Waikato Business News August/September 2023

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16 WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2023 Unleash the power of AI to increase productivity in your business What if I told you that the most popular business productivity tools—apps like Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Excel—could now harness the boundless power of ChatGPT? Imagine having an extraordinary mind at your side, ready to assist, suggest, and co-create within the very applications you rely on daily. Writing emails, product descriptions, and even policy documents for you; generating spreadsheet formulas based on plain English, or cleaning up data in seconds based on plain English instructions. This is not science fiction; it's the current reality that businesses are taking advantage of, and those who aren’t are getting left behind. A joint study just released from Harvard, MIT, Warwick Business School and Boston Consulting Group tested over 700 consultants, requiring them to complete a series of tasks. Half of them were allowed to use AI, the other half were not. The results were amazing. The consultants who used AI completed tasks 25% quicker and produced 40% higher quality in their results! What is more, the consultants who performed the worst in their benchmark tests before the experiment, had the biggest jump in performance when using AI, with a 43% improvement. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one, meaning that using AI can be a significant leveller in THE DIGITAL WORLD BY JOSH MOORE Josh Moore is the head marketing fanatic at Duoplus, a Hamilton-based digital marketing agency that helps clients get more leads and sales through online marketing. www.duoplus.nz terms of performance across a team. Welcome to a world where ChatGPT becomes your indispensable partner in achieving unparalleled excellence. So how do can you use ChatGPT in everyday business to increase productivity? Here are some ideas. Create Spreadsheet Formulas Using Plain English You can now use GPT within Cars, cars, cars! I had the experience yesterday of driving through the Knighton Rd/Cameron Rd/May St area. We had been asked to comment on v urban design, or lack thereof, in the area – that’s another story. However, one of the things that immediately stood out was the number of cars parked on the street, and in driveways and across footpaths. This is the unfortunate outcome when insufficient parking is provided on site. This is particularly true in areas with a lot of student flats, which typically have higher numbers of cars per houshold or property. There is a general move underway – though not without some resistance – in society and from central and local government, to reduce our dependence on cars, and to enable and encourage more public transport use, walking and cycling. Largely this is driven by our ugrent need to reduce carbon emissions, transport being our second largest producer after agriculture. With my productivity hat on, I cannot see how it is efficient to move millions of people around in individual metal boxes. I readily acknowledge that public transport is not suitable for every place or situation. But the beautiful thing is that when more people use public transport or active transport modes, it also makes the roads freer and easier for Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to write formulas for you. There is a small setup process that is required, but once connected, you can save considerable time and effort. Let’s look at an overly simple example. Having entered sales data for last year, you can ask GPT in plain English, for the formula you need to calculate the totals. For example, “total all sales figures in cells c3 to f3.” GPT replies saying, “Assuming the sales figures are in cells C3, D3, E3, and F3, you can use the following formula: =SUM(C3:F3)” But where the power really kicks in is writing complex those who genuinely need – or just really want – to drive. Having said that, and while our team would love to see a future with fewer cars – architectural practices after all being often idealistic, green-minded places – we are pragmatic enough to recognise that, at least in the immediate future, most households have at least a couple of vehicles, and therefore, require somewhere to put them. The 2020 National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD), prevents local councils from requiring developers to provide a set minimum number of carparks in new developments. While well-intentioned, and appropriate to encourage higher density development in city centres, the broad application of this rule to all urban areas formulas for you that would normally take an Excel expert to write. Things like XLOOKUP, INDEX, LEFT, MID, RIGHT, MATCH, REGEXEXTRACT and more. With ChatGPT connected you can just describe in plain English what you want to happen, and it will create the formula for you. Easily Extract Specific Information From Your Spreadsheet You can also use some specific GPT functions to extract information from within cells. This can be extremely useful for extracting names, emails, domains, or company names LANDMARKS BY PHIL MACKAY Phil Mackay is Business Devolpment Manger at Hamilton-based