94: Are LLM Visibility Audits Total BS? (Emily Zertuche)

Speaker A: Hello, my fine friends. Welcome back to Destination Discourse. I'm your host, Stuart Butler, and I'm joined the. Georgia. Join. I was going to say join today with the technically challenged Adam Stoker, but I'm the, um, speakerly challenged, so. Hey, Adam.

Speaker B: Hi, Stuart. Hey, I want you to know you did great there.

Speaker A: Thanks, buddy. You give me a clear C. What was that? C plus, C minus.

Speaker B: We're. We're a little bit the everybody gets a trophy culture right now, and you deserve a trophy.

Speaker A: Thanks. I, uh, I will receive it in. In the, you know, spirit. It was intended. We got. We're joined today with another repeat guest. This. This is definitely the record repeat, I think, but. But deservedly so, because Emily Zattucci is with us. Hey, Emily Zatucci.

Speaker C: Hello.

Speaker A: Glad to be back doing some party hands. Um, now, Emily, you have two episodes in the top 10. I literally think right now you're sitting at number one and number 10 in the top 10 episodes, so.

Speaker C: Oh, fun. Maybe this will be number five.

Speaker A: There you go. Yeah, that's right. Keep that bell curve going. Great. We're glad to have you back, but, man, your life has changed since you were last on the show. Several weeks ago, you were, uh, you know, a proud member of the light side working there at Corpus Christi. But you've. You've been seduced by the dark side of the force, and you've gone out and created your own business. Now you're an evil dark side vendor. How's that going?

Speaker C: Well, evil dark side, it feels so good. Um, yeah, yeah, I'm on your side of the fence, Adam.

Speaker B: The dark side is seductive.

Speaker C: It is. And it gets. You. Gets. You get to talk a lot more, um, have a lot more conversations. So that's been really fun. And I like to talk. And you know, what we were talking about right before this is now. There is no government speak. That I can't not say. So this is great for more content.

Speaker A: Well, we're looking forward to the gloves being off and you just having no filter. Uh, can you imagine what I'd be like if I had no filter? That would be.

Speaker B: We get to experience it right before you press record. But I actually, I want to speak to the change that. That Emily just made, because there is a freedom that comes from being on the vendor side, because we can't just look around and say, man, somebody should fix this. We actually get the opportunity to go try to fix it. And a lot of destination marketing professionals are kind of stuck within what their budget allows and what the leadership allows and Being on the vendor side, it, uh, you really do get the complete freedom to see a problem and try to solve it. And it's one of the. The most amazing things I've found as well. And it's so fun seeing what you're doing, Emily. Um, and I'm sure we'll talk about it today, but I'm really excited for you. I think you're going to love it.

Speaker C: Thanks. It's been fun. So far, I've met with nothing but positivity. You know, we were just at Destinations International and the, you know, the amount of people that have always been my peers, and I've always supported them, they've always supported me. It's been met with, you know, such a really cool, like, positive insight, but also a lot of curiosity and what, what this is and what this means. And I agree with you. I think a lot of it is just the fact that I can be very vigilant in the one thing that I keep seeing and just go. Go hard with it because it's all. It's. I can focus all my attention on one thing. How beautiful is that?

Speaker A: That's lovely. That's great. I saw your LinkedIn post about DEI. Uh, you've made a couple pretty interesting ones, but there was one where you're like, I was kind of nervous because I didn't know how I was going to be received because it is a shift in the dynamic when you're now a vendor versus a peer. And so, um, I think that speaks a lot to your reputation in the industry, that you were embraced the way you were at di, that people still know who Emily is, what she's about, and you're not out there like an evil, real evil bender that's hocking your ways left and right. You're actually trying to solve problems, right, Adam?

Speaker B: Yeah, those. Those guys are the worst.

Speaker A: Well, let's jump into the episode, shall we? Let's, uh, let's talk some. Some fun SEO stuff. I mean, GEO stuff. But before we do. It's the greatest segment in all of entertainment.

Speaker C: There's no.

Speaker A: Oh, there is.

