Employees at a range of businesses are being encouraged by their companies to doodle their ideas and draw diagrams to explain complicated concepts to colleagues.

This is a point we clearly believe in and we’d take that a step further and say use a Livescribe smartpen so you can capture audio with your writing – and then move this into the digital world.

Even with advanced gadgets such as smartphones and tablets, “the hand is the easiest way to get something down,” says Everett Katigbak, a communication designer at Facebook

Many of our corporate clients already realise this – the fact remains that workplace communication and knowledge sharing is built around verbal conversations – and Livescribe smartpens capture this and via the digital writing platform allow this critical knowledge to move into the work digital world.

Using Post-It Notes to Create Interaction

Something else caught my eye in the article – this picture

A workplace using Post-It notes to create interaction, to spark the creative side.

We’re holding a half day strategy workshop for Smartpen this week – mapping out our social marketing efforts in the run up to the Spectronics Inclusive Learning Technologies event and into the second half of the year – this got me thinking about how we can use Livescribe Sticky Notes to help this process.

Our plan now is to still use flip chart paper to craft the strategy week by week – but we’re going to use sticky notes to add strategy clues to each week – so in a few weeks time once we’re deep in it – we’ll be able to refer back to the sticky note and re-listen to what we were discussing at the time. If you recall an earlier blog post i wrote about Craig Leaney – this is kind of the same but we’re moving the content from the paper into the digital world, and also dynamically onto our planning sheets.

I’ll share some photo’s once we’ve completed the session.

What this means is that we can now take our written notes and synchronised audio and have this automatically uploaded to Dropbox – increasing the flexibility and useability of your digital writing platform. We’ve spoken to hundreds of Dropbox users across Australia and New Zealand and based on their feedback – this will be a very popular addition.

Set Up Dropbox and Livescribe

If you want to know how to set this up, check out this tutorial video of how to setup and use the Dropbox integration with an Echo smartpen.

Craig Leaney is a management consultant focused on sales team development. In a recent strategy session with a clients leadership team Craig facilitated a broad discussion across a number of key areas where the business is looking for improvement. One of Craig’s key skills is his ability to listen and ask probing questions – a job made much easier because his smartpen is capturing the audio.

“The real value Livescribe gave myself and my client was the format of my digital notes – it wasn’t just an audio file, or basic notes, its the interactive PDF – theres no barrier to being able to read and listen to the meeting – this allowed all of us to recap in a much deeper way.”

How Has the Echo smartpen Helped?

To understand how Craig has redefined his value paradigm we must first look at how he would previously conduct sessions and provide feedback:

1. Convene strategy session with client and key knowledge holders
2. Chair the session and also take copious notes – both written and mental
3. Finish session – rush to airport or back to office – check emails, get caught up in the rest of his day, forget some but not all mental notes
4. Eventually type up session report and key findings for client

Now, lets look at Craig’s new value model – basically the same process but with the added involvement of Craig’s smartpen

1. Convene strategy session with client and key knowledge holders
2. Chair the session BUT, rather than trying to take copious notes – write bullet points and also use bookmarks as important points emerge or when the discussion goes off in new directions
3. Contribute fully to the session – asking probing questions and ensuring the group keep a dynamic, engaged discussion going
4. Finish session – immediately share notes and audio with client using Livescribe Connect – rush to airport or back to office – catch up on emails, then go over notes using paper replay to recall salient points, noting further thoughts and ideas
5. Using MyScript for Livescribe, convert expanded notes into editable text and finish report for client – report includes a copy of the interactive PDF

Key Business Results

Craig shared some really interesting insights with me about the impact of his Echo smartpen.

1. More Engaged - Craig found he personally was far more engaged in the session with his client – really leveraging his expertise to add a new level of value to the project

2. Client has rich content to reuse - the client has reused the interactive PDF over 17 times since the session – using it to recall key points and ideas as they turn action items into real action

3. Ideas shared throughout the organisation - the session generated over 20 key action items for the leadership group to own and take further. By using the interactive PDF the leadership group has been able to take these ideas, plus the interactive PDF down to field level – sharing ideas and generating a further 34 follow up tasks and business improvement ideas

Summary

From Craig’s perspective – he’s taken his role of strategic advisor to a totally new level – helping the leadership group flesh out key ideas but also capturing and sharing this in a simple, easy to reuse way.

Do you have a story to share?

