Today we are bringing you SOB’s two new Google AI tools that can help your small business. Notebook LM and Google Opal can help small business owners leverage AI for content creation, organization, and app development.
Marketing HOT TAKE: Google is NOT going away and is still relevant for businesses.
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction (Please Leave us a Review)
01:48 Marketing HOT TAKE - Is Google Still Relevant
06:03 Notebook LM Introduction
22:13 Google Opal Introduction
31:05 TLDL; How Google Opal and Notebook LM Can Help Your Small Business
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Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...
Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
Vivian: *robot sounds* Chelsea, welcome to another episode of the SOB Marketing Podcast.
Chelsea: What are you trying to sound like?
Vivian: AI, that's my AI voice.
Chelsea: Oh, that's not bad. Have you heard the AI when you call customer service or something like that and they have the keyboard clacking in the background?
Vivian: No.
Chelsea: You haven't heard that? Y'all, that makes me so mad. I know you're AI. Don't pretend that you're typing on a computer.
Vivian: It's gotten pretty bad because then I start to talk to them like they're a real person. They keep on going. I'm like, wait a second. What? I've been made bamboozled yet again. Today's topic, we are introducing you to two new tools that you can use in Google. We are super excited to introduce these to you guys because we think that it's going to help you not just with maybe organizing your small business, but there are so many other potential opportunities you have with creating content that I think you're really going to be impressed. I almost guarantee you may not have heard of these quite yet. I'm pretty bold in saying that.
Chelsea: Yeah, no, I think you're right though. So let's name them first. We're going to be talking today about Google Opal and Notebook LM.
Vivian: These are both offered through Google. We're going to get into the nitty gritty of it. What they are, how you can utilize them and what all comes with it. But before we do that...
Chelsea: I have the marketing hot take. So this week's marketing hot take, Vivian, I may have stated this before. It may have been a hot take before. Who knows? I surely don't remember after 150 plus episodes. But there's a lot of discourse going on right now stating that Google would become obsolete because of these AI programs like ChatGPT or Claude or all that stuff. I'm calling bullsh**.
Vivian: Yeah, and I agree.
Chelsea: Yeah, Google is too big of a company. They offer too many resources. They have their fingers in all the pies. Is that how that goes?
Vivian: I mean, that's how you made it go.
Chelsea: Okay, that's fine. My point is they are not just going to disappear. Let's be honest. Let's be serious here.
Vivian: I mean, at least not without, it's not going to be quietly and it's not going be in the middle of the night. To your point, there are lots of reasons for thinking this we've also discussed this in previous episodes. Interesting, not related, when you were talking about now that we've done 150 episodes, I think we've talked about this before. It reminded me of 50 first dates, have you seen that movie?
Chelsea: 50 first dates? Yes actually! I have seen that.
Vivian: Where she has, what is it? Amnesia. So every day it's like a first date for them. I feel like it's 150 first podcast episodes for us. You have amnesia and you've forgotten all them.
Chelsea: As long as I don't forget that I have a baby.
Vivian: What?
Chelsea: I don't have a baby. I'm talking about Drew Barrymore. Can you imagine, wait, real quick, sidetrack, can you imagine how terrifying.
Vivian: I was like, am I an auntie and I don't know about it?
Chelsea: No, I was referencing Drew. Can you imagine how terrifying that is if you have amnesia and you wake up and you're pregnant?
Vivian: What is this?
Chelsea: That's terrifying! You just wake up and you have a baby?
Vivian: Well, first of all, where did you get that from? Because she's not pregnant in the movie.
Chelsea: I thought that was the end of the movie. The end of the movie, she has a child.
Vivian: Oh. I don't remember.
Chelsea: Right? They're on a boat or something. I don't remember.
Vivian: Anyways, we've gotten way off topic. Let's get back to the marketing stuff.
So a couple of reasons we think that Google is going to be more relevant than ever. For one, their Google ad spend has not slowed down. This money is still bringing in big dollars from advertisers because they have all of the data. They have a lot of information just about people's behaviors and it gets them in front of the right people. So it's effective still. The other part of it is remember that Google doesn't just own Google, Google owns YouTube as well. YouTube has a ton of data and information too on people and their behaviors. It's not going to go away anytime soon. The other part of it is could there be a space for both? I think that AI isn't necessarily going to replace Google and some of the offerings that Google has. Might Google shift over the next 10 years? Absolutely. If they're any good at what they do, pivoting, they'll do it just as they have been doing throughout all these years. Going back and introducing, so let's go ahead and actually have the conversation.