Speaker B: I was waiting for you to mess it up Sometimes. Sometimes it's hard to get to you. Stop talking so I can play the jingle, you know?

Speaker A: You know, I wish, I wish your. Your big old body wasn't covering up the lyrics so the audience at home could, could actually sing along karaoke style.

Speaker B: But it's okay to be fat shamed on the show I co host is a new experience.

Speaker A: I didn't say anything about fat content I just said like, size. That's different. So know, you're a help. You're a healthy 240 pounds. You know, like, well, you carry it well, whatever you are. 230, 220. I don't know.

Speaker B: Listen.

Speaker A: Okay, should we stop there? Well, I've.

Speaker B: I've lost some weight, so I'm feeling a little offended by the. The weight you're attributing to me, but. Yeah, no, we're good. Let's. Let's keep it rolling.

Speaker A: I told you before I recorded I was going to be feisty today. We've had an interesting week. Political stuff. So, um, you know, I got to take it out on someone and I. I can't take it out on. On our elected officials. So, you know this Adam, your potty therapist, probably punching back. It's fine.

Speaker B: It's good.

Speaker A: It's all good.

Speaker B: Hey, I'm happy to be that guy. Um, we're just gonna have to talk about our retainer engagement, whatever it looks like.

Speaker A: Um, I thought you can say our boundaries, but that retainer works too.

Speaker B: Oh, no, you pay me enough. We don't need any boundaries.

Speaker A: This is going with. All right, so let's talk about the STU's news, shall we? So there was this article back in April on Fast Company, and I like Fast Company. They sort of keep up with technology. They're always looking at, you know, the latest trends. And the article was basically saying that they felt like geo. So generative engine optimization is a mirage, doesn't really exist. It's essentially saying it's snake oil. And they sort of said there's a lot of people out there trying to do a land grab on different tools that make this look like it's a real thing. And ultimately there's no real substance in it when you actually peel it back. You know, they sort of pointed out some correlations between, um, citations and how much folks show up on LLMs, but they pointed out each LLMs looking at different citations. And they also pointed out the difference. SEO is very much about a preformed ranking. And, uh, generative AI is very different. It doesn't preform rankings. It doesn't have a notion of what it's going to say until the prompt is put in. And then it goes and grabs a lot of individual snippets of context relevant. And it's based on math probability. Right. So every little snippet of block of text is assigned values, and then based on the prompt, they figure out a vector that assembles all that together and Then I could ask the same prompt three times and get three completely different responses, you know, because it is probability based. So they're basically saying all these tools that are out there that uh, are um, saying how well you're ranking and giving you a visibility score and stuff are really nothing more than a tool to make you feel good and they don't really provide any, any true value. Uh, so I thought it was an interesting. I think that's a topic we're going to dig into a little bit more today. But Adam, what were your thoughts on this article in.

Speaker B: I think GEO is a really interesting concept and there's so many parallels to draw to SEO when SEO first came out, when you could actually make modifications on your site that help you show up better in the Google search results. Right. We're dealing with a very similar situation and I want to, I want to go through a couple things here because I think it's a, this is a fascinating concept to me. So number one, there is low hanging fruit of things you can do on your website to make you more likely to show up on in the LLM results, like optimizing for schema for example. It makes it where the bots can crawl your site and get access to your content. So to me there is at least some component of GEO that makes sense because those simple optimizations, uh, especially on outdated websites, I think those can really help the place where I think a lot of. And I didn't get a chance to get through the entire Fast Company article but uh, I can see where it's going and I think my main challenge with it is content is what gives you the ability to show up in the results. So if your GEO is tied to content, I think of course it's going to be relevant because it makes you more likely to pop up in the search results. There's a lot of stuff happening right now. So for example there are people who are scraping all the reviews that are out there about an organization and they're pasting it on a page on their website calling it such as. So if it was Visit Myrtle beach, it'd be Visit Myrtle beach reviews, uh, on their, on their main URL. That's something that's going to be snuffed out that that's similar to when we used to put white text on a white background, uh, in SEO when SEO first came out and we didn't know what was black hat or white hat. I think we're in that era right now where I think we're going to start seeing what's black hat and what's white hat and what's what? And by the way, black hat and white hat was just a term to describe are you doing something that's really not, not the way it should be done. But you know that it's tricking the algorithms in the short term and then the algorithm will update and, and change that. I think we're going to continue to get algorithm updates. So anybody that says they have a silver bullet, that I know exactly how to, you know, make, make content or make, uh, changes on your website that guarantees the future of geo, that that is all snake oil because the algorithms are updating every day, the models are updating every day. So my suggestion would be we need to be focused on quality, which to me says the site needs to be optimized and then content needs to be optimized. And if you do those two things, no matter what changes in the LLMs, it's very likely we're going to show up and then things will shake out and I think we'll have a clear picture of what GEO is going to look like for the long term. I just don't think we're there yet for somebody to definitively say they've got a silver bullet.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the one thing that you're missing is the citation piece. I think there is a strong evidence that there's a correlation there. You know, for example, it seems like Google is looking hard at Reddit, you know, so having conversations that are positive about your destination or your businesses on Reddit seems to help. But, you know, you're right, I think it's doing a good job for the consumer is always the answer. Emily, I'd love you to chime in on this.

