One of my favorite reads on brand marketing is Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand. Miller writes persuasively on how to build a brand and how to elevate it. In other words, whether your company is in its infancy stage, or it is a mature company looking to expand into another market, there are some useful tools throughout the book. How does Miller’s brand strategy teachings effectively cover such a wide spectrum?

Update Your Resume 
Singer/songwriter Stacy Chaney talks about the parody song that is music to the AEC Marketer's soul! Stacy cleverly created Update Your Resume Pronto to the tune of We Don't Talk About Bruno and takes this creative approach to her work as an A/E/C marketer.
https://aecmarketeer.fireside.fm/84  
 
How A/E/C Clients use Websites to Find and Vet Services Providers
This is a link to a study published by the SMPS Foundation in 2017 about how A/E/C Clients use websites to find and vet services providers.
https://lecoursdesign.com/aec-websites/ 
 
Busting Boilerplate Proposals with Jen McGovern
This former SMPS Chapter President goes into what makes a boring boilerplate proposal go from compliant to compelling. They dig into win themes, go/no-go discussions, and so much more!
https://aecmarketeer.fireside.fm/77 
 
Calendly
Calendly is a scheduling tool to help you organize and manage your work schedule. You can create simple rules and add your availability preferences in the tool. By sharing the link of your schedule, you can let people know when you’re available so they can book a meeting with you while considering your prior engagements.
https://calendly.com/ 
 
Quillbot
Quillbot is an AI-powered online paraphrasing tool. It helps you rewrite and enhance your sentences in different forms. You can also choose from Standard or Flow mode and get it integrated into Chrome or Microsoft Word for a smoother workflow.
https://quillbot.com/

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few months, it’s been hard to escape the ChatGPT chatter. Language modeling software, including ChatGPT, is one of the most rapidly growing fields with significant potential for future development and innovation. In fact, many of us are already seeing the benefits and drawbacks as it becomes a major disruptor in our content production processes. And as A/E/C marketers, it's important to stay informed on the latest trends and technologies in our field.

According to a survey by HubSpot, 63% of marketers believe that AI will be able to generate content with accuracy within the next five years. In addition, a report by MarketsandMarkets found that the natural language processing (NLP) market size is expected to reach $26.4 billion by 2024, driven by the increasing use of NLP in various applications, including sentiment analysis and speech recognition.

The AI Revolution is Coming...Slowly for the AEC Industry
Our own survey of SMPS Colorado members showed that 100% of respondents have heard of ChatGPT or other language modeling systems, with about 75% having tested such software. However, less than 50% of respondents reported using language modeling software for day-to-day tasks, indicating a hesitation to rely fully on AI-powered tools.

Getting to know ChatGPT
Our survey revealed that just 41% of our members are familiar with the underlying technology of language modeling systems, such as deep learning and neural networks. This highlights the need for more education and training around the mechanics of these powerful tools. With more widespread and common use, you can assume that people will be generating a significant amount of more content. Which leads to questions around saturation and generalized content. Therefore, understanding the underlying power of AI language models like ChatGPT will be increasingly important to ensure that they are developed and used in a responsible and ethical manner, and leverage to their potential to drive innovation and positive impact on society.

Ethical Dilemmas in the Age of AI
In addition to concerns about the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content, ethical considerations also arise. Our survey showed that almost 80% of respondents see potential ethical concerns around the use of language modeling systems in marketing. When I asked ChatGPT for statistics about ethical concerns involving ChatGPT and language modeling systems, here’s what it said:

“AI language models like Chat GPT have been found to have ethical concerns related to bias, misuse, lack of transparency, and environmental impact. Studies have found that language models contain biases related to gender, race, and ethnicity and that researchers are concerned about their potential for misuse. The lack of transparency around how these models are trained, and the data used to train them can also raise concerns about fairness and bias. Additionally, the energy consumption of training and using these models has been found to have a significant environmental impact. Addressing these concerns will be important to ensure that language models are developed and used in a responsible and ethical manner.”

Despite these concerns, it's clear that language modeling systems have the potential to revolutionize the way we approach marketing. 

The world of AI-powered marketing is both exciting and daunting. But with a little education and a lot of caution, we can navigate this brave new world and use these tools to their full potential. Who knows, maybe one day we'll be able to fully embrace our AI overlords...err, we mean, colleagues.

 

Congratulations on becoming a supervisor for the first time in your career! Or, if you’re not a supervisor yet (and would like to be), congratulations on being proactive! In our haste to create a comprehensive onboarding experience for our new “direct reports” (who will be referred to as team members moving forward), there’s often something lacking—onboarding for the first-time supervisor. 

In early April of this year, I had a chance to interview Jim Mellor, who just recently retired from Pinkard Construction. Jim joined SMPS in the early 1980s and has had a huge impact on the Colorado chapter. He was also the recipient of SMPS Colorado’s prestigious Leonardo Award in 2000. 