Chelsea: Yes, let's have the conversation. Let's start with Notebook LM because that's the big...not that Google Opal isn't a good tool. It's a very specific type of tool, whereas Notebook LM has a lot to offer.
Vivian: Now, let's talk about how this kind of ended up in our laps. There was one day that I was, you know I'm a big Google girlie. I teeter between my Gmail account and Google Drive quite a bit. When I was going in there, so as you guys know even having a Google Business Profile you're able to access that through your Google account. You click on that little thing that's got what, like four dots or something on it in Gmail?
Chelsea: It's three. I actually have no idea.
Vivian: It's not three. It's like four. But anyways, you click on there and then it pulls down this dropdown that has all of the tools that you have access to. Something in me was like, I usually don't scroll further down. I just use most of the stuff that's on that first little pop-up. I was like, let me just keep scrolling down, and at the very bottom, there was this new one that I had never seen before. It was called Notebook LM. I was like, let me click on this. What is this all about? I felt like I had just opened up this treasure chest of exciting new opportunities and I started-
Chelsea: I'm going to get you an eyepatch.
Vivian: Yes, I want to be a pirate. Give me a hook better yet.
Chelsea: A hook? I was going to get you a parrot, actually.
Vivian: That way I can-oh yes! A parrot on the shoulder, let's do it. Let's have a pirate episode, okay?
Chelsea: Fine, but no birds, I don't trust birds.
Vivian: Rightfully so.
I started playing around with a lot of the features in there and I just was excited about it. I could not wait to tell Chelsea about what I had discovered. So let's...
Chelsea: Can I say real quick, if you were a part of our SOB community, you would have heard about Notebook LM a while ago.
Vivian: Yeah, like last month.
Chelsea: Yeah, like last month, because we brought it to our community as soon as Vivian started playing around with it. But we will bring it to you guys too, eventually. It gets on the podcast. But if you want first dibs on information. Join the SOB community.
Vivian: Absolutely. One of the things, Chelsea, that I think we need to review first is who has access to this Notebook LM?
Chelsea: Yes. Let's talk about that first. So if you have a Google Workspace account, then you have access to Notebook LM. We're going to keep saying this over and over again. So yeah, if you have Google Workspace. Now Google Workspace is not free. It starts at $7 a month and there are multiple tiers. So this is not a free resource. It does cost money in the sense that if you have Workspace, then you'll get access to this tool. So I guess the tool technically is free.
Vivian: Yes, it is under, to those people that have the workspace. Now, if you want more information on workspace and stuff, you guys, let us know. But it's very simple. We recommend it if you're a business owner and you want access to a bunch of stuff, whether it's setting up your email with your own domain and then also being able to access drive, get yourself organized in that way makes a good investment.
Now that it has the Notebook LM under that suite of offerings, we feel like it's definitely a good investment because what does Notebook LM give you the capability to do? How would you best describe it, Chelsea?
Chelsea: I will use Google's words. Google classified it as an AI research and thinking partner.
Vivian: Partner?
Chelsea: Well, you know how we're talking about AI right now. So it's designed specifically to work kind of like a virtual assistant. That's how Google's pitching it. I'm not going to lie from what Vivian has shown me and from the research that we've done today. Yeah, absolutely. It has a lot of capabilities.
You can organize, understand, analyze information. It can generate ideas with the information you provide. It can create quizzes. There are so many things that you can do, but it primarily starts with sources. Right Vivian?
Vivian: Yeah. The way it works, Envision this, you go into Notebook LM and the first thing it will ask you, and it has an app. I have it downloaded on my phone. So it will ask you to upload a resource or a source, and what it means is you can upload a what? A PDF, a document. You can upload a link to a YouTube video. You can upload a website link to a study, a research study perhaps. Images, you can also do audio or copy text. So if you copy and paste it from another source, you can upload it in there. But so that's where you have a lot of different options for being able to upload information.
Chelsea: Yes. The way that Notebook LM works is it takes the sources, it takes the information that you've uploaded. From there, it can do a lot of things. You can get a summary. So you can generate an overview of lengthy documents. It can be text. It can be audio. It can be a video summary with narration. You can also create visual mind maps.
Vivian: Yeah. Okay. So let me give you a real life example of why I got super excited about this. As you guys know, Chelsea mentioned this earlier with her 150 first podcast episodes.
Chelsea: 150 plus.