Speaker C: Yeah. You know, I agree with the silver bullet concept that it is so early for GEO to even be in the space that it's almost impossible to measure. Um, if, uh, iab, which is one of the standardizations for marketing and how they measure, they have even come out in May saying that they have brought out a way to say like this is like the statistical rigor that you do need to have in order to accurately say that you're tracking something like this, but it is too early for them to actually make it a standardization. So anyone out there that is claiming that they have this silver bullet, they don't. No one does. Um, but what I will say is it is true that it is non deterministic when you're getting an LLM, uh, that's responding to you and that inherent non determinism of like LLMs makes varies in what is being sent out to you. Because the LLMs itself are very complex, they're very probabilistic. Um, and their architecture is changing all the time whenever we have these new updates of every single LLM. So, so that stochastic nature is the single. Like having a single measurement is pretty much meaningless. But there is a way that you can still get a signal in how you're measuring that. And it's not necessarily measuring the responses that are coming out, it's measuring the variance. And if you can get that variance into a small enough bucket to where there is a confidence level that you can have. Right. A margin of error that you can have by asking that same question over and over and over and over, that can equate to a signal that you can use to inform your content strategy. Um, and what I've seen is there are some out there that they don't. They measure it maybe two or three times. That doesn't get you to a statistical, um, confidence level. But there's a way to do it. It's just a lot of work. It's very expensive. It can get very expensive. Um, and again, it's new, so it changes over and over. Um, but there's a way to at least measure what direction it's going.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's the key. Right. So to. If I look at any kind of industry or any opportunity, you can always tell when something's going on. When a ton of vendors jump into the same solution at the same time, and we've seen every vendor in the industry come out and say, hey, I can measure your visibility in, uh, LLMs, and we can do it the same way. We're all going to use the APIs, we're going to hit it 1,000 times with these hundred different keywords, and then we're going to give you this one magic score, and you can share that magic score with your board and then you can all feel really good at the end of the day when that score goes up by one or two or three. Right. And so this is the. To me, this is the inherent problem with our industry. We gravitate to. Towards feeling good without actually doing good. Right. We gravitate towards a number at random. Well, not random. Our conjured mirage number that we created and stacked in a way that we can manipulate is going up. So therefore we're doing a good job. It doesn't mean that a single new person's coming to my destination. It doesn't mean my Destination is going to show up more in LLMs. It doesn't mean that we've actually helped our economy in any way. But we, we thump our chest and we go to our board and say, look at us, we're great. It's that illusion of relevance that Adam's talked about so many times on the show. So you can use these tools to inform your strategy, but the tool itself, that number can't be the goal because there's no real meaning to that goal. Right. The meaning comes from understanding why. And when you can understand why, then you can actually go and do the work that actually has the impact. It's the fundamental problem in our industry.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think that the, like, the only robust scientific approach to measuring a non deterministic system is through repeated sampling and statistical analysis that gives you exactly the confidence level that you're asking. Because you can ask many of these, uh, these vendors, well, are you going to prove your interval confidence? Are you going to show me the, the rigor that you put. Do you publish your methodology? If they're not, that's something to question because even the biggest companies, like some of these really big ones don't do it. Or some of them say they only measured three times each. And it's like, that's not gonna, that's not gonna get you a score. Even when that was published, um, I think it was on skift. It was published. There was one that they only measured each question three times each. I'm like, that's always, that's not gonna give you an actual answer. But it's published and it's showing that. This is so early in the game. There's not like no one is, is secondary, uh, grading other people. You have to come in with being like extremely transparent and saying, look, the likelihood of you getting cited, for example, like I have a 95% confidence interval that this specific prompt is getting visitors to do a certain thing that would contain a true underlying probability. And then you have to report that confidence interval that gives you the critical functions. Does it, does it quantify the precision of that answer? Um, does it also report that it. Do you report the uncertainty? Like, how much uncertain are you? Um, and you know, you just need that statistical basis. And I think what's happening right now is people find it's so cheap to get an API, add it to your thing and then prompt and ask it questions. Of course, anybody could do that. Um, and it's where I actually started at visit, Ah, Corpus Christi. I was doing that on my own, but Then over time, you start realizing how, how you can get it to be as, as much as a signal as possible. Um, because at first it takes time, but then over time, when you start developing an actual methodology, that's what we need to focus on.

