Creating a brand tone of voice for Gemini with Notebook LM

As marketers, we spend years honing a brand voice. It’s the personality, the rhythm, and the "soul" of our comms. So, it’s only natural that we feel a bit protective. The fear is that AI will take our unique, hard-won tone and turn it into something bland.

In a previous blog we explained why we like Claude as a writing partner. But Gemini’s not far behind. In fact Gemini has some advantages over Claude. Because it’s plugged into Google, its answers are based on fresh information. It can also create images and video; so If you're writing a blog post and need a custom header image, It can do both. We also find that Gemini "gets to the point,” and its style aligns well to emails, social media captions, and punchy marketing copy.

To get Gemini up to speed with your brand we recommend using Notebook LM and creating a distinct project. Within each project you can drag and drop up to 50 files including PDFs, videos, web links, podcasts and more. So it’s easy to not only add your tone of voice guidelines, but also provide source documents to train the model to mimic them. 

A powerful prompt model

Once you’ve uploaded your files, you can then have a conversation with Notebook and work with it to refine its understanding of your tone of voice. We find this prompt model is particularly helpful:

Overview 

Think about a synthetic persona you’d like to work with. Such as: “You’re a creative director. Interview me and ask everything you need to know to create a Tone of Voice Guide which can be used to create copy across different channels. A guide which I can make available to my team and embed into Large Language Models to create, for example, a reusable GEM. I suggest you ask a question at a time – up to seven. When you have finished each bit let me know what your key takeaways are, and confirm if this is OK before moving on. Ask no more than five sub-questions per section. Talk to me about copywriting styles, words and phrases we like, and those we don’t. As you develop your understanding, present me with example copy so that we can refine this together. You can use sliders to help where relevant too such as “professional versus conversational,” “concise versus discursive,” “direct versus free flowing,”. 

Be clear about the outcomes you need, and prepare to invest a little time – at least 30 minutes and perhaps up to an hour. But remember, this baseline tone of voice can be reused again and again to save time on every project.  

Be precise in your expectations. We usually ask the model to prepare a structure document I can share with models and my team which includes:

• A short voice manifesto which explains how we speak – around 30 words

• Channel needs – build me different styles as required for different channels (web, internal comms, social channels, ads, etc..)

• Things we avoid – such as cliches, lists of three, overused words and phrases (see what’s trending with Wikipedia tracking how LLMs are impacting copywriting 

• Grammar guidelines – ensure the model knows key rules from the use of contractions, to how you write dates and names, to proper noun usage, capitalisations etc..

• Formatting rules –  headings, emojis and more 

When the guidelines are ready save them. Then swap over to Gemini, use the left hand menu to create a Gem and paste the guidelines in. Always check work and feedback so the Gem is tweaked and becomes “more you”. As your business evolves be sure to review and update the guidelines as necessary.

And that hour you spend refining your tone of voice? Trust us it will pay back many, many times over as you write everything from blogs to social posts, emails, articles and more.