PAUA, Procuta Associates Urban + Architecture means private developers are less likely to include adequate parking provisions for new housing. Until a change is made to allow councils more scope to control parking in suburban developments, the burden will fall on ratepayers to provide additional on-street parks, and we will see suburban streets increasingly crowded with parked cars. from a big list of data. For example, if we have a list of full names, and you want to extract the first names, and remove duplicates, you can use GPT_EXTRACT to quickly achieve that without any complex formula. e.g. We can use the formula: =GPT_EXTRACT(B3:B11, ”unique first names”). Almost instantly the result comes back with the first names from that range. The power comes in ChatGPT understanding what you want to extract. You might hand it a list of contacts where all the information is in a single cell, and you can ask it to extract names and email addresses or company names, and it understands and pulls out the data. One of our team members spent three hours manually creating some very complex formulas to extract URLs from a long list of data. Another team member used a ChatGPT function to achieve the same result in less than four minutes! Access Internet Information from Within Your Spreadsheet There are other functions where GPT will access its knowledge base to provide information we didn’t already have in the sheet. =GPT_TABLE("Make a table of the top 3 Korean car manufacturers with their annual revenue and number of employees") Sheets returns a table with the data almost instantly. That’s wild! Creating Emails and Policy Documents in Google Docs One of the things ChatGPT has become famous for is its ability to write very well-written content. Let’s look at two scenarios. In the first scenario you want to create a professional and friendly email to thank everyone who attended your recent networking event. Simply use plain English in the custom prompt box to tell Docs what you want and then let it do the work for you. We can tell GPT that we want it to, “create a brief thank you email to send to the people who attended our networking evening.” The results come back within seconds, and it’s very well-written. In the second scenario, you could get GPT + Docs to create social media marketing content for your business. For our example, we could tell GPT that we want it to, “write a LinkedIn post, welcoming our new sales manager, Tim Major, formerly Queensland Territory Manager for XYZ Widgets in Sydney.” The result is superb. If you haven’t tried it before, try these prompts as examples and you’ll be suitably impressed with it returns. I don’t know how many times I have sat at the keyboard waiting for inspiration, trying to find just the right words, and ending up with a result I’m not entirely happy with. Never again! While the results aren’t always perfect, it is much faster to edit than to start from scratch. The speed and productivity boost that comes from embracing AI is so impressive, that every office-based company needs to be embracing AI to boost productivity and effectiveness, or alternatively find yourself struggling to keep up with the competition.
There’s an audience for every business on TikTok TikTok is not just for Gen Z, and businesses who do it well are reaping huge rewards, according to awardwinning PR agency HMC. HMC director Heather Claycomb says if your business isn’t on the platform yet, now is a great time to be first and capture a loyal audience, because others will follow. “TikTok is not a trend, it is a platform that has changed the face of social media permanently. Our team believes most businesses will be on it within the next five years.” HMC has helped several businesses lean into TikTok and overcome any pre-conceived perceptions they may have about the platform. Hamilton Central Business Association (HCBA) general manager Vanessa Williams started using TikTok to promote the many and varied shops and businesses in Hamilton’s CBD. She admits she knew very little about the platform before she started but says its short-form video content has been a game-changer for the organisation. “When TikTok crossed our radar as a tool to promote the CBD’s businesses, I felt lost. But even then, I could see it was a hand-in-glove fit for our objectives. Short, snappy videos seemed like the perfect way to showcase these businesses to a new audience of younger digital natives,” she says. “HCBA promotes a diverse range of businesses, so we must attract a variety of people of different ages and interests. We were already leaning heavily into Facebook and Instagram but felt that we lacked a good channel to reach a younger audience. Tik- Tok plugged that gap for us and was where we could post punchy, engaging compilation videos.” Can I find my audience on TikTok? So, can other businesses find their audience on TikTok? With over 1 billion monthly active users around the world the answer is most likely yes. Although many assume it is a platform for teens, research shows 61.6% of users are over 25, and 170 million users are aged 35-44. HMC’s social media expert Jamie Batters says most businesses can benefit from Tik- Tok, and it pays to do your research first. “See if your