In April and May, we’re conducting a series of Pencast interviews with Livescribe smartpen users from across Australia and New Zealand. If you’d like to share a story, check out this blog post.

We’ve organised a large exhibition area where we’ll be focused on showcasing the Livescribe product and its power, plus doing demo’s, helping new users get up to speed, as well as showing the entire product portfolio. The conference is great for us given our strong focus on education, and particularly how the Livescribe smartpens help:

• Students with learning and communication difficulties, and
• Teachers and parents who work with these students.

New Product Announcement

Given the nature of the audience, we’re also using this event to launch a new addition to the Livescribe range of dot paper products – this will be exciting for the audience as it’s a real showcase of how the Livescribe smartpen helps teachers, students, and parents – creating a truly inclusive environment.

Teach It Once

As part of the conference program I’ll also be sharing customer stories and experiences from around the world about how teachers are using Livescribe smartpens to help students learn anytime, anywhere. The full timetable of sessions (including my own) can be found here.

We’ll be releasing more information about our special offers in the coming weeks – follow us on Facebook and/or Twitter to keep up to date.

As such, starting in April and running through to the end of May, we’re going to be conducting a series of pencast interviews with business users across Australia and New Zealand.

What’s a Pencast Interview?

Basically I’ll be meeting with business users and asking the user a series of questions about what their job and business activities and how the Livescribe smartpen is helping them.

What I need are volunteers who are prepared to invest 30-45 minutes of time to answer some simple questions about how they use their smartpen.

If you’d like to volunteer to share your story, contact me via comments here or via email, phone, or one of our other social channels.

What was interesting about this group was how they’ll be using their Smartpens. Being involved in corporate comms means they are interacting with a diverse range of stakeholders around the work their firm does (think large infrastructure projects). These stakeholders can range from government, industry, technical experts, and community groups.

The key requirement where they identified value was around the need for them to capture accurate minutes and notes from meetings.

Where Could the Digital Writing Platform Help?

As we dived into training the group started identifying areas where Livescribe would bring value to their day to day work lives. The key points they felt would benefit included:

1. Accuracy of meeting notes and stakeholder meetings - given the nature of the work they do, accuracy of what was discussed or agreed in meetings is paramount
2. Recall of complex/technical terms - the comms professionals often find themselves in the midst of highly technical discussions with groups of experts from various fields.
3. Compliance - in some situations, the professional are compelled to have audio recordings of meetings – notes and audio simply adds to this compliance.
4. Speed - the users are able to instantly share notes or combined with MyScript for Livescribe, convert their hand written notes into editable text thereby distributing meeting minutes fundamentally faster than they can with a dumb pen and paper.

Key takeaway points

1. Connect will allow them to distribute notes and audio to key stakeholders in meetings
2. Where they need to generate very accurate records of meetings – the pen is crucial
3. In highly technical meetings they don’t need to worry about trying to write down or understand technical terms or words – they can listen to the audio later to create an accurate transcription
4. By using MyScript, the user can significantly reduce the time gap from meeting to minutes distribution

Conclusion

Accurate note taking and real engagement in meetings remains a critical priority for companies – Livescribe smartpens as a digital writing platform provide the right foundation for this to happen.

I was thinking some more about how we share content that has been created by our Smartpen. In a training session yesterday with a group of corporate comms professionals I used my pen with a trainee and we captured a 45min session as a way of showcasing the power of Livescribe Connect and interactive PDF’s, but also to share the training content so the new users can refer back to it.
 
The problem we ran into though is the PDF file size isn’t email friendly! The file size ended up quite large. This got me thinking about how we’d get around this.

My thoughts were we need an option where we can have the PDF hosted on a service like YouSendIt and an email sent to the recipient to download the file.  
 
Maybe we can extend Livescribe Online to allow a user to host these PDF’s in a time limited manner? Ultimately though we’d need to allow Connect to integrate to internal resources or even private clouds so as to overcome issues around corporate security.

The ultimate outcome though would be (i) Create content from 90min meeting, (ii) launch the command line, (iii) select upload and email, (iv) select recipients as per normal – and we’re in business.

What Has Changed?

Up till recently, the 2GB Echo was a starter package and didn’t include the usual A5 starter pad.

This new model includes the black A5 starter notebook and is now in line with the 4GB, and 8GB models.

Anyone purchasing the 2GB Echo smartpen will receive this new package – whilst the RRP for Australia remains at $149 (inc GST).

