I have noticed AI disclosures on your website, writing a disclaimer for your website, we actually didn’t have quite a few like the privacy policies, those things that you’re supposed to have on your website. And so I was like, I’m gonna see if Chad GPD can come up with something very like simple and then obviously run it by our lawyer, just to make sure everything sounds great. But it really helps take out a lot of the guesswork for us. We didn’t have to do you know, how many hours of research trying to make sure that what we had in there? Would it be? Sound for us to use, even if it’s just like a blanket one? I think ours is our AI disclaimer is probably two paragraphs, just saying, you know, we use AI, there are things that may be generated by AI that come out here, but there’s always human oversight, ultimately, is what it says but in some more legalese term. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 28:15 Like that. So I guess that brings up a good talk at a good point to talk about as well, where I know I’ve been at chamber conferences and breakout sessions you you lead some these breakout sessions, where we talk about AI? And the question always comes up as far as the legality, the copyright issues if you’re especially like image generation, right? So if you’re asking generative AI to produce an image for you, who owns the rights to that, is there copyright issues if you’re bringing in certain elements into that? So if you would speak a little bit to the legality and regulations around AI and what we need to kind of be aware of and kind of look out for as we kind of navigate through this new world of artificial intelligence?
Kaytee Lorentzen 29:03 Absolutely. This is definitely something we need. As chamber professionals. If you’re using AI just to keep up to date on there are quite a few websites that you can track legislation. And there’s a lot on AI. Currently, right now, as of August 30, of 2023, the US Copyright Office issued a notice of inquiry in the Federal Register on copyright. And AR pretty much just means they’re going to be studying it to see kind of whether legislation or regulatory steps are even warranted, and also just steps to advise Congress on any legislation that does come through. But anything right now made by something other than human is not protected by copyright. So if I like the API disclosure I was talking about I can’t if someone else wanted to copy and paste it and use it, they legally can. And I can’t cry that that’s copyright. So that’s it. One thing that we have to look at, right now a lot of people are getting frustrated with the image portion of it, I haven’t used that aspect too much, because I still feel like there is a lot of stock photo that I can use in that aspect. And I don’t need to just create an image that we don’t have. But other people are saying that it’s very unfair to the artists, which I do, as someone who’s a photographer, I get that completely. And it takes, you know, scanning my work to use someone else’s yet that’s not exactly something I’m a fan of. But I am interested to see where that’s going to be going and legislations and any what Congress is planning on doing on that. And I do think that they’re in a very interesting position right now. And I think they do need to take that whole issue very seriously, that AI is here, and it’s going to, it’s, you know, people are still scared of it. But it was very similar to like, when the internet happened, it, everyone was scared of it, it was this big thing that everyone’s like, this is going to change the world. It did. But now if we look back, if you don’t have a website, you’re not really relevant. Or you’re not considered trustworthy. So if that’s something similar what AI is gonna do, that’s, I’m just very interested to see where it’s gonna go, what regulations we’re gonna have. So just keeping up to date, making sure that we are using it legally, then that is something that we do need to do, and do our due diligence on it, as you know, people that are in the community seen as a trustworthy and leader.
Brandon Burton 31:42 Yeah, for sure. Now, it’s definitely important to keep that on the forefront with any legislation that comes out. But I think to your point with the internet, you know, if you didn’t adopt the internet and have a website, now, you’re kind of irrelevant. And I see a very similar course with AI. And just the AI technology has been adopted quicker than any other technology in the history of mankind. I don’t know, besides like the fire, maybe I don’t know. But. But as far as the technology goes, it’s been adopted very quickly. And I could easily see in five or 10 years maybe doesn’t even take that long, that there’s going to be two types of chambers, right? There’s going to be the ones that use AI and the ones that are no longer around, essentially, because they’re not relevant. And they’re not able to really leverage the power that comes from Ai, especially when you’re dealing with limited budgets, and being nonprofits and all that. There’s a lot of leverage. Yeah,
Kaytee Lorentzen 32:38 and I completely understand why it would seem intimidating or scary at first, because I was in that same exact boat. But as soon as I tried it, I was very surprised at the fact that I felt like it was something that anyone and everyone can use. Even if you’re just asking simple questions like, can you give me a recipe for a very simple meal like something, it’s something you can just play around with and have fun. And the more you use it, the more you find things that you can use it for? Yeah,
Brandon Burton 33:09 I’ve heard people will take, you know, just random ingredients they have in the refrigerator and say I’ve got these seven ingredients, give me a recipe of something, I can make it it’ll do it. So where would you suggest somebody gets started with a journey in AI and just kind of getting their mind wrapped around it? Yeah,
Kaytee Lorentzen 33:28 I would say just pick up like one or any of the generative AI tools that we have available. Google’s version is Bard. And then there’s chat GPT. There’s all just, obviously, Google, because Google or cert, go in your search engine, and ask it for a generative AI tool, and just start asking it questions. And the more you do it, the more you’ll get better at asking the I don’t want to write questions, but better questions, you refine the questions, you refine the questions to get the answers that you’re looking for. And then you start, that’s when your wheels start turning and figuring out where can I apply this in my professional life? Right.
Brandon Burton 34:10 So I didn’t give you a heads up that I was going to ask you this question. So if we need to edit it out, we can but I’m curious. What are you excited about on the forefront that you see coming with AI in the next weeks, months years?
