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What if all your documents, meetings, research, and podcasts could work together in one AI-powered workspace? AI educator, Lisa Monks, explains how NotebookLM can make better use of the information that you’re already collecting.
Is NotebookLM the Best AI Tool You’re Not Using?
ChatGPT and Gemini will tell you almost anything you ask, with confidence, whether or not it’s true. That’s the nature of generative AI: it’s built to generate, and sometimes what it generates is fiction dressed up as fact. NotebookLM works differently, and after talking with Lisa Monks, a social media strategist and AI educator, I’m convinced most marketers don’t know what they’re missing.
NotebookLM is Google’s “grounded” AI tool. Instead of pulling from the entire internet, it only works from the documents, audio files, videos, and links you upload yourself. Ask it a question and it answers from your sources, not from a guess about what the internet thinks the answer should be. As Lisa put it, “it’s basically a RAG system, the retrieval augmented generation, and it just grounds everything that you put in there.”
Why Grounded Beats Generalist
Every large language model has a hallucination problem. It’s baked into how they work. Ask ChatGPT a question outside its training data or buried deep in a niche topic, and there’s a real chance it will answer with total confidence and zero accuracy.
NotebookLM sidesteps a lot of that by limiting itself to what you feed it. Upload your own podcast transcripts, your client’s brand documents, or your company’s SOPs, and the tool answers from that material instead of from the wider web. Lisa was upfront that this isn’t a magic fix. The trade-off, she told me, is that “it doesn’t have the creativity that you would have, say if you were using Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT.”
That’s a fair trade for a lot of marketing tasks. You don’t need creative flair to transcribe a meeting, summarize a podcast, or build a quiz from your onboarding manual. You need accuracy. And accuracy depends entirely on what you feed it. Garbage in, garbage out applies to every AI tool, but it applies especially hard here, since NotebookLM has nothing else to work with.
From Podcasts to Trade Shows: How People Actually Use NotebookLM
Lisa’s own entry point was podcasts. She’s a self-described podcast person who listens far more than she reads, and she started uploading episodes into NotebookLM to generate audio overviews, quizzes, and flashcards she could use to learn AI faster. That’s a smart move for anyone trying to get up to speed on a dense topic without reading a stack of articles.
But the use cases get a lot more interesting once you move past personal learning. Lisa shared a story about a client who attends a massive tourism trade show every year, the kind where you have over a hundred meetings across three days, each one lasting about eight minutes. Instead of scrambling to write notes afterward, Lisa’s client now records each meeting on a phone, uploads the audio straight to NotebookLM, and lets the tool handle transcription, structured meeting notes, and even drafted follow-up emails.
That’s the kind of workflow that quietly saves hours of admin work, and it’s the sort of thing a lot of business owners don’t realize is possible with a free tool. If you’ve ever left a conference with a stack of half-legible notes and good intentions, you’ll appreciate how much friction this removes.
NotebookLM also shows up well in client-facing work. Lisa described building entire onboarding notebooks that clients can access directly, walking them through every step of a process with full transparency. For larger organizations, she pointed to a more structured use case: uploading SOPs and using the built-in quiz feature to test new staff on procedures, whether that’s a safety protocol or the exact steps for handling a customer order.
The Hack Most People Miss
Lisa recommends uploading what she calls a “master business document” as a source file, sitting at the very top of your notebook, containing your brand voice, your goals, your business objectives, and your target audience.
Once that document is in there, you reference it directly in your prompts. Tell NotebookLM to follow the instructions in that document, and your outputs start matching your brand without you having to repeat yourself every time. Lisa used this approach to build a slide deck for a presentation, even uploading a photo of the branding she needed to replicate. The result stayed consistent across every slide, generated by Google’s Nano Banana image tool working inside NotebookLM.
It’s a bit like building a style guide and handing it to a new freelancer instead of explaining your brand from scratch on every single project. Once the foundation is there, everything built on top of it gets faster and more consistent.