competitors are on the platform already. If they are, have a look at their content and the amount of engagement they’re getting. That’s a quick way to see if TikTok has an audience you can capture,” she says. WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2023 WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS, 17 A Can I provide value to my audience on this platform? Reaching an audience is one thing but turning them into customers is another. The key is deep engagement – getting them to watch your videos then seek you out for advice. How do you achieve that? For Jamie, it’s about giving them something valuable first. “TikTok lends itself to quick explainer videos, light-hearted how-tos, life hacks, “day in the life” videos, and educational tools. If you’re a lawyer or accountant, what great advice can you give for free? “Younger users are turning to the app for discovery purposes in place of Google. Nearly 40% of Gen Z members prefer TikTok over Google for online searches, and we are experiencing a shift of users utilising the platform as a search engine.” Work to a plan TikTok success comes from playing a longer game, which puts an emphasis on consistency and frequency of content. That may sound daunting, but Vanessa insists it’s well within reach of most businesses, provided they get one thing right. “Planning is everything. That’s one of the early things Jamie did with us – we sat down with her and laid out a 3-month map of the content we wanted to capture on video. Working to a plan freed us from the weekly stress of ‘What now?’” How difficult is it to create video content? A cursory look on TikTok will show you that most of the best content has been created with a simple point-and-shoot of the phone video. For Jamie, keeping things simple is better. “Bring it back to basics. The key is giving your audience something they’ll find valuable. That’s how you become a resource that people will turn to when they need your product, service, or advice.” Our Democracy Needs You The General Election is upon us, and voting is one of the foundations of democracy, and with democracy comes so many freedoms. There are many nations where voting is not offered and many more where there is only one “real” alternative, so it is a rare privilege to be able to pick your representatives and one that over the broad sweep of humanity on this planet has been offered to very few. We need good people to stand for election and to show common sense in Parliament. Sadly, this trimester there have been a few whose behaviour has not met the public’s standards, and many more members of Parliament who simply have not delivered. Good luck to all the candidates. In today’s world the concept of elected service to your community is forgotten by many, yet we want the best, most meritorious, candidates to represent us in Parliament or on Council. Whatever your politics, when Members of Parliament voluntarily close their political careers and get the opportunity to look back on their time in Parliament, with its review of why they stood for election, we should read or listen to their speeches in appreciation of their service. It is easy to be partisan and block your ears to the words of the people and parties you may not support. But the Chamber is a broad church with its members spread across the political spectrum. In the hurly burly of electioneering, we as voters often miss why a candidate stands for election. Accordingly, when two of our serving politicians voluntarily step down and get to deliver their valedictories, we should listen and appreciate their contributions. Hamilton East has both Jamie Strange and David Bennett retiring this electoral cycle. We encourage you to head to Parliament TV On By Don Good, CEO of Waikato Chamber of Commerce. Demand and watch Jamie’s valedictory from 15 August and David’s on 23 August. The Chamber is also hosting a debate for the Waikato business community to hear from the Labour and National candidates for the Hamilton East & West electorates two weeks out from New Zealand’s General Election. Join us on Tuesday, October 3 as Labour’s Georgie Dansey (Hamilton East) and Myra Williamson (Hamilton West) go headto-head with National’s incumbent Hamilton West MP Tama Potaka and candidate for Hamilton East Ryan Hamilton. The debate will be moderated by former Hamilton City Councillor, Mark Bunting. This event is open to non-Chamber members, however registration is required in advance on our website: https://business. waikatochamber.co.nz/ events/calendar. Jamie Batters Vicky Redwood and Vanessa Williams Want to learn more? Tune in to CRUNCH, HMC’s podcast designed to lift the lid on public relations and communications. In the latest episode, HCBA general manager Vanessa Williams and marketing manager Vicky Redwood share how they are leveraging TikTok to boost reputation and relationships and social media expert Jamie breaks down what TikTok can achieve, and how to do it well – using a real success story. www.wearehmc. co.nz/ep-2-the-pr-power-oftiktok-using-short-form-vid/ Connect - Grow - Inspire - Represent
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Waikato Business News August/September 2023

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