Working Smart

When to use Gemini vs. Notebook LM

| Lana

When it comes to webinars, you can strategically leverage both Gemini and NotebookLM to achieve your goals of creating recaps and getting insights from the source materials like transcripts, chats, and the presentation.

When to Leverage Gemini

You should leverage Gemini for tasks that require direct content generation, rephrasing, summarization, and quick, concise answers.

  • Recaps: Gemini is excellent for drafting engaging and concise recaps by providing the raw content like an anonymized transcript and presentation. Ask Gemini to:
    • Summarize key discussions or presentations into paragraphs or bullet points.
    • Rephrase technical information into more accessible language.
    • Draft compelling introductions, conclusions, or social media posts for the recap.
    • Generate discussion questions for future engagement.
  • Concise Insights: For quick insights, Gemini can:
    • Extract specific answers to questions or highlight key pain points that were discussed.
    • Summarize the core takeaways of a long discussion into a few sentences.
    • Help you rephrase existing text to be more impactful or for a specific audience (e.g., leadership).
  • Ad-hoc Queries: If you have a specific question about the content (e.g., “What was the main concern about Feature X?”), Gemini can quickly process the text and give you a direct answer.

When to Leverage NotebookLM

You should leverage NotebookLM for tasks that require deep analysis, synthesizing information across multiple documents, identifying themes, and maintaining a structured knowledge base for ongoing internal reference.

  • Collecting Insights for Leadership Teams: NotebookLM excels here because you can upload all your materials for multiple sessions over time. It can then help you:
    • Identify recurring themes and pain points across several webinars on related topics (e.g., common challenges mentioned across all sessions, not just one).
    • Synthesize customer feedback from various sources to create a comprehensive view of customer needs or sentiment.
    • Track evolving insights over time by adding new documents to the same notebook.
    • Generate structured summaries that pull out key insights, trends, and actionable takeaways for a summary brief.
    • “Chat with your sources”: You can ask NotebookLM open-ended questions like “What are the common challenges attendees face with X?” and it will pull relevant passages from all your uploaded documents.
  • Structured Knowledge Base: Use it to build an organized repository of all your webinar content. This makes it easy to revisit past discussions, find specific information, and build a long-term resource for your team and leadership.
  • Preparing for Strategic Discussions: If you need to brief leadership on customer sentiment or knowledge gaps related to any topic, NotebookLM can help you consolidate evidence and arguments from various sessions into a cohesive narrative.

Combined Workflow

  1. Preparation (Gemini/Manual): Initially use Gemini for quick tasks like pulling initial summaries from individual documents or drafting quick recaps for social media.
  2. Deep Dive & Synthesis (NotebookLM): Upload all raw materials into NotebookLM. Use it to conduct deeper analysis, compare insights across multiple sessions, and identify overarching themes for internal leadership summaries.
  3. Final Output (Gemini/Manual): Once you’ve synthesized the insights in NotebookLM, you can then use Gemini to help draft the final, polished leadership brief or internal report based on those aggregated insights.

I used Gemini to help shape this post so I could spend less time writing—and more time putting these concepts into practice as a community manager. See Smarter Community Management: From Prompt to Practice.

Prompt: When should I leverage Gemini and when should I leverage Notebook LM? I create external-facing recaps and also would like to collect insights from webinars to share internally with leadership teams. I upload the transcript, chat, and presentation.

Why Gemini: I preferred the Gemini response over the other AI tools since it understandably had more insight into itself and NotebookLM as Google products.

Smarter Community Management: From Prompts to Practice

| Lana

Inspired by Hilary Gridley’s Making AI a Habit, I’ve started using AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to explore ideas on community management and work through different angels before putting them into practice. Like with any tool, AI works best when paired with critical thinking – much like trying on four shirts in a dressing room and walking out with the one that fits.

In each post, I’ll share which tool(s) I used, my preference, and the actual prompts that guided me. I’ll always refine the AI’s output so that it’s helpful and actionable.

Essentially, this series is my AI personal toolkit for community management. So let’s get started!

Stakeholders vs. Partners: Key Differences for Community Managers

| Lana

It’s important to understand the difference between a stakeholder and a partner since each role has their own level of involvement, commitment, and engagement. This allows you to develop your relationships with each role appropriately through appropriate communication, decision-making, and strategic alignment.