Kaytee Lorentzen 34:24 I’m just excited to see the evolution of where it’s going. It just reminds me of like when the first iPhone came out, like and just seeing how it evolves and where it’s at now that it’s pretty much a part of our daily lives. If you’re an Apple user, obviously. It’s something that I am just excited to see where it’s gonna go. I’m excited to see how our legislation will take this and you hopefully use it for the good obviously, there’s always some bad actors, but I think Oh, For all this is going to be something that’s extremely well received in, in our world. Right?
Brandon Burton 35:07 I think there’s just a world of opportunity available. And quite honestly, I don’t know if legislation can keep up with the trends and the way things will develop. But we need to be plugged in and not be burying our head in the sand pretending like it’ll go away because it’s not going to go away. Well, Katie, as we look to the future, actually, let me back up before I ask that question for a chamber who’s listening who wants to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share for them to try to accomplish that goal?
Kaytee Lorentzen 35:42 I would say, the tip to use is embrace playing. I know that sounds so weird, but embrace that it’s something new embrace change, it will make a world of a difference. Because I can even tell you even in my office, as soon as people started embracing this tool, it was a game changer. Like our membership director, she now uses that a lot to help personalize each individual sales email, instead of just having like this copy and paste mentality of the same type of email, she can personalize it a lot more saying, this is the industry this person is in. And now she says that she really can’t go without it. Our operations manager uses it to help create some Excel documents, like it’s different things, the more you play with it, and embrace the change that it can bring, the better I think we’ll all be.
Brandon Burton 36:41 Absolutely, it reminds me. Last year, our church, we were putting together a fundraiser for our youth program at church. And I was trying to get the text together for the flyers that we’re gonna go out and promote on social media and everything. And I was just having the hardest time trying to make all the words fit on this flyer without being crowded and like telling what we’re trying to accomplish. And I told my wife, this Super Chat GPT will say I plug it in, give it the prompts, and it spit back and answer those beautiful, perfect, and we use that going forward. Like if I would have just done that from the beginning, it would have saved me so much time and headache and just beating my head against a wall trying to figure something out. That wasn’t coming to me. And it was it’s a great tool. So I would encourage everybody to embrace the play and embrace the change. Because I think initially, you and I both had this similar initial reactions I get I’ll know about this chat GPT steps, the more you get into it, you see more and more applications where it can assist you and make your life a little bit easier. So as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Kaytee Lorentzen 37:53 You know, it’s funny as I was like, you know, how do I answer? Because I knew this one was coming, right? Because I hear from everyone. So I asked chat GPT what they thought. And it gave me a gave me a list of nine different things. But I would like to kind of summarize what because a lot of it is things that I thought of but I was like how do I make this sound? Great. I do see a lot of the future of chambers using innovation and technology adaptation, obviously, for me using AI and GPT. I do see that. And I think with that we will become leaders in the business space in general. I think it will bring forward I’m trying to think of the correct word that I want to use. But it will bring forward this leadership of how the standard should be set on business and how they can embrace it as well. And I think that we’ll have a lot of Gosh, I’m trying to figure out
Brandon Burton 39:04 here, but you can plug it as chat GPT
Kaytee Lorentzen 39:09 Pretty much yeah, just focusing on the technological changes focusing on small business and it’s going to just help leverage that and just, you know, promote this business atmosphere that I think will be that will occur encourage all of that.
Brandon Burton 39:33 Yeah, I can definitely see that and we need to be embrace the innovation that comes with technology. Yes.
Kaytee Lorentzen 39:43 You pretty much said exactly what I was wanting to say. All
Brandon Burton 39:45 right, well, whether you know it or not, you said it at some point in there because I wrote it down and he said well, Katie, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and learn more, maybe Do you see some of the slides or anything you’ve shared at different conferences or whatever you’re willing to share and help out with them? What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?
Kaytee Lorentzen 40:09 The best way is probably through either email or through LinkedIn. So my email is just klorentzen@chamberbloomington.org. And my LinkedIn, you can just find me, Katie Lorentzen, and I spell it differently. So I’ll spell it here for you guys. It is Kaytee and then my last name Lorentzen. And either a message on either of those are typically the best way to get a hold of me just because I am all over the place. And my phone is always on me. So those two apps right there for me.
Brandon Burton 40:45 That’s perfect. And we’ll get that in our show notes too. So people can pull that up and have easy access to reach out. But I appreciate all the value you offered to listeners today here on chamber tap podcast for sharing your experience of exploring and being innovative using generative AI and I just, you know, it’ll be fun to look back at this episode a year from now and be like, Wow, things have really advanced in the last year. So I know I’m excited. Yeah, but thank you for being with us today. This has been a fun and enlightening conversation. So thank you.
Kaytee Lorentzen 41:18 Thank you for having me.
Brandon Burton 41:19 If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app 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.
Get started with your own Chamber Podcast and shortcut your learning curve with the Chamber Podcast Course offered by Chamber Chat Podcast.
Have you considered the many benefits of hosting a podcast for your Chamber? The options, leverage, and possibilities that a podcast offers are virtually endless. Download my FREE Chamber Podcasting Guide to learn how to start your own Chamber podcast!