There’s a second power move worth mentioning here: you can turn your own chat outputs back into source documents. If you draft something useful inside the chat, like a strategy document or a set of talking points, you can save it as a note and re-upload it as a source. From there it becomes part of your knowledge base for future tasks. Lisa called this “a circular thing that goes on,” and it’s an easy feature to miss if you’re only using the chat box like a basic chatbot.
Where This Gets Genuinely Useful for Client Work
If you run an agency or work closely with clients, the onboarding and SOP use cases deserve a second look. A shared notebook means your client always has access to the latest version of a process document, without you fielding the same questions over email every few weeks.
One caveat worth knowing: sharing outside your organization requires a personal account rather than a Google Workspace account, since workspace setups come with enterprise security restrictions that block external sharing. It’s a small detail, but one that will save you a frustrating afternoon if you find out about it after the fact instead of before.
Getting Started with NotebookLM
You don’t need a strategy session or a new line item in your software budget to try this. Lisa’s advice for getting started was simple: open up NotebookLM, create a notebook, upload a handful of documents on a topic you care about, and start playing.
A few concrete ways to begin this week: upload a recent podcast episode or YouTube video you want to learn from and ask NotebookLM to quiz you on it. Build a notebook around your own brand voice and goals, then reference it the next time you need on-brand copy. Or if you’ve got SOPs sitting in a folder somewhere, upload them and try the quiz feature with a new hire.
None of these require a budget, a developer, or a steep learning curve. They just require opening the tool and giving it something real to work with.
If you want to go deeper, Lisa is putting together a comprehensive NotebookLM guide that lives at lisamonks.com/notebooklm, and you can follow her ongoing AI content on LinkedIn under Lisa Monks.
Transcript from Lisa Monk’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is an Australian-based social media strategist and AI educator with over 15 year’s experience. She helps local businesses, consultants, and solopreneurs leverage social media to connect organically with their target audience and grow their business, explaining everything in ways that are easy to understand, jargon-free, and genuinely practical.
She now extends that same grounded approach to AI integration across marketing, productivity, and everyday business operations. Her work is guided by her KISSS mythology. I pronounced it like that because there are three S’s. Keep It Simple, Social, and Strategic for social media. Keep It Simple, Structured, and Strategic for AI.
She believes strong foundations and a core tool stack beat chasing all the shiny tools every time. Today we’re going to be looking at NotebookLM and everything it can do for your marketing and your business with Lisa Monks. Lisa, welcome to the podcast.
Lisa: Hello, Rich. How are you doing? Excited to be here.
Rich: Yeah. I’m excited to dig into this, because I’ve definitely been enjoying NotebookLM, but I’m definitely not using it at the level you are, so let’s talk about this. Before we kind of jump into that, what led you to pay attention to AI tools, and what particularly led you to NotebookLM?
Lisa: Well, I guess it goes right back to the beginning when I first started using AI. That whole day when ChatGPT launched back in November 2022, is it? Oh my goodness, it seems like it’s forever ago now.
Literally a week after that launched, I was on a morning radio show with the Tech Tuesday that I would do, and I was all excited to introduce this new tool. And at the time I said, “This is going to blow your minds, people.” And we did a live interaction show on actually the radio to demo it. And I said, my prediction is this is going to change the way we communicate, the way we do business forevermore from this moment forward. However, I did not anticipate how fast it was actually going to move. It was just at lightning speed. And I think that took everybody by surprise.
So I very quickly learnt that I needed to find a way to try and take in all this information and try and teach myself how to use it. Because it was a fire hose, and I was struggling to try and understand it all and basically get my head around everything.
And then I came across NotebookLM. And after giving it a bit of a whirl, I thought, this is going to be a fantastic tool for me to be able to really start using it as a means to understand how to use AI. I’m a bit of a podcast person. I love and consume podcast after podcast. I don’t read so much; I listen. It’s normally when I am out walking or where I’m driving.