Ten Things Successful People (Who Are Actually Happy) Do Differently
This article by Dr. Travis Bradberry gives insight into what he feels are ten things that successful people do.  It is an interesting reminder about priorities.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/things-successful-people-who-actually-happy-do-dr-travis-bradberry/ 

Good to Great is a classic business management book based on Jim Collins’ team researching hundreds of companies and distilling the list down to a handful or so that all have “greatness.” Collins is a leading management researcher and consultant who works out of Boulder, which adds to his coolness factor. So, why should a marketer read “Good to Great,” when in fact it is more of a management than a marketing read...?

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this (or said this) before when trying to fill a marketing position at your firm: “This candidate seems to have [insert desirable skills here], but doesn’t have AEC-specific experience, so we will pass.”

Raise your other hand if it’s been difficult to quickly fill and keep marketing positions at your firm: are both hands raised? Great, now do the wave because you’re amongst many.  

After seven years of doing Marketing in the A/E/C industry, I am thrilled to be attending a conference. The Southwest Regional Conference (SWRC), held April 12th through 14th in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will have an assortment of speakers and sessions for anyone at any stage of their career.

Every year for our anniversary, my husband and I like to splurge on a fancy meal. We love to explore new places, but I was reminded this November that the Old Hickory Steakhouse is one of our favorites for a reason!

Lately, I’ve been listening to The Anxious Achiever podcast, hosted by Morra Aarons-Mele. Its mission is to reframe how we think about mental health and neurodivergence at work.

Today’s world has highlighted the need for our firms to consider how societal issues affect our most valuable assets – our people. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are more important than ever as we work to ensure our organizations are places where every individual is seen, heard, and celebrated for their unique strengths, values, and perspectives.

My fiancé and I moved to Colorado from Southeast Kansas in the summer of 2018. It didn’t take long for us to realize, and fall in love with, the Denver social norm that is “Brunch”. To be honest, you Coloradoans had me at “Bottomless Mimosas” and “Breakfast for Lunch.”    

Fast forward three years to 2021, and we found ourselves experienced brunch connoisseurs living in the small touristy town of Idaho Springs, which is roughly a 30-minute drive west on I-70 from Denver and has a population of just over 1,800 residents. With it being on the way to ski towns like Silverthorne and Vail, traffic is often the worst part of living here, at least during the summer and ski season. One of the best things is that downtown, home to so many amazing local shops, bars, and restaurants, is less than a mile from my front porch. Choosing which restaurant to write about from all of these amazing local places wasn’t easy, but it’s Main Street Restaurant that has taken the cake, or pancake, I should say.

Get a sponsor: How to find the person who can help you get ahead at work.

This powerful talk from Carla Harris, business executive and author, explores how to identify and develop a productive sponsor relationship with someone who will speak on your behalf in situations such as closed-door meetings that you are not yet a part of.

Asymptomatic Spread of Racism

If you’re like me, you’ve been around the block a few times with self-help audiobooks, seminars, workshops, and probably even podcasts. As marketers and business developers, we are constantly looking for new ways to connect with each other to build meaningful, and hopefully profitable, relationships. Many of you have probably seen, or at the very least heard, the name Jay Shetty.

When you become a member of SMPS Colorado, you get two separate logins – one for SMPS Colorado and the other for SMPS National. When I began my membership in 2017, I was very new to the industry and my role while working as a sole marketer. I took the opportunity to search MySMPS and SMPS.org for any resources that could help me succeed in my new role. 

Whether the Community Boards, Directory, or the Education Webinars, there is so much to go through and take advantage of. One resource from SMPS National that I found the most helpful, even now after five years, is the Bookstore (https://www.smps.org/resources/store/). The Bookstore contains various publications including some well-known, popular ones such as the Marketer magazine, Blueprints, and Markendium, as well as lesser-known publications like the A/E/C Marketing Fundamentals, Domains of Practice, and Marketer Must-Reads e-books. Some of the publications are available at no cost to current members while others must be paid for in order to receive via mail or digital copies.

The most recent (free) publication that I downloaded was the Marketer Must-Read e-book: Digital Marketing. The e-book is a great option for Marketing and BD professionals looking to up their game in the digital world. It has tips galore provided by other professionals in the industry.

As marketers, we know that creating a winning proposal requires significant time, thought, and resources. We also know that “spinning our wheels” on projects we have no chance of winning, don’t make good business sense, or don’t fit our firm’s strategic goals keeps us from investing in opportunities that are right for our business. Not to mention, these instances lead to lower win rates, poor team morale, and burnout. Losing repeatedly isn’t fun for anyone.

“If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t YOU. The problem is your system.” Sound too good to be true? Well, in Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, James Clear explains that we repeat bad habits not because we don’t want to change badly enough, but because we don’t have the right system for change in place. He offers a practical framework: don’t focus on the outcome; focus on the process. Changing your focus to your system means creating tiny, “atomic habits,” which compound over time and naturally lead to remarkable results. Think a 1% change, compounded over time (365 days), leading to exponential change (37x better in a year)!