Speaker A: Right? It's the outcome. Right. What do I actually do with this information? So if, for example, I'm looking at, hey, what visibility for certain queries and I'm seeing certain other destinations showing up and I'm seeing where the citations are coming from that are giving them more relevance for that query, that's where my energy should go. So you should have this rigorous weekly, monthly, quarterly, um, process where you're looking at what citations are relevant and important and making sure that you're playing in those spaces, making sure you're in the conversations in those, where those citations are gravitating towards.

Speaker C: You want to fill those gaps for sure.

Speaker B: I, I do feel like for the sake of our audience, I need to at least take the other side so that the three of us aren't just agreeing about this non stop. Stuart, one of the things that you mentioned here is whenever you see a bunch of vendors jump on the same solution, that's a little bit of a, it points you to the fact that there might be a little bit of a, an issue there. Um, I also, in thinking about just investment strategy as a destination, anytime you're the beachhead, anytime you're first, the level of waste is going to be increased because there's more trial and error because you're, you're the first one in. Right. Um, but if you're the type of, uh, marketer or tester that stays in wait and see mode until a lot of those, the waste and mistakes have been made on the front end, there is a distance between you and the people that went first in a lot of cases. Now, of course, that's not always the case. Sometimes somebody else spends the money, wastes, makes a bunch of mistakes, and then you get to skip a lot of the mistakes that went into it. But I just, uh, we've been talking a lot about the need for people to be willing to try something new. And then when something new comes out, if we just dismiss it as snake oil, I think we're doing the industry a little bit of a disservice because we're discouraging the activity that I think we've really pushed on the show. So I do think people should be trying stuff. However, I think we need to give them a framework to understand whether or not what they're buying into is real or if it's just hype. And maybe that's one of the things that we can take a couple of minutes on here is how do you distinguish between the hype and the reality? Because I do want the desties that listen to the show to be ready and willing to take a risk to try something new, to use a vendor that has a new solution because that's the only way we evolve as an industry.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'll be completely unbiased because as you all know I am doing AI visibility. So you know, I'm in the hot seat right now. I could go both ways on uh, you know, challenging, you know, some of these. But I've also, and I'll be very transparent. The moment I announced that I was doing this, I had about 4, 5 LinkedIn messages that day that all came from AI visibility vendors asking what are you doing? Let's get on a call. I want to be part of what you're doing. So even that very curious, like well what is it that you're doing that I'm not doing? Or let's compare notes. Um, and it just shows like to your point that everyone just jumped in on the same thing all at once. But the difference is there are so many that are not doing any method like, like are being statistically rigorous in the methodology. And I think that's what I could say to a DMO is one, the baseline approach is leverage your existing free tools. There are so many free tools out there that are really good. Um, for example there's ah, you can go into GA4 now and there's a whole setup guide that I actually published on my substack uh about two weeks ago. There's a setup guide that allows you to see the crawlability of um, AI assistance including ChatGPT, perplexity. And um, I think there's another one, Gemini. Oh and Claude, that shows the direct traffic sources going to your website at no cost. You could do that. You can look at direct uh, uh, traffic referrals um, and see what is driving the AI driven engagement. Um, so there's many DIY approaches to this and I would say like you know, to begin this process is start there, start there and start doing your own research because it's absolutely free. I mean there's time but it is free to start. Um, and then you know, if you want to get really into it, you can go like Myrtle beach. Like I know you guys and Diane are putting together Stuart a like a whole operating system on looking at these A.I. uh, prompts and citations. I mean, there's like, there, there's ways to look at other demos and how they're approaching this.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that's the great thing about the industry, right, Is it's very collaborative and helpful, I think, you know, to address your, your criticism, what I said, Adam, I, I understand what you're saying. Right. We need innovation in the industry. I think what happened though, with both chatbots and with LLM visibility was every single vendor, regardless of what their vertical was, regardless of what their specialty was or expertise was, came out with a solution very quickly that wasn't very deep, wasn't very robust, wasn't well thought out. It was opportunistic. Right. And so I think the problem is you get this signal and noise problem where maybe 10% of those vendors actually had something worth investigating, but it was so much noise that you just sort of dismissed the whole category. And I think anytime multiple folks from different perspectives, different skill sets are all trying to solve that one problem, it just feels like a land grab, and it just feels opportunistic in a way that isn't helpful to the industry. It feels like a money grab more than anything else. And so I think now that's settled down a little bit. But early on, we were pitched by people to do very simple queries on a stack of different, um, prompts. And it was going to be like $20,000 a year for us to get this tool that gave us a dashboard. The same thing you could do today in Claude, in an hour, you could build it. They were trying to charge $20,000 a year for it. Right. And so there's my, sort of, my, my point of, um, frustration with this industry is there's too much opportunistic approaches from some vendors out there. When there seems to be this kind of an opportunity. I think that the smarter folks are taking a more, um, deliberate approach. Right. Like Emily is like some others are, ah, where they're like, okay, let's really look at this holistically, not just what's the simple thing to do, but what does that mean? And then what do we do about it once we know this information? Right? And I think that's what we're looking for as an industry.

Speaker C: It also has to go beyond the DMO, because the DMOs are stewards of the community. And if you're only measuring the DMO itself, you're essentially equating E commerce to type like any kind of, like E commerce style things to a DMO versus a full ecosystem of a community. And so if you're going to be measuring the dmo, how are you measuring them holistically? How are you getting very meticulous with your hoteliers, with your restaurants, with your business owners? How are you helping steward their, um, level of understanding with AI visibility so that the full economy can grow? Um, and I think, like, that's the one piece that needs to be talked more about, is that this is not just a DMO's thing to take on. This is the full community that needs to remain visible. And it, it helps you with your full destination and them getting advanced and how they're going to be. I mean, we've put so much effort and time into listings. Um, we used to have, like, so much staff that would just completely operate on the listings. The Visitor Information center, like, this is the new digital footprint for them. How are they going to stay operational through their listings if people aren't going to the website to click through? And how are you showing partners that you're giving them what they need if they're not going to the website anymore? So these are the types of things that need to be solved and talked about when talking about AI and visibility.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a bubble that's about to burst sooner rather than later. Right. Is where. And where do. How do we measure the value that we provide to our stakeholders? It's the metrics we've used for a long time, 15, 20 years, uh, are just not relevant anymore or won't be very, very soon. And so I think you're right. I think we've talked about this on the last few episodes recently where our role is shifting. For sure. More stewards. Right. But, but also our mindset has to shift. Like, we can't think about, uh, us owning everything. It can't all live on our website and on our social channels. Right. We've got to now be an incubator and a catalyst to encourage an army of ambassadors to be talking positively. It shouldn't be us creating fake burn accounts on Reddit to go comment on Myrtle Beachy stuff or stimulate conversation. We need to actually encourage real people to go have those conversations. We need to be the incubator for that. We need to be the incubator on social media. We need to make sure our businesses understand this and that they're also doing it so they're part of the conversation. Because at the end of the day, that's what it is. We need to make sure that everyone that has a positive, uh, perception of Myrtle beach or is Experiencing Myrtle beach in a positive way is talking about it on the Internet somewhere, whether that be social, whether that be forums, whether that be on websites and blogs. We need to stimulate the conversations about Myrtle beach in a positive way. That's how we win the long game with SEO. I mean, Gao.

Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: I think, Stuart, what you're saying. And Emily, you, you added in that we need to look at more than just the destination website. And Stuart, you just kind of went through the same thing. It actually gives us a different perspective on KPIs when we think about it that way. So for example, we've talked a lot about visitation as a KPI and that's most definitely a KPI. But what about quality score? I mean, the aggregation of all of the reviews across your destination by category, whether it's dining or lodging or, uh, you know, attractions or whatever that is. A KPI that I haven't seen anyone tracking is the aggregation of the review score across the board. Okay, awesome. I haven't seen the reporting on that, so maybe you could share a little bit about that methodology in a second here. But I think there's the inspiration, like how many new searches related to the destination are we getting this month versus last month versus the previous month? That's. Are we creating demand? Right. M. And so I really, I think there's some work that needs to go into aggregate KPIs that we should be reporting on that aren't all just tied to the destination website because that's what's built the house of cards that I feel like is kind of crashing down right now. And, and maybe a, uh, I don't know, it'd be interesting for us to do an entire episode on what are the correct KPIs that a destination should be tracking. Sounds like you've dug into the quality score. I'd love to hear what you guys are doing, Stuart.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, Melissa and our team, we need to have her back on and sort of just show this dashboard that she's created with Claude because it looks at multiple dimensions of community. Ah, health. Right. And it looks at Those top level KPIs, like visitation, um, tax collection, visa spending, the tangible stuff. But it's also looking at the demand generators, like, um, ad performance, things like that. But we also are looking at sentiment. We really think sentiment towards Myrtle beach is critical. Right. And we sort of do this in a few ways. We do our own sentiment surveys to our own audiences and third party audiences. We work with folks like MMGY who do their portrait of American Traveler and we'll put questions in there. Sometimes we'll work with Longwoods to do some halo studies, things like that. So we got sort of like these transactional survey based things coming in. But we're also increasingly looking at how do people feel about Myrtle beach online, right. What is the sentiment on social media, what are the review scores on TripAdvisor for not just the destination but also for individual businesses and stuff? I'd say we're at the very beginning of this journey, but we do feel like it's critically important. Here's the thing, right? If we go back to like SEO early days and you talked about the black hat, white hat, we were always trying to game the system. That was the methodology is like, how can we find an exploit in. Just dig in there and gain some kind of alpha advantage. Then it evolved right after Penguin and Panda, uh, came out, we were like, oh man, we can't game it nearly as well. And then the smart SEOs came out like the Rand fishkins of the world. People like that came out and said, hey, you've gotta be better than your competition. You've gotta understand what Google's trying to do, which is understand the semantic, um, um, content they're putting into the search engine. Like what is the actual request, what are they actually looking for? Not what did they type, but what do they actually mean by what they typed. And then provide the best version of that you can. That's Google's job. And if you can understand that and you'll know what people are searching for, you can solve that problem by just creating great 10x content. Right? We're at the same place with Geo, but it's different because it's not just written content, it's experiences. Right? Because experiences will drive everything else. If uh, people come to our destination and have uh, a great experience, they're more likely to talk about it, they're more likely to post about it on social, they're more likely to write about it, they're more likely to leave a positive review or all of these are the citations that are going to go into us getting recommended. And if Myrtle M Beach has a ton more of that chatter and positive sentiment going on, its probability of showing up in the LLMs goes up compared to our competition. So that's the end game. We've got to make sure the experience is great, that we're measuring it, we understand how to, how to move it in a positive direction, how to educate our stakeholders. Um, and I'll finish on this. We have seen everyone's dealing with the K shaped economy right now. And we've seen even despite headwinds with the economy with Canadian travelers, with gas prices in Myrtle beach, and we're about flat year over year from an economic, overall economic standpoint, we see massive winners and losers. And when I really look at these businesses and I see what the difference is, it's how they're operating and how they're focused on experience. And you know, some of these folks that are complaining to us are saying our, uh, business is down 20, 30%. Then I start looking at their marketing, then I start looking at their customer service, then I start looking at their reviews. I'm like, there's a fundamental problem here on how you're operating in 2026. You've got to make sure people are having a great experience and that you're focused on that and the ones that are, are uh, winning even despite a down economy.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's interesting because you can like, it doesn't matter how much marketing you do, you cannot out market a bad experience. Right. And so if we're report and I don't want to build reporting just based on defensibility, I think that's already coming from the wrong angle. However, if we're in a board meeting and they say, hey, our visitor numbers are down and I can show that, that all my metrics are still looking good. But the quality score, the aggregate quality score of the destination that has uh, you know, reviews and the Reddit sentiment and all that built in. And I'm like, look, we brought this many visitors, we created this much demand, but look what's happening on the experience side over time. We've got to figure out how to fix this on the other side. It, it makes it where the DMO is not just the punching bag for every single metric. That might not be what they hope it is. So I do think as we think about KPIs tracking some of that and it sounds like you guys are in the early stages of that could make a big difference on even reputation of the DMO with some of the challenges that we're all dealing with.