Here’s a quick recap of what we get up to:

1. Facebook

We share a lot of customer stories, product changes, and special offers through our fan page. If you’ve got a product or support question this is a good place to start (in addition to Livescribe’s excellent knowledgebase!). You can follow our page here – we announce special offers here first and we always welcome your feedback – let us know how we’re going or where we can improve

2. Twitter: 

Like Facebook we find Twitter is ideal for providing rapid feedback and service. We share a lot of education based stories as well.

As someone noted to me recently Twitter is a bit like ‘Where’s Wally’ as its one way people can keep up with where I am in the region! Our Twitter account is here – feel free to drop us a tweet.

3. The Smartpen Blog

The blog has been my favorite engagement platform over the past three and a half years.

I’ll continue to break news, share stories and blog about how Livescribe is the only digital writing platform of its kind in the world.

Shortly, I’ll be announcing details of our upcoming business pencast program – short, focused interviews with business users around the country – giving them a chance to share how they use their Livescribe smartpen – I’m really excited about this and the opportunity to showcase Pencasts to our local community.

4. YouTube

Video and specifically YouTube has been fantastic for Smartpen as it allows us to show what the Livescribe pen does and how it can help a diverse range of users.

The really exciting news for 2012 is that we’re going to be creating local user content – talking to teachers, executives, students around how they use their Livescribe pen – subscribe to our channel to get first hand news.

5. LinkedIn

Livescribe has emerged as a must-have business tool.

Tablets are nice, but real engagement in meetings, with clients, or even brainstorming ideas comes from being able to capture what you write and what you say/hear – and this is unique to Livescribe. Follow Smartpen on LinkedIn as we share business stories, pencast interviews with business users, and general tips on how to use Livescribe effectively in the office.

6. Google+

Whilst we were early adopters of G+ it’s only recently that we’ve been able to work out how to harness this in an interesting way.

Here’s the exciting news - Starting in two weeks we’re going to be holding regular ‘hangouts’ so as to give you the chance to ask questions, and engage with us. It doesn’t matter whether you have a pen or you are thinking about buying a pen – our regular hangouts will be a great opportunity to pick the brain of Mr Smartpen!

So in this age of engage – connect with us – we are social…

Mark
PS. if you’re wondering how we manage all these channels – we use and recommend the Social Marketing hub from Awareness Inc – an enterprise tool that allows us to centrally manage and engage with our communities across multiple channels.

These users come from an incredibly diverse range of businesses – Busy executives, sales reps, executive assistants, project managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, business coaches etc are finding tremendous value from being able to effortlessly take what they hear and write into their digital world

From talking to enterprise customers around ANZ, a number of ideas have been put forward and I wanted to share these with you – I’m interested in your perspective on these ideas…

1. Integration to SharePoint

To me this is a no brainer. SharePoint dominates the enterprise knowledge management space – a connector to allow a user to connect and drop content into a central directory would be a brilliant addition to Livescribe Connect

2. Tags

Given that many enterprise knowledge management tools use tags heavily this makes a lot of sense. This suggestion got me thinking about how we could manage this.

One option would be to include a line at the top of the page titled “Tags” where any words written on that line become the page tags.

The other option that I think is even better is to create a new command line called “Tags” – so just as we can draw a command line and write ‘Email’ – if we wrote Tags the pen would then prompt us to nominate tags – AND – what pages those tags are associated with…

This should then allow us to use those tags to route content once it hits a tool like SharePoint – ultimately it’d be really useful if we could get content into SharePoint, have visible tags, and then allow workflow rules to take over and move the content where it needs to be.

3. Integration to Outlook

This is really interesting – though it might be tough to solve. A lot of users have asked about integration to Outlook – can a user write on a page and have this create a calendar entry, or Task, or even a more dynamic email (than the current Pencast PDF).

My personal opinion is that as Livescribe Connect matures as a digital writing platform we’ll start to see this type of deep connectivity emerge – at this stage its a real wait-and-see.

Livescribe Business Ideas Handbook

One final point.

We’re developing a Livescribe for Business Ideas Handbook.

This spiral bound manual will help business users and internal resources understand how to (a) deploy Livescribe pens on a larger scale, and (b) how to ensure users get maximum value from their digital writing platform.

If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions as to what to include – feel free to include a comment here on the blog or connect to us via: