How Google NotebookLM is Changing the Game for Event Planners

[00:00:00] Hey Tess, imagine you upload all your notes, your documents, your research, things like venue websites, speaker profiles and even past event feedback. Then you got it analyzed to summarize key points, suggest agenda topics, it'll help with venue selection and even create content for you. It's like having an assistant who's read everything and is ready to help you make smart decisions.

[00:00:27] That means somebody's smarter than us. Something that's smarter, it's not a someone, it's a something. That's NotebookLM. It's an AI powered tool from Google and you can put it to work now. You're listening to The Event Tech Pull Up, the show that brings you the good, the bad and the ugly of event technology with your hosts Tess Vismale of iSocialX and Keith Johnston of i3 Events. So cute. Yeah.

[00:00:57] You know how much I adore Google. I love Google. I love, love, love Google. You've been a Google girl for a long, long, long time. Well, and I always tell everybody, Google's a data company. Always has been, always will be. And they always, to me, do things the right way. People kind of think they don't. At least had a bad rep for a long time. Oh my God, you ask anybody. But when it comes for innovation. Google's stealing my data. No, they're not. Okay. Okay. Yes.

[00:01:26] Yes, yes, yes, yes. So they have a tool, which is, I understand, complimentary for those who pay for Google service. It's really, truly complimentary for those who pay for Google services. Right? Tell us about it. Well, Notebook LM, which you introduced me to. I had never heard of Notebook LM. And one day you're like, well, just put it in Notebook LM. And I'm like, what? What the hell is that? I know. Zalia actually mentioned it to me one day. And I was like, what?

[00:01:56] Well, and it's funny. It is now my actual go-to AI tool over pretty much everything else. Like, I still use Spark. Okay. Right? Because that's a very focused. That's for our industry. Right? That's a very focused AI. Yeah. And I still use ChatGPT for doing things like giving me drafts of blog posts and, you know, things like that. But if you really want to get work done, I'm actually finding Notebook LM is literally the way to go. Yeah.

[00:02:24] And the reason being is you give Notebook LM the sources you want it to use. Right? Which is a little bit different. It's not like you're going to ChatGPT and you're saying, hey, write me this. Because you're saying, based on these ten things, do X. Yeah. And that's good. And it's a good way where you can focus your information and train it to give you the things that you want it to have as your source.

[00:02:54] The thing I like about it, too, is because it's a part of Google, I can put in Google Slides. Yep. I can put in Google Docs, links to YouTube videos, or just websites. Yep. We can upload audio files. PDFs. PDFs. Just straight doc. And then this is the clincher. I can copy and paste text from anywhere and drop it in there. And that still becomes a source.

[00:03:21] So it's not like some of the other ones where you've got this copy, it's sitting somewhere, but how am I going to get it in there? I need to convert it and make it into a PDF, put it into a Google Doc, and then put it in a PDF, and then upload. You know, you don't have to go through all the shenanigans. Yeah. And, well, it's weird, right? Because I think Notebook LM, and this is probably completely wrong thinking, but to me it operates more like a software program. Whereas, whereas ChatGPT is a chat, right?

[00:03:51] It's one window where you're putting everything. Whereas this, you upload your sources, they're on the left-hand side, right? And then you ask it to do things with those sources. So it does, it works more like a, and you can have notebooks for individual things. Yeah. It's very cool. Yeah. So we should tell people some of the things they could do with it. Yeah. So destination and venue research. I'm going to let you take this one because you love this. Yeah. This is actually one of my favorites, right?

[00:04:15] So what we will do is we will, let's say a client is looking at the Southeast U.S. We will go out and do our research separate, apart from Notebook LM. And then, but let's say we narrow it down to five hotels. We've got places in Charlotte and Orlando and Atlanta. We will put all of that data into Notebook LM and have it compare and contrast.

[00:04:42] And give us recommendations based on X, Y, and Z with what is the best property. Now, you know, no, we're not just going to pick it, pick a place based on what Notebook LM says. But it helps us narrow the field. So we can get it down. We can start off with maybe 20, 30, 40 hotels. And we can narrow it down to four. Based on your criteria and what you're actually looking for for real. And then boom, site inspection started. Yes. Right? Then you can go straight to work.

[00:05:10] Yeah, but then you get things back from the hotels. You get the proposal back. You get information about ballroom space. And you get all this. You continue to dump that into Notebook LM to continue to refine your research. Yeah. It is flippin' game changing. It really is. You can save notes in it. Also, a couple of other things we need to think about is agenda planning. So what kind of things can we do with agenda planning?