Vivian: Yes, first podcast episodes. We have a lot of content. Our podcast episodes get uploaded both in audio and also in video format so what I played around with is, I actually was able to take the YouTube link to the video. Actually for this one I didn't run it on the podcast I ran it for The Seasoned Marketer, our marketing tutorial YouTube channel. So I took one of those and I copy and pasted the YouTube link. I posted it in there. What it then did was basically gave me all kinds of information about what I had talked about in the video. In there, what I love is on the right hand side, there's a panel that pops up and you can tell it to create different things, which is what Chelsea is talking about.
With that one source, you can tell it to create a quiz. With that one source, you can tell it to utilize the information and create flashcards. You can tell it to also create an infographic. These infographics were pretty cool, you guys. Okay, but the reason I like it is not because I would then turn around and copy and paste anything, but the infographic gives me a visualization of how better I can explain something or even how I can maybe create my own graphic. Take a part of it, create my own graphic in Canva and then use it as a post for social media. Because you guys know that we are very visual people. If there's another way for me to hit home the idea of like, hey, this is a topic that we just discussed in this YouTube video. Here's the basic part of it. Then maybe I could blur out a part of it and put a question mark, "to be able to find out what you know what this part means, go back and watch the video".
Whatever it is, you can you can create material to entice people to want to go consume more of your content.
Chelsea: So what I'm hearing, Vivian, is it's really helpful in helping you repurpose content.
Vivian: Yes, that's exactly what it is. It is. I think it also gives you, because it has that AI driver on the back end, the way that I look at information is very different from the way that you look at information and from the way that AI looks at information. If anything, it's giving you one extra idea for how this information could be better organized or what they're pulling from it. It just sparks creativity.
Chelsea: This is not business related, but let me tell you, when I was in college, I would have loved this because my life was Quizlet. Do we remember Quizlet?
Vivian: I never used it.
Chelsea: Okay, so Quizlet, you can make your own flashcards and then you could study that way. They had games with the flashcards and all this stuff. This tool can do that for you. You don't even have to make, like manually make the flashcards. You can just upload the source and it'll make it for you and then you can play a quiz.
Vivian: Yeah. Here's the part is I think really, there's endless possibilities with as creative as you can get. So for example, they have the option to do the flashcards. The idea of the flashcard is like question, answer, question, answer. What if you took one of those questions and used it as a prompt to make your next Instagram reel, because it's intriguing enough that you're like, that would be a good lead into the topic that I'm discussing. So there's just endless opportunities for being able to utilize the way that it repackages information and content. Then you could just pick from it what you want.
Chelsea: A great example, Vivian, of ways that you can ask it questions as well. Let's say you've uploaded a source, you've uploaded information about a new product or just your product line in general. You need help creating an FAQ page, just ask it. Just say, hey, based off this information, what needs to be included in the FAQ page? What's the most important thing? Or you can ask it to identify gaps in a process.
Vivian: That's the other part is it doesn't only help you to create content for outward facing stuff, but it can also help you with some of the internal processes, right? The one that I'll tell you I used in real time that helped me was I was creating an email for one of the elderberry clients that we have. In there I wanted to reference a study that they had done regarding taking elderberries and elderberry syrup and stuff, and then how that would minimize the cold that you had, right? So you actually got better, healthier, quicker, right? It had to do with preventative care, making sure that you take it ahead of time actually helps to reduce the incubation time, whatever.
All right, so what I did though is it was a medical research study and granted it always gives you the abstract overview at the beginning of it, which I read, but I wanted to be able to just include the link in there and have this Notebook LM run through it to pull out any other things in the study. Not so that I would copy and paste, but so that I could see what other content might be in there that I could pull from and then I could go find that sentence and quote it. So very simply, I loved what it did. It gave me a visualization. It also was able to give me some other ideas for how the other stuff in the research study could be pulled into the email. It wasn't doing the work for me. What it was doing was scanning it and saving me time from having to read 30 pages worth of a study, it did it really quickly, pulled up the key components that I could use, and then I would go back and actually find the paragraph where it talked about that so then I could...
Chelsea: Easily reference it. An example of ways that it can do the work for you if that's something that you want it to do. Now, again, Vivian and I, we both believe that you should always tweak anything that's been created for you, put your own spin on it. You know, some of this stuff isn't always 100% correct. So you want to do your due diligence, correct? But what you can do, let's say Vivian that we're creating a new product. What's our new product?
Vivian: Okay, so you talked about you don't trust birds. Why don't we create a bird muzzle?