Internal stakeholders are teams who are interested in your community because it affects them in some way. They want to know about your community’s outcomes and may give resources or share their opinions, but they don’t get involved in the day-to-day activities. These are teams you keep informed about your community metrics and other outcomes. Example: Sales

Internal partners are teams that are just as interested in your community as stakeholders, but these teams roll up their sleeves and work closely with you on shared objectives. These are teams that you directly collaborate with on projects and goals. Example: Product and Support

Knowing the difference between an internal stakeholder and partner gives you the ability to manage your expectations and build stronger relationships by understanding the level of

  • Communication and engagement – Partners will be more collaborative and involved while stakeholders will prefer a high-level summary.
  • Resource management – Partners are involved with your projects with shared goals which requires more resources while maintaining the level of support from stakeholders who aren’t as directly involved requires less.
  • Strategic planning – Partners will be more influential when you’re setting goals and project initiatives while stakeholders have a more indirect influence

The difference between a good and great community manager is recognizing the nuances between internal stakeholders and partners. Knowing how to approach each group using the right communication strategies, along with resource expectations and weaving them into your strategic plans not only builds stronger relationships, but also significantly contributes to your community’s success.

Try This

  1. Label each team in your organization as a stakeholder or partner.
  2. Identify your level of communication, engagement, and their involvement.
    • How often will you give updates?
    • What will you share with them? If metrics, which would be most beneficial and why?
    • What is their level of involvement and expectations?
  3. What are their goals and initiatives, how do they align with yours and vice versa.

Mastering ChatGPT: Top Tips from Wired Magazine

| Lana

Part of my Thought Follower series:

Here are my 5 ChatGPT takeaway tips from Wired Magazine’s 17 Tips to Take Your ChatGPT Prompts to the Next Level written by David Nield:

  1. Get a response for your intended audience
    Takeway: Use prompts tailored to your audience like “explain quantum physics as if you were talking to a 12-year old”
  2. Create prompts for other AI engines
    Takeaway: You can ask the chatbot to add more detail to sentences, role-play as another AI tool and refine answers as you add more information.
  3. Explain difficult concepts
    Takeaway: Copy and paste text from different sources and ask Chat GPT to explain it to you
  4. Ask for feedback on writing
    Takeway: Paste your text and ask ChatGPT if your title is effective or to check your spelling, grammar, tone, readability, and more.
  5. Potent prompts – specificity and refining
    Takeaway: Detail and specificity is important when generating prompts and helps you get a better response. Additionally, giving ChatGPT a starting point lets it finish it off – and you can always refine the response.

My Action Items

  1. Use ChatGPT for article titles and editing
    While I may not agree with every suggestion, it’s like having a personal writing tutor.
  2. Write specific and detailed prompts
    Quality prompts result in quality responses.
  3. Consider my audience
    Ensures my content is relevant and engaging.

Recap: 20 Ways Organizations Use AI To Interact With And Serve Customers (Forbes)

| Lana

Here are some of my knowledge nuggets as a thought follower from Forbes Technology Council’s article, 20 Ways Organizations Use AI To Interact With And Serve Customers which shares ways AI can augment an organization’s product and services to effectively communicate with their customers:

  1. Personalized Customer Experience – responses catered to the individual
  2. Adaptive Entertainment – real-time changes to digital experiences
  3. Chatbots; Behavior Analysis – 24/7 customer engagement and ability to analyze buyer behaviors, preferences, and inclinations.
  4. E-Commerce Searches – Personalized guidance
  5. Real-Time Delivery Tracking – AI predictions notifying customers about package delivery
  6. Tailored Purchase Offers – Predict which customers will buy complementary or higher-level products.
  7. Sentiment Analysis – Predict how customers feel during interactions
  8. Customer Feedback Analysis – AI sentiment analysis applied to feedback to detect nuances in emotions and pinpoint problems early
  9. Disease Prevention – identify patients who are likely to develop a chronic condition
  10. Content Generation And Curation – use user data to show different information based on actions
  11. Guided Customer Support – customer support solutions using real-time sentiment analysis and guidance
  12. Fraud Prevention – using machine learning models to detect genuine customers from frauds
  13. Predictive Maintenance – analyze data from connected devices and sensors to anticipate failures and conduct preventative maintenance
  14. Dynamic Pricing – personalized pricing strategy
  15. Verified Customer Onboarding – welcoming genuine customers and keeping fraudsters at bay
  16. Customer Profiling – creating profiles of current and potential customers for better service, keep shelves stocked, etc.
  17. Talent Sourcing And Recruitment – better source workers for better talent matching and acquisition
  18. Body Measurement – online try-ons, virtual dressing rooms, fitness coaches, and rehab assistants
  19. Customer Complaint Management – better classification of customer complaints to connect customers to the right person at the right time
  20. Higher-Quality Patient Care – tailor-made treatment plans, identifying health issues early, reduce wait times by streamlining operations

Read the full article on Forbes.com:
20 Ways Organizations Use AI To Interact With And Serve Customers

My Takeaways

From the above, the following are of value to me to learn more about:

  • Personalized customer experience
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Content generation and curation
  • Behavior analysis
  • Guided customer support
  • Verified customer onboarding
  • Complaint management

Raising Your Game as a Community Manager

| Lana

Oftentimes in Community Manager forums the question comes up “What are some skills I should learn to become a better Community Manager?”. The usual go-to answers are to develop ones skills in time management, empathy and analysis. Easier said than done, right?

In this new blog category I’m calling “Raise Your Game”, I’ll share some peripheral skills that have helped me as a Community Manager – ones where you can actually get started with immediately and begin bringing your best to your position.

effectively raise your game

  1. Know how you learn. Do you learn by example or hands-on? Work within the parameters of how you process new information for the highest ROI.
  2. Whittle while you work. Don’t overwhelm yourself thinking you have to absorb everything you read. Break things down during your workday or work week and take note of one takeaway.
  3. Rome wasn’t built in a day but they were laying bricks every hour. Start small and remember that even if you’re moving zig-zag, you’re still moving forward and learning new things.

Recap :Centers of Excellence (Adrian Speyer)

Lightbulb on a stack of magazines
| Lana

Here are some of my knowledge nuggets as a thought follower from Adrian Speyer‘s article and presentation Centers of Excellence: The Next Big Thing for Community. What’s shared here is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of content so I encourage you to dive deeper by reading the article or watching the video.

EPIC Quote

There’s an opportunity for there to be a space – a digital home so to speak – for everything customers need to be successful – a center of excellence – but with community permeating all aspects of this – so the conversation is not to the community as much as it is with the community. It would touch all aspects: help, learning, connection, discovery, and thought leadership.

Adrian Speyer, “Centers of Excellence: The Next Big Thing for Community”

My Takeaways

  1. Communities should be the central hub for all customers to be successful along their journey – from pre-sales to learning best practices
  2. Communities should “broaden their horizons” and move past being just a support community.
    • Stop using the word “support” and use “success”
    • Focus on outcomes – what makes the customer happy (max ROI)
  3. Stop working in a silo. Think laterally and involve teams in a “Center of Excellence Advisory Board”
  4. Understand your customers by building personas.
  5. Focus on your members, finding the right people to run the community, and develop a robust plan (don’t just wing it).
  6. This takes time so don’t expect immediate results. Rather, focus on micro-successes.

My Action Items

  1. Redefine my communities as Centers of Excellence where customers find value beyond support and focus on highlighting content that will make them successful such as virtual events to connect with peers to discuss strategy and share their experiences (best practices and pitfalls).
    • Extend CoE concept to internal teams – product, engineers and developers. Hearing product feedback will help make the product better, improving customer experience and building trust in the company.
  2. Reach out to other teams – especially those in the field – to better understand what is keeping their customers from being successful (e.g. knowledge gaps) and develop community opportunities for them to connect and learn from others.
  3. Empower customers by partnering with them to develop customer-led/focused community programs so that they can share their success stories with others.

Thought follower…and proud of it!

| Lana

So many people want to be thought leaders – but what’s the point of leading if no one is following?

There are so many influential and brilliant community managers creating amazing content – books, articles, webinars, videos – that I’d like to start highlighting them as a thought follower. Author Todd Henry said in his article Forget Thought Leaders – We Need more “Thought Followers”

[Thought Followers]…are people who immerse themselves in the brilliant, challenging thoughts of others, commune with great minds, and then follow their own thoughts wherever they might lead. They have a disciplined Study Plan that challenges them to think about important problems and allows them to stretch their thoughts and explore uncomfortable places.

They aren’t afraid to humbly submit to the great insights of others and consider their implications to their own work. They are fiercely curious. They love process. They set aside time to savor great writing. They understand that brilliant ideas are excavated and assembled, not self-generated.

And this is what I plan to do starting in 2022 whether it’s listening to a podcast, reading a book or article, or watching a webinar or conference session. I’ll summarize each with my top 3 takeaways followed by my action items. I hope to follow my summary posts with my results as well!

So here’s to the Thought Followers! Let’s begin…