[00:05:40] So with agenda planning, right, you can feed it. You could feed Notebook LM your past five agendas and say, hey, we want to mix things up a little bit. Right? You know, what would a new format look like? Or what would a new agenda look like? Right? And because we all have to admit, we get stuck in our ways. Right? We have one client that for 12 years, plenary, breakouts, plenary, breakouts, networking reception.

[00:06:08] Day two, plenary. Right? So, and again, you know, that's a dramatic example. But it happens. But using any AI, but specifically Notebook LM, because it's looked at past schedules. And maybe you feed it the schedules from other events. And then you can look at some scheduling gaps that you may have or scheduling gaps you should be having. Yes. You could say, you know, we for years have never really had a whole lot of breaks in our schedules.

[00:06:38] People are saying they're very tired. They want some of their time back so they can kind of loose on between. We don't necessarily know where should we place these breaks. How can we create so the suggestions could come back from that? Or even maybe potential different types of speakers if we need to get in a different direction. Yeah. Like one of our clients is really big in a particular narrow strip of the steel industry. Right? Of steel.

[00:07:07] So, and they've been doing their conference for a long time. You could go to other conferences that maybe are aligned or parallel to theirs. Grab their agendas and come up with whole new themes. You know? And just things that you may not think about because you're in it every day. Yeah. Right? It's great to have an outside thought. Well, speaking of that, content creation is another way in which you can do it. Thinking about maybe new event descriptions, if you will.

[00:07:37] Marketing materials. Speaker introduction. Yeah. That sort of thing or. Well, here's one. You have all of your speakers linked in profile links. Yeah. Right? Put those all into Notebook LM in a speaker notebook and you can have it write the speaker bios. You can have it give you, you know, one of the things that I love to do with AI is give

[00:08:02] it a whole bunch of information like that and go, give me one paragraph that I can post to social media about the speakers. Yes. And it'll go through all their bios. It'll analyze that but give you back that one. That good nugget. That good nugget. Right? Yeah. That's going to grab people's attention. And again, these are things that used to take hours and days. Now literally take seconds. What about attendee insights? What are the attendees looking at?

[00:08:33] Oh, insights. See? He got me. He got me good on that one, y'all. You know, again, you know, based on the demographics, right? And here's another thing I like to do is mix it up. So take attendee LinkedIn profiles. Feedback from past conferences. Dump that all in there.

[00:08:58] And Notebook LM or any AI can do it, but Notebook LM would excel at it. It can analyze the information to highlight demographics, key common interests, right? Those are really cool things. And this is where you can start to personalize the event experience, right? You really can. Yeah.

[00:09:19] Especially if you are, if you truly want to listen to what they've said throughout all the last few years and that feedback, I think it can lace it with some interesting things. And I also think it might be interesting to share that information because I would garner what's going to be new from it, right? And say these are attendee insights. But then how can it help me?

[00:09:46] It could also help me craft the messaging to the attendees to say, look, hey, we've listened to you. And then this is how we're implementing it. This is how we're going about doing the work differently than before. Yeah. And this is why it's going to rock this year. And really build up that excitement. Pre-event. No doubt. Yes. Pre-event. Well, actually, and even during, right? If you're capturing, right? If you've got one of those little booths, right?

[00:10:13] Where you're capturing attendee feedback live during the event. You know, a lot of conferences do that now. We set up a little area where people can give testimonials and things like that. Take those and feed them in immediately. Yeah. And start pumping that out. Information out. Yeah. Oh. It's killer. It's killer. It's killer. That just reminds me of the days when we used to do live tweeting. I think it would help putting live posting back into order. Now, this is one of my favorites, logistics and operations.

[00:10:43] And I think, so when I. Because you're the logistics lady. Logistics lady. So when we go back. If I go back a number of years. When I very first. First time I met Dahlia. We were doing a session on Evernote, right? And I had been using Evernote. But of course, first time meeting her. And she starts talking about it and everything. And we talked. She talked about actually making Evernote your event binder.