Here in Australia, we drive quite distances to get from A to B, so I’ve got a lot of time with my pods in my ear listening to podcasts. And NotebookLM was the most amazing tool to be able to upload my podcasts, replay them, create audio podcasts that I can then talk to, to actually learn more and really digest the information and just learn about it in different ways.
That’s how I started to use it, and to this day, I still do use it as a tool to be able to help me learn about AI, because it has not slowed down. In fact, it has sped up at, it’s just crazy. I don’t know anybody out there that is keeping up with what’s happening.
Rich: It’s pretty hard, for sure. And before we get into some of your use cases, because I definitely want to dive in there, for those of us who are more familiar with ChatGPT or Claude or even Gemini – which is another Google product – what is the difference between those traditional LLMs and NotebookLM, in your opinion?
Lisa: Okay, so unlike all your other large language models, the Claudes, ChatGPT, Gemini it’s grounded in your content only. And what that means is you upload sources into NotebookLM, and it is only reading your sources. Whereas if you are using ChatGPT or any other large language model, it goes out into the big wide web and reads absolutely everything and is a generalist, and then it brings that information back.
Whereas NotebookLM is very grounded in whatever you put in there, and it does not hallucinate. Actually, that’s a bit of a fib. It does, it can, but it all depends on the information you put into it. If your sources are very solid, the likelihood of it hallucinating is nowhere near as much as any of the other large language models.
And the beauty of it is you can cite every single source in your document. When you start generating content in the chat, which we’ll go into the different areas within NotebookLM, it will cite a number. You click on that number, and it’ll take you to exactly that point in whatever source document you have uploaded.
So to me, it’s basically a RAG system, the retrieval-augmented generation, and it just grounds everything that you put in there, and it doesn’t come out. And it’s in the Google ecosphere, which makes it a lot more secure as well.
Rich: All right. So just to make sure that we understand what we’re talking about here, all generative AI, all large language models have a habit of hallucination. It’s just because they’re generative. It’s the nature of the beast. And sometimes that can be problematic.
What you’re explaining to us is that NotebookLM has a much lower level of hallucination because it’s working off the documents that you’re providing and you’re pointing it to. Is there a trade-off? Is there something we lose because it’s only focused on those documents?
Lisa: It doesn’t have the creativity that you would have, say, if you were using Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT. Which is super, super important. So I guess, yeah, that’s your trade-off. It doesn’t have that creativity that you can get. And it can’t go out to the internet unless you pull information in to search for any additional information.
But where it is solid is that once you have your grounded information in there, and you have it as you want, and the most important thing actually is whatever you put in there needs to be good. Garbage in, garbage out. That goes for any large language model you use, but particularly for NotebookLM because it is only using those sources. It’s got nothing else to work with.
Once you have it all in there, you can then integrate it with other Google products, like Gemini, and have basically NotebookLM as your library where is the home for all your content. It would be like a custom GPT or a Gem where you can actually have your knowledge base. Well, this time you can have it inside of NotebookLM.
But the beauty of it is you can attach so many more different source documents. And they’re not just documents, it’s audio, it’s video, it’s images, it’s absolutely everything. So it has a very diverse source base that you can put in there where you can’t do that in any of the other models.
Rich: All right. So before we get into actually how we use NotebookLM, what are some use cases that you recommend that you’re using or that you’re recommending to your clients?
Lisa: Okay, so I’ll tell you some of the ones that I’m using, and I use them often.
Well, first of all, the one that I first mentioned at the very beginning, I listen to podcasts. So what I do is I create a notebook for every single individual podcast that I listen to. And then, so I’ve got a library of each one, and it’s very easy to add a podcast to a notebook. You just copy the URL of the podcast, the YouTube podcast, and you pop it into NotebookLM, and it will basically then give you an audio overview.
You can create audio overviews, or you can create documents on that particular podcast. So I use it to repurpose podcasts. I will use it as an audio overview where I can re-listen to it in a different format. I will use it in quizzes, so I can quiz myself on the content. That’s the learning aspect of it.