Chelsea: I love it. Okay, so we're creating a bird muzzle. We can upload all of the information for this upcoming product, for this bird muzzle, and then ask it to create a script for a video where we're promoting this product.
Vivian: I love it.
Chelsea: I would love to see what it does.
Vivian: I would, if I was the one prompting it, I would say include in there a scene where Chelsea's getting attacked by a bird.
Chelsea: I mean, I would include that in there too. I think it's great. It's why I don't trust birds.
So an example you can do both inward and outward. You don't have to have it create your content for you. You can ask it specific questions, but if you do want it to create content it can do that as well.
Vivian: We don't want you guys to take our word for it. If you have a Google workspace account already, okay, you have Google Drive, Gmail, all that stuff. We want you to go in there and find Notebook LM, test it out for yourself because what we think is going to happen is you're going to get in there, you're going to explore a little, and then you're going to come up with the best way that you can leverage this new tool to be able to help you in whatever you need, okay? Only you know your process of how you create content, what you need in your business every day. Playing around is going to allow you to see what you could use it for, how it best fits you and your lifestyle.
*S.O.B. Community Ad*
Vivian: This episode of the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is brought to you by the S.O.B. Community. If you are a small business owner that is neglecting your marketing and you feel like you've wasted time and money on marketing help that didn't deliver. Or if you're just craving support from people who actually get what it's like to run and promote a small business, then our membership community is for you. Visit skool.com/sob to sign up today to get instant access and weekly support. That's S-K-O-O-L dot com slash sob.
*End of S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: I think we've sold them on at least testing out Notebook LM.
Vivian: Yes, and leave that in the comments. If you guys have never heard of Notebook LM, you go out there, you test it, leave us a comment about what you think about it.
Chelsea: Yes, we want to hear from you. Okay, Vivian, so our next one is Google Opal. Do you want to introduce us to Google Opal?
Vivian: Yes. So Google Opal, I need to go in and play around more with this, but it is very, very cool because if you've ever thought to yourself, "if I just knew how to program then I could create an app to do this".
Chelsea: Is it program or code?
Vivian: Code, program, whatever.
Chelsea: So as you can see we don't know how to program or code.
Vivian: Listen, back in high school I actually learned how to program in C++. Okay, so don't knock it, girlie. I know a little bit.
Chelsea: I have HTML experience and coding. I know more than you because my minor was computers.
Vivian: Well, but did you program, did you code?
Chelsea: Yes, that was part of it.
Vivian: I used to, too. Back in the day.
Chelsea: So basically Vivian and I's knowledge is obsolete at this point.
Vivian: Yes. It is. This is the truth, especially now with tools like this, because you don't even need to ever have learned to touch code to use Google Opal.
Chelsea: What is so Vivian?
Vivian: What it does is it allows you to go in there and it has two settings. You can use it conversationally to create an app. Or you can actually go in and map how to create the app. That's probably that's the second tier. If you're getting a little froggy and you actually want to do it on your own, but the conversational one works just as well. That's the beginner one. You could go in there and you basically instruct it or give it an idea for an app.
So let's say for example, that you're a workout trainer. A workout trainer? A physical trainer. I'm sorry, you guys. You're a physical trainer. You want to create some type of app that your clients can use to come up with meal ideas, but you want them to be healthy. You could go in there and say, I'm a physical trainer, create an app that will come up with meal ideas. Keep the meal ideas under X amount of calories, make sure that it's promoting nutritional, whatever it is. You script it and literally it will turn around and create that for you.
Chelsea: Yeah. So Google defined it as AI mini apps that anyone can build, edit and share. Also, I lowkey really want that app.
Vivian: Well, and here's the thing, we're talking about it from the small business perspective. You can use this for anything.
Chelsea: Oh yes, absolutely.
Vivian: Let's say that you are trying to do one of these, I'm just going to throw it out there. You're like, I'm going to do the carnivore diet, but I literally am tired of eating the same thing every day.
Chelsea: I thought you were going to say tired of eating meat and I'm like, well, I think the carnivore diets not for you then.
Vivian: Or if you're doing a low fat diet, a Mediterranean diet, whatever it is, if you're just wanting to change something up and you're like, but I am tired of doing the thinking for it, use something like this, go in there, play around with it and see if it could create an app that you can use every day to just do that for you and that way you'll save time.
You don't have to use it just for small business purposes. You can use it for personal stuff. We encourage you, just like we did with Notebook LM, we want you guys to go out there and actually try this, test it, see its capabilities, how well it works. Then also familiarize yourself with it because the better you are in using it, the more you'll probably be able to come up with creative ways to allow it to be an extension of your small business.