[00:11:07] Now, I think an updated version of that, you can also use Notebook LM as your event binder. Yeah. So when you're doing it, you can also use Notebook and L.A. You know, I actually really hadn't considered it that way. But you're absolutely right. You could. Because not only will it analyze it. And you don't have to necessarily analyze it. But you could still have all the docs right there. And one thing we didn't share with the audience is those sources. you can have up to 50 sources right now. And then you probably have a little bit more

[00:11:37] because now they just released Notebook Plus, and I've got to look at the limits on that. There might not be many limits on that, like on a regular Notebook. But it could because you could put the contracts in there. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And then from contracts, you could create task lists. You could put your budget in there. Ooh. Track your budget. It could literally monitor your budget. Yes, it can track it for you and all the allocations that are for it. Oh, that's awesome. And you could do trends like, okay, I know I want to come within the 10% or 15% of my budget,

[00:12:07] and what should I be buying more? Should I not be buying more? Is there something I need to put more on or pull back on? You could ask it all kinds of questions to start analyzing. Now, I don't know if this would work or not, but you could actually use it to suggest cost savings. Yes, cost-saving measures. Like how can I or should I? Or this is about to come down the path. What about it in real time, too? Because, I mean, even though they don't have an app for it, it's easy to get on your mobile phone.

[00:12:37] But what if you're in real time at the event, and this huge cost comes because of, I don't know, you needed to add internet hard lines in a room that you didn't ever think you needed to add, and you know that costs a whole lot of money, where's that budget implication that's going to come, you could ask it to try to look at your overall budget really quickly for you and calculate it. And where can I shave? Yes. Oh. Like that, right? See? Even I listen to this and learn things. Mm-hmm.

[00:13:07] Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Okay. Now, the next one that I think is really good and easy to implement, because, again, the one thing I think about Notebook LM, compared to all, except for Spark, compared to all of the other AI tools out there, I do think it is the easiest to use. Right? It is the easiest to just jump in and kind of know what you're doing.

[00:13:34] But it's that event analysis, particularly post-event analysis, right? You know, you can dump in feedback surveys, social media mentions, you know, event reports, all of that. And it can give you the successes and tell you where you need to improve. Yeah. And then you can also use it as a nice business case. And then we've got some other AI tools you can use and do a presentation real quick on it. This is actually what happened. This is where I think we need to improve.

[00:14:04] Can we go ahead? Is it necessary for us to sign a contract that you said you wanted us to sign in the next couple, right after you? Yeah. Do I have to sign up on the date? Can we pause a little bit? Because, you know, these insights coming back, and they're not quite like I want them to be. Let's give me some more time on making these types of decisions. Yeah. And I think there's one more thing that Notebook LM, and this completely separates it from all of the others. Uh-oh.

[00:14:31] That I think could be for the right organization that is willing to put in the effort, it can absolutely... Well, wait. But I don't know which one it is. Let's try it again. Do it again. Push the button. Ah, that's a laugh. Nope, that's music. There we go. We have a cheer. Okay. Okay. Okay.

[00:14:56] This is where Notebook LM crushes all of the others. Okay. Tess, hit them. What could they do if they have all of their session transcripts, all of which they're going to have, which they should have, you get your session transcripts, you get your meeting notes, what can you do with Notebook LM that is so different than all the others? Are they ready? You can create an instant podcast.

[00:15:26] With AI voices. With AI voices that sound freakily real. Instantaneously. So at the end of every day, you could literally take the day's transcripts, load them in, and create a 30-minute recap podcast that goes out literally at the end of every day. Or every episode, depending on every session, depending on how fancy you want to be. Yeah.

[00:15:54] But the end of the day would be amazing. So when you have those recap videos going out, you could also just release that to the rest of the entire world where they have the audio. Yeah. Or what I love to do is take the whole two and a half, three days, however long your event is, upload all those transcripts as you're going, right? Because you can have your Notebook and you can keep adding to it as you go. Well, you've got your survey that's going to go out. And that's a great hook.

[00:16:23] Do the survey and you get access to the podcast that is a recap of the whole event. Awesome. Awesome. If you do this for me, then you get this. Exactly. Oh, that's beautiful. Beautiful. And there you go. Thanks for joining us this week on the Event Tech Pull-Up. Make sure to visit our website, eventtechpullup.com and find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

[00:16:53] You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, and other podcast platforms so you never miss an episode. While you're at it, if you found value in this show, we'd appreciate a rating or simply tell a friend about our brand of crazy. Interested in becoming a guest? Check out the application on our website. If you would like Tess, Keith, or both at your next event or in-house training, please email us at tech at eventtechpullup.com.