If I am watching somebody doing a tutorial on YouTube, I can bring that in, and then I can watch it, do the lesson, sit there and quiz myself, and have flashcards that I can test myself. So it is a really great resource to be able to help me with my education when it comes to learning.
So I recommend everybody who’s trying to get their head around AI and how to use it, that’s a very, very good use case, to use it as a learning tool. It’s basically that is what NotebookLM was originally built for. It was for educational and research purposes.
Rich: And just for people listening, you don’t have to be interested in AI to use it for podcasts the way that Lisa’s explaining. It could be anything. You could be trying to train yourself up in woodworking or the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whatever you happen to be interested in, you can do it. Lisa’s passion is obviously AI.
Question on the podcasting thing. So does it only work with the podcasts that are on YouTube, or is there a way to get the audio files for people who don’t post their podcasts onto YouTube?
Lisa: You can actually put audio, you can upload an audio file. So if there’s an MD file, you can upload an audio file. If you have the transcript of the podcast, you can upload it as a transcript, or you can upload it as a YouTube video. So you’ve got three options there.
Rich: That’s pretty impressive. Because one of the things that I don’t believe any of the other LLMs I use can handle is audio files. It always requires a transcript. So what you’re saying is NotebookLM, if I’ve got the video or if I’ve got the audio file or I’ve got a transcript, those are always getting information and training up those RAG documents so that NotebookLM can do its work. That’s huge.
Lisa: Absolutely. And the thing you need to remember with YouTube, if it doesn’t have a transcript, it cannot be brought in as a knowledge document. It needs to have a transcript. So some YouTube videos don’t have, especially if they have brand-new ones.
If a brand-new YouTube video has just been uploaded, sometimes it takes 24 hours for the transcript to be made available. If it doesn’t have that, you can’t upload it. It has to have a transcript because that’s what it’s reading. It’s not watching the video, it’s reading the transcript.
Rich: So with the audio file, is it transcribing the audio though, and then it’s got the transcript? Like, how does that work?
Lisa: No. You upload the audio file, and I’ll explain how I use this with a client in another case example. You upload the audio file and then in the chat box within NotebookLM, you ask it to give you a full transcript, and then it will give you a full transcript of that audio file.
Or if you don’t want the full transcript, I use the full transcript because then I then turn it into something else. I like to read it first and then I’ll say, “remove all the filler “ and all of that. It basically does what a lot of the other tools do, it’s just that it’s free and it’s easy.
Rich: We didn’t even mention that it’s free, so that’s another great advantage of this one. It’s free.
Lisa: Yeah, it does have various subscription models, but for the most part, and for the majority of people’s use case, you can do it all on the free model.
Rich: All right. Let’s let’s walk through a process. So if you get to notebooklm.google.com, you can create a new notebook. If you’ve never been there, there’s a button to create a new notebook.
And what is the first thing that happens? Wha’s that first step, Lisa, when you’re creating a new notebook? I assume it’s to gather your RAG documents, but is there another approach there or is that exactly what you do?
Lisa: Yeah. The first time that you open up your notebook, you’re going to be asked to create… funnily enough, at the very top, it’s going to say to you, “Create audio/video overviews from your notes.”
Now, that’s obviously because it’s a new feature, and they’re really pushing that. But it’s going to ask you for all your source documents, and then you can actually upload all your files as I said, PDF, images, docs, audio, Google Docs. It connects to your Google Drive, so your Sheets and your Google Docs, and copied text. You can actually just copy text off of anything.
You might see a website you might want to copy text off that. You might have, say for example, you might have subscriptions that are paywalled, and if you want to bring that in, you just copy it, bring it in, drop it in here. Because obviously you can’t bring paywalled information into NotebookLM through YouTube or any of the subscription models.
So websites, text, MD files, you name it pretty much, I think it pretty much covers everything. You think of what you can create, what sort of audio, video So, it’s incredible.
