You'll thank me for this one. I guarantee it.

3 min reading time

TL;DR = listen better, remember better, write easier with this one free app

In one of those rains/pours situations, I spent Monday in Los Angeles with an innovative medical-grade sensor company and Tuesday in San Francisco with a needle-free blood drawing company.

It was the first time I sat with either of them in person.

So we began, as better engagements often do, with a full-day strategy session. I enjoy these very much.

I go into these almost totally unprepared. By knowing almost nothing, I get to ask probing questions to learn the essence of the product or service, the company, or problem they solve.

My typical responses, if there are such things, range from “I completely understand; great insight,” to “Let me see if I can paraphrase,” to “Sorry, I’m just not following you,” to “Why should they care about that?”

We cover a lot of ground. I leave exhausted but satisfied. I remember the main points.

But the “really good stuff?” The deeper explanations that will make more sense once I’m more familiar with the category? I won’t remember those. It’s too much.

Enter Otter.ai.

So Otter.ai is a voice recording app. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, what’s the big deal about that, you say?

By not taking notes, you can listen, strategize, and participate better.
Otter.ai transcribes the words for you. Bonus: The phone app shows you the words as you speak them.
You can replay the recording and it highlights the words as they are spoken. You can make edits right in the app.
You can export the audio and copy the transcript into Word, WordPress, or anyplace else!
You can share the audio and transcript link with whomever you like.
Otter.ai is completely free.

Otter vs. YouTube

All the way back in Journey #3, I recommended YouTube as your free source for transcripts.

Today, I take it back because Otter is better. Upload your audio or video there instead!

You can’t upload “just audio” to YouTube.
A YouTube transcript is a huge block of text. No spaces, no punctuation, no sentence case. Otter is imperfect here. But at least it tries and gets some of them right.
You can search for a word you remember you said and jump right to that section. It even offers some of your more popular words up front.

Here’s a 1:45 video demo I made while talking with Matt at RBC Medical Innovations last week.

Fantastic, right? You’re welcome.

Your new content generation strategy

I’m always recommending to clients: Record yourself! Record your phone calls, your meetings. Because if you actually heard the things you say all day – about your product, about problems you’re facing, about questions customers are asking you – you will have materially written your website copy!

The two days worth of recordings from this week would be enough to all but redo two company’s websites.

I can’t recommend this strategy for content generation strongly enough.

And remember our talk about Content Shock? No? Then reread it now: https://medicalmarcom.com/medical-device-marketing/content-shock-marketing because it’s probably the most important message I’ll deliver this year.

What could be more unique, more breakthrough than the practical issues you face all day long? That will get rid of your “but I don’t know what to write” blinking-cursor blues faster than anything.

Entertainment Break for Parents

Do you have any Mario Bros. games in the house? Here’s the piano ragtime version. Fun!

Fast Round

Big surprise. LinkedIn’s getting even worse, if that’s possible. ???????? I mean, something as simple as the ability to show group logos(!) has been broken for three weeks! (And that should be my biggest problem.) They managed to erase about 200 suggested discussion topics too. ???? Vanished. ???? I mean, just gone. ???? !

An Open Letter: To Linkedin and everyone who uses it and yet often wonders why. The article’s okay but what caught my attention was a comment by “Linda” who observes, “LinkedIn is a selling platform. The problem is it’s not a buying platform.”
I’d never heard the difficulty (misguided biz dev disappointments on LinkedIn) expressed that way. Thought provoking.