Speaker C: Yeah. Stuart and Adam, to your point, brand lift and brand perception and sentiment has to be a KPI and it should be a KPI in your strategic plan. Adam, we talked about this at your CMO jam two years ago. When we first created this strategic plan, that was the thing I advocated for was that has to be a KPI because we need a holistic way to show that we are bringing some kind of Positive lift to the destination, whether it be, you know, partner sentiment, visitor or uh, your residents or just your businesses doing what they can. And there has never been a more critical time to do so. Because, you know, to your point on the K shaped economy with AEO or GEO now surfacing and how you are being discovered, it is actually leveled the playing field for discoverability in many ways. Because reach used to be purchasable when we would go into SEO, everything we did was paid search and these paid search campaigns to rank on the first page with our blue links. But now it's all about how much of a distinctive experience are you giving and what is that positive sentiment? Because if it's positive and it's consistently recent and you have this way of being able to make yourself different and uh, you know, differentiate yourself from other destinations, that is going to surface more likely in the citations and in, in the space of discoverability. So, you know, when we think about the top of funnel, um, piece of like how we used to do certain, use certain tools, use certain metrics to be discoverable, it is now being surfaced in the black box of an LLM. But there is a way to influence it and that is through the visitor experience. So, um, it is a full circle moment that, you know, your visitor experience is so important to your citations and how are you and you getting cited?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I think any DMO that's still sitting there thinking that we're only marketing, we're only the promotion engine, you're fighting a losing battle. Right. We've got to look at marketing holistically. It's not just promotion, it is about the product. Right. If we're not acting like stewards of the community and thinking about what, what kind of product mix do we need, what kind of hotel product do we need, what kind of attractions and restaurants do we need? If you're not working actively to elevate the culinary scene in your destination, the music scene in your destination, if you're not working on that physical product, if you're not helping your uh, stakeholders do a better job of marketing themselves in customer service, in driving great unique experiences, then you're never going to succeed in this new kind of paradigm that exists. So we have to act as stewards today. It's not even a question.