Rich: So we choose a topic for our new notebook, and let’s just use sales as an example. We want to get better at selling. We want to learn everything there is to learn about selling only, so we separate that from AI questions.
So we get a whole bunch of documents, and maybe these are trusted resources. Maybe we have a PDF of Zig Ziglar’s greatest closes. Whatever it is, we put them all in there. What happens next? Because I know that I get to a screen, and there’s basically three columns. So why don’t you break it down for us, what we see and what we can do with it.
Lisa: Sure. Now, first of all, let me just say, when you are adding your notebook sources in, only put in what is relevant. Don’t just think, “Oh, that might be okay. That might be okay. I’ll like a little bit in here.” Make sure your information is solid, and only bring that in. Create a notebook for one topic or one main thing and just keep it at that. Don’t mix your notebooks at all. Just keep it on one topic.
So once you have them added in, and you might have a whole range of different types of source documents, so you’re going to have a column that says ‘sources’. And as we’ve mentioned, sources could be anything from a YouTube video, a website link, a Word document, a PDF, an audio file, a photograph. Whatever the case is, you add it into the sources area.
Then you’re going to see there’s little square boxes listed next to every single source document. If you click, it’s going to say ‘select sources’, and if you tick that select sources box, it’s going to highlight absolutely every file that is in there. And then if that happens, you go into your chat, you’re going to be talking to all those files.
So your chat section is just like you’re talking in ChatGPT. But the most important thing to remember is if you don’t need a certain document or a file that is in your sources, you untick it. Because you don’t want to confuse whatever you’re prompting in your chat. So you can either select everything, or you can just select one document or two documents or three documents, whatever is relevant to the task that you’re actually doing.
So it’s great to be able to have it as an area where you can put everything in, but just be very mindful that when you start creating content, you’re only using the document or the video or the file that you specifically need for that task.
Rich: All right. Makes a lot of sense. We’ve got all of our content in there, and so now we’ve got, like I said, these three columns. In the left column, I see my sources, everything you just discussed. The middle column, which tends to be a little bit bigger, is called the ‘chat column’.
So I’m kind of curious. Even with this more grounded, large language model, how important is prompting, and what are some of the simple ways where we can get better results or better outputs through prompting?
Lisa: Look, it’s no different than any other large language model. You have to keep it simple, keep it structured, keep it strategic is what I reckon. So you still got to prompt it like you would to get effective results anywhere else. Give it an expert role, give it context, give it an objective, let it know what your audience is, your target audience is, who you’re speaking to. Give it an output format, what it is, how you want it to be output.
Now, that could be, say you might be writing a LinkedIn post and you want it 150 to 200 words. You have to be specific with what you want. Your tone, let it know the tone that you want it in. And of course, as always, at the end, you should always list any constraints that you don’t want it to have. Like any specific things that you want to avoid.
So for me, when I’m generating my content here in Australia, I always have to add, “Please only speak in Australian/British English, no American spelling,” because we obviously spell different to what you do in America. So that is something that I always add in. So when you’re prompting it, be clear. It doesn’t have to be overcomplicated. You just have to be very concise and very clear what your objectives are and what you want to achieve.
Now when it comes to context, you actually have the ability in your chat section to, at the very top on the right-hand side of the chat section up top, you’ve got three little horizontal lines. That says ‘configure notebook,’ and when you click on that, you can actually configure your notebook chat. So when you configure this, your output will actually follow what you have done on here.
Now, it’s going to say, “Define your conversational goal, style, or role,” and you’ve got three choices in there. It’ll default. It’ll be a learning guide, which is obviously best for all your educational content or helping you grasp new concepts and skills. You’ve got the default, which is your general purpose, or you can customize it. And where you customize it is where you might put any information that’s specifically relating to you, your voice, your brand, et cetera.
You’ve got 10,000 characters that you can use in that space to customize that area. And then you can choose your response length for whatever it is. And the default is you’ve got a default, longer, and shorter. And I suggest you just play with that to work out what works best for whatever task that it is that you’re doing.