Chelsea: Yes, Vivian. Let's give two examples of how this can be used for a small business.
So my example is, you can create an app that builds intake forms that will automatically score your leads and populate them into Google Sheets to do all the work for you.
Vivian: Awesome. I love this. So that's an internal process to help you be more efficient and also allows you to rank people based off of how likely they are to buy. I love that.
The other thing too is think of a process that you have, maybe you're onboarding somebody, you're doing the same things over and over again, you're needing it to aggregate some of the information. This would be a great way to do it. It's an extension of what you're saying, right? But maybe you're doing it to take the information that you get from clients, from people that you're onboarding into your business and making it quicker for you be able to do what you need to with that information.
Chelsea: So like Vivian said, just test it out, play around with these tools and see how they can help your small business. If you play around with Notebook LM or Google Opal and you decide it's not for you, you don't want to use that, I love that for you. Don't use it.
Vivian: Send Chelsea hate mail.
Chelsea: Send me hate mail for what?
Vivian: For wasting your time with these two recommendations, none of which you used.
Chelsea: Hey, it's not a waste of time. Just try it out.
Vivian: Yeah, and you know, I think this is part of one of the big things that we're fans of around here is we know that as small business owners, for one, you have a limited budget with what you can work with and also you have limited time and you're also trying to do all the things in your small business.
Any tool that is going to help you either decrease the amount of time that you were spending in one area, which frees up time for you to do something else, probably something a little more, what do you call it? Revenue generating would be helpful. Also, I think it's just knowing that these tools are out there, even if you're not using them or you're not in a place where you can use them today, it may be that three months down the road you have an idea and you're like, great, I don't even need to hire an app creator because let me first run it through Google Opal, see what that can do. If it still isn't what I'm thinking, then I have something to send an app developer to say, "Hey, this is round about what I'm thinking about. I would like it to have way more depth. This is what I would like for you to add on". I think it helps with the communication of ideas because you're generating maybe even a basic idea and you're like, okay, great. Now let me just hire someone that can build to it or add to that.
The other thing I want to mention is that you can share the link to this app for people and they do have a way for you to actually turn it into a mobile app. Now I'm not well versed in it enough to be able to tell you what those steps are, but I did notice that there is a way for you to be able to take what it's showing you on the screen and actually create it into a mobile app.
Like we said, we want you to go out there. We want you to be pirates and explore the new worlds of Google AI generated options.
Chelsea: Look at us. I love it. I still don't think we need a parrot, but I'll have the eyepatch. You can have the hook for a hand.
Vivian: Would you settle for a SOB marketing podcast logo eyepatch?
Chelsea: Oh my God, I want one. That sounds great. That's perfect.
Vivian: We're doing it. I'll take the parrot since it won't attack me. I'm going to have a muzzle on it.
Chelsea: I mean, I don't trust birds and I don't trust horses. Okay.
Vivian: I thought you were going to say people.
Chelsea: That's a whole other thing.
Vivian: All right. Do you trust though? Google Notebook LM and Google Opal. I was about to AI.
Chelsea: I think that it can be a great tool for small businesses. I think it's worth everyone's time to at least check it out.
Vivian: All right. Do you want to do the TLDL?
Chelsea: Absolutely. Let's do the TLDL.
All right, TLDL, Vivian, too long didn't listen. If you skipped ahead to this chapter, I'm going to give you a brief summary of what we talked about today. Today we talked about how Google is not going away. It's not going to be obsolete and they are building more tools for people and small businesses alike to use. We talked about two specific tools, Notebook LM and Google Opal. So Notebook LM is supposed to be kind of like a virtual assistant, helping you understand your sources and sift through information, create content, all that good stuff. Google Opal is specifically designed to build AI mini apps for anyone. You can share them and edit them and all that good stuff. So that's what we talked about today. Vivian, is there anything you want to tell our dear listeners before we, before I sign off.
Vivian: Yeah, you little rascals. Go and subscribe to the podcast because we want you to be alerted every time we drop a new episode. Also, we were looking at our analytics earlier today and I just want to say thank you to the one Canadian that was out there listening to us on Spotify. We love you.
Chelsea: We appreciate it. If you can, pretty, pretty please leave us a review. It helps us get in front of more people and you could buy us a coffee. Check out all the links in our description if you're interested. Vivian, go be the best SOB you can be.