Now, what I will say is you get the chance to customize that, but what I find super useful and actually better than that is uploading your master business document as a source document. And have it sitting at the very top, and giving it instructions as how you want everything that you produce inside of NotebookLM to your brand voice, your goals, your business objectives, your target audience. You can get a lot more in depth in there. And you can also give it instructions on various things that you want to do.
Like for example, I’m creating a workshop for NotebookLM, and I wanted to create some slide decks. So I put in there some instructions on how I wanted those formatted, how I laid it exactly how I wanted. It was quite lengthy, but I also took a photo and put it in there of the branding for this particular presentation. So the templates are the same all the way through, and I was actually able to replicate that exact template in the slide deck and then fill out all the information purely because of the instructions that I gave it that I had put in the prompt. So that’s really important.
And that’s a bit of a hack. It’s a bit of one of those things that most people don’t think about when they’re putting it in there. But using a master business knowledge doc or a how-to on whatever specific task that you are doing within NotebookLM, have it as a doc that will give directions. So when you’re in chat, you would say, “Refer to the name of that document. Please follow the instructions in this document.” You would obviously have that document enabled. You would have a tick next to it to enable it so it can call on that source document, and it would have very detailed instructions as to how you wanted your output to be.
Rich: So if we have a brand guide, in other words, that would be a document that we could put up. And is this presentation you’re working on for Mike Stelzner and his AI conference?
Lisa: It is, it is. It’s for the AI Society.
Rich: Is he still using Comic Sans?
Lisa: I don’t, I don’t know.
Rich: You don’t want to out him, it’s okay. Mike, I know you’re listening. Stop using Comic Sans. I love you.
All right, let’s move on. So we’ve talked a little bit about chat. I want to talk about that third column, which they’re labeling as ‘studio’, is why NotebookLM caught fire so quickly. Because it has some really unique abilities over there. So why don’t you walk us through some of your favorite tools in the studio?
Lisa: Oh my goodness, there’s so many. Well, first of all, we’ll just quickly go through. We have audio overviews, we have slide decks, we have videos, we have mind maps, we have reports, flashcards, quizzes, infographics, and data table. And you can produce all those different content based on the source knowledge that you’ve got loaded up there.
Now, my favorites. Gosh, it’s hard. The audio overviews I love because I use them regularly for when I’m repurposing and listening to podcasts. The slide deck I have fallen in love with. Since I have been putting this workshop together and doing this presentation, I’ve really dug into what makes them work. And what I found is what I just said, giving very, very good, clear instructions. It can actually create an image that replicates brand guidelines for whoever you’re doing work for, whether it’s yourself or for somebody else.
Rich: Before we move on, the slide decks, are they Google Slides, and are they editable after they’re created?
Lisa: You can edit the slide deck, not like you would edit in PowerPoint or in any sort of design thing. But when you create your slide deck, you will get a little box that opens up under it once they have been generated, and you can say, “Change the wording on this,” or, “Change this image out.” And you do them all one by one, slide by slide.
So you’ll do one, type it in, do the next one, type it in, until you’ve gone through all the slides and made the changes that you want. Then you press ‘regenerate’, and then it will regenerate the slide deck, and it will make those changes, hopefully. There have been instances where it hasn’t, but it depends on how complicated it actually is, how much detail you put into those slide decks. Generally speaking, the slide decks are pretty on point if they’re not too complicated.
And NanoBanana is what generates them, which is Google’s NanoBanana. Which if everyone has used it, you’ll understand how good that is. And if you haven’t used NanoBanana in Gemini, I suggest that you try it because it’s pretty impressive.
But anyway, that is what is integrated into here in NotebookLM. And so the slide decks are very impressive. You get the ability to customize these. So in all, what I will say, in everything that’s in the studio, you can just tap on it and it will generate something, but the gold is in the customization.
So for example, slide deck. To the left of it you’ve got a little arrow. If you click that and you open it up, it will say ‘customize slide deck’, and you can either do a detailed slide deck or presenter slides. They can be short length or default. And then you get to describe the slide deck that you want to create. And that’s where you add all the information that you want with what you’re creating.
And once again, I’ll go back. When you are creating with these, only select the source documents or files that you need. Because this takes a little while to generate. And if you have too many source documents highlighted and selected, and they’re not necessary, you won’t get the best out of any of these ones that are generating images or video. You just need to be very, very specific with what you want in these. But the slide deck is pretty awesome.
Rich: On that point, I just want to make sure I understand this. So normally, when I’ve used NotebookLM, and I’m obviously not at your level, I upload whatever documents I want and make sure they’re all checked off, and then I kind of forget about it.
But if I’m understanding what you’re saying is, I can for each time, whether I’m creating an audio overview or a slide deck or a video overview, I can select or deselect certain things if I want that video overview or that slide deck or whatever it is to focus on some element of what I’m trying to learn or create.
Lisa: Yes. And so select only that what you need, and then you basically can chat in the chat feature to get it how you want. And when you chat, because there’s different elements to it, you can actually create documents within chat that will move over to your studio. And if they are something that you have generated that you want to turn into a slide deck, what you can do is you can then turn that note back into a source document. And so it sits in your source document now, and you can select just that and then create your slide deck.
That is the best way to do it. Get it exactly in the format that you want it and all the information that you want, and only the information that you want in that slide deck. Have that as a source document and then put it back into your source document if it’s something that you have created in your chat.
Because when you’re in chats, you can do exactly what you’re doing in ChatGPT, and can create strategy documents, you can create basically anything. And if that gets into a format that you like, just put it in as a note, file it in your studio, and then turn it into a source document. It’s like a circular thing that goes on, and that’s an actual really good power feature, that one, because not many people realize that you can turn your chats back into a source document.
Rich: All right. There are so many features over here, and some of them I absolutely love. Like Mind Map is a great way of figuring out or wrapping your head around a topic, or generating, figuring out what kind of blog posts or podcast you need to create to fill out to become a knowledge document.
We can go through each one, but what I’d rather do is, so far everything that you’ve talked about makes a lot of sense if we’re trying to learn something, if we want to get better at AI or sales or whatever the case may be. What are some use cases that are more specific to marketing out to other people or internal business processes that you’ve seen or that you’re currently using?
Lisa: One of my clients goes to a very big trade show every year, and we’re just getting geared up for it to happen again next month. And it’s basically speed dating for the tourism industry. The entire northern hemisphere comes down to Australia, all the tourism agents the wholesalers, the travel agents, the airlines, et cetera, and they meet with the tourism industry down here.
Over three days, they’ll have over 100 meetings over three days, about eight minutes each. And my client said to me, “What’s the best way that we can do this so it’s going to be easy with the follow-up and everything?” Because it can be really intense. And I suggested to her, I said, well, why don’t we just record your meetings? And just using your iPhone, record them on your iPhone, download the NotebookLM app on your mobile device, and you can do that for Android or iPhone. And when you record the audio, you can then share it directly to your notebook.
And so you can collect all your meeting notes in the one notebook. Then when the trade show is finished, you can go to your room and you can basically say, “Okay, transcribe all these meetings.” It will give you full transcription. Then I can use the reports section in the studio and turn those into structured meeting notes, which would cover exactly what was covered in the meeting, any problems, any action items that need to be done.
And from there, you can then instruct through the chat to draft actual Emails, response, follow-up emails, that can all be done inside there. And when you do that, you then turn those emails that are in your chat into a note, and then you can download it to your Google Drive.
Now, to help, for those that already have automation and everything set up in Google, you can obviously use things like Make or n8n or whatever you use for your automation to then automate those a little bit further.
But for those that aren’t at that level, for those that don’t have that ability to connect Make or any of those, what I recommend is basically, when you download anything from NotebookLM, it just sits in your drive. It doesn’t go anywhere, which is a bit of a pain. And I’m absolutely certain it won’t be too long before you’ll be able to select what folder you want to put them in. But right now you can’t. So everything just lands in the one thing.
So what you can do is when you draft all your documents inside NotebookLM, you can download them to the drive and then basically enable a trigger inside Google App Script, so as soon as that document lands in Google Drive, it will move it into the folder that you want. And if you have any automation set up, it will trigger it from there. And by doing that, having it sitting in a folder, you can also then start using, for those that are on Google Workspace, you can start using their Google Studio for their few automations that they’ve got with regards to email.
So you can basically, as soon as it lands in there, have an agent set up so it moves it in and puts a draft into your email. So that’s a whole workflow that you can do using a tool that is free and just gets you much, much further along than if you were sitting there writing out your notes or whatever the case may be. So they found that very helpful and saved them a ton of time.
Rich: For those of us who are working with clients, how might we use NotebookLM to improve communication or documentation or follow-up? Are there some use cases that might work there?
Lisa: You can. So if you are actually working with clients, you might have documents, you might have reports that you want to share. Like an onboarding process. You might have a whole onboarding process that you can actually share an actual notebook with. So you might have everything in there that goes through all your onboarding process, and you can share it with your client so then they have access to it too, so they know all the steps, everything that’s going to happen, and you both have access to that notebook.
Now one thing with sharing documents. If you are sharing outside of your business, you need a personal notebook to be able to do it. You can have a pro account Notebook that’s not inside a workspace. But if you have a Google workspace, it’s basically an enterprise security system in there. You cannot share anything out of there unless it is within your organization. So if you have a larger organization and say you have standard operating procedures that when you have somebody new coming into your organization and they need to be trained on something, you can have all your SOPs uploaded into Notebook. And then you can use the quiz feature for them to be able to understand and know exactly what they’re doing.
Like, there might be safety things that they’ve got to do. Say, for example, if they’re in a restaurant, they’ve got to know how they’re going to talk to their customers, all the procedures that happen from when they take the order to when they deliver it to the table to all the safety side of things. You can have all of that uploaded into NotebookLM, and then they can just access it. And you can use it as a means to be able to test your staff to make sure that they’re up to date on what’s current and all the standards that you expect within the organization.
Rich: Lisa, on some level I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of what NotebookLM is capable of. And they keep on adding new things, so I’ll have to have you come back. But in the meantime, thanks so much.
If there was one step that we could take to get started with NotebookLM this week, where would you recommend we begin?
Lisa: One step. My biggest thing, is as with any AI tool, is just open it up. Open up, create a notebook, add in some documents that you want to query within your organization. You might be making a marketing plan, or you might want to do some research. So get in there and just start playing, is my recommendation.
Rich: Lisa, if people want to learn more about you, follow your lessons around NotebookLM, where can we send them?
Lisa: The best place is on LinkedIn, Lisa Monks on LinkedIn. That’s generally where I will share any AI content on there. Obviously, social media is my background, and I am really liking how it’s all kind of fitting in together. You know, using tools like this will really help.
Rich: And I understand that you have a resource that’s not ready as we record this, but it’ll definitely be ready when the show drops.
Lisa: Yes.
Rich: Where might people go, or will we just put that in the show notes after the fact?
Lisa: It’ll be lisamonks.com/notebooklm, and it will be a pretty comprehensive guide. It will take you through all the elements of NotebookLM, and I’ll also be giving you good prompt instructions on various use cases, how certain businesses can use it, different examples of how you can use it, and they’ll be broken up into all the various areas within the studio. So it will definitely be a good one to watch out for when that comes out.
Rich: Awesome. Lisa, thank you so much for your time and expertise today. I really appreciate it.
Lisa: No worries. Thanks a lot, Rich. Lovely chatting.
Show Notes:
Lisa Monks is an Australian-based social media strategist and AI educator who helps businesses simplify marketing, productivity, and AI adoption. Her practical, jargon-free approach helps business owners how to use technology strategically.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.