Speaker C: And when you think about uh, the workforce in the future of what does this even mean as marketing departments, sales departments, visitor services departments, it's all coming together in so many different ways. Um, I just saw this podcast on, I can't remember her name but she's a futurist that speaks about AI and has been in, you know, been at the US Embassy talking through all of these things. And they talked about the differences between how we are now T shaped workers, meaning, um, that you have one specialty but you can go through a broad series of different things within your organization. And there's no better industry than tourism and DMOS that knows better about the T shaped worker, they're switching to what she calls the M M shaped worker. And so the M M shaped worker, our M shaped employee, will have a deep domain expertise, but they'll also have that technical fluency. So AI orchestration, for example, and systems level emotional intelligence. So let's say you are a community stakeholder manager, but you also have AI orchestration and your niche is um, let's say sustainable tourism. You can, you can't prompt, you can't prompt AI effectively if you're trying to solve the over tourism problem. But if you don't have a deep understanding of the nuances of local hospitality and urban planning, for example. So these M M shaped type workers, it's going to be merging everything together that we're going to be orchestrators versus um, doers. And I think that in itself is just going to really revolutionize this idea of that's a marketing problem or that's a leadership, uh, problem. It's everyone, it's the full DMO M that needs to be stewards. And we've been moving towards this direction for so long. This is just going to speed it up to be that holistic steward of a destination.

Speaker A: Yeah, the silos internally are going to have to collapse, right? They absolutely have to because we're all going to be touching multiple aspects of what, what everyone does. Go ahead. Adam, you had a thought.

Speaker B: Tactical proficiency in a specific, you know, um, discipline that, that is, if you really think about it, that's kind of an asinine way to build a job description is, oh, they know how to do this one thing, but they know how to do it really, really well. The place where this is going because of AI is those that have the ability to think critically and have knowledge about a specific topic, like you said, Emily, are going to be able to do just about anything. We've talked a lot on this show about the shift from tactician to strategist that needs to take place for every individual in the industry. This is why, because uh, a T shaped employee's value is going to be diminished significantly. It already has been diminished significantly because your ability to click within a Software platform really isn't a skill that provides the value you're going to need for the long term. It's knowledge, critical thinking and ability. And then you can leverage AI to get a lot of the tactical things done. Um, for everybody that's listening, if you're a T shaped employee, you need to redraw yourself as an M as quickly as you can.

Speaker A: Yeah. You know, I push back a little because I think there's, there's two sides to the T shape. One is knowledge and one is expertise. Right. Or skill, let's say. Right, right. And so I think if, if the, the base of your tea is knowledge, you're uh, unless it's very proprietary knowledge that it can't be found somewhere else. Right. Um, but if it's knowledge, you're, you're out of luck because knowledge is, is basically free now. Right. It's, it's. If you have a skill to be able to do something with that knowledge that other people can't or AI can't, that includes, you know, taste or rigor or critical thinking, then I think you're safe for a while. But I think the trend is, is right. People are going to need to be more, um, discerning discernment is going to be the biggest skill that I'm looking for. Like can people take a lot of information and sort of make judgment calls on that? Because part of the battle of leveraging AI is understanding what are you pulling together to create that solution. Right. And having that sort of wisdom or experience or uh, gut feeling or taste to bring it together to solve the problem. So I think, you know, you've talked before, Adam, about we need more generalists on the agency side. And internally I sort of agree with you. I still feel like you need some subject matter expertise or folks that you sort of lean on or defer to on certain cases. But I'll give you an example. Like if, if, if we um, it would be a great example. Right. Historically it was a group of people or an individual that had very specific knowledge about how to fix stuff, how to set things up, you know, from WI fi to fixing the printer or whatever. And that, that knowledge and know how was confined to that one group within the organization, whether that be an individual, multiple people. Now anyone can do that by going to LLM and saying this is what's happening, help me troubleshoot it. Right. Or this is what I want to accomplish, help me do it. So that knowledge piece is gone, but you still need someone that can have the judgment to say, well you here's what we need to consider because of our specific use case, you know, so I think that's where I think I wouldn't throw out all the T shaped people. I think there's still value but they need to, they need to adapt. You know, maybe they need to become like a, uh, I don't know. I don't know why we like using letters for shapes and stuff all the time. We got K shapes, T shapes, M shapes.

Speaker C: We are talking a lot about letters today. A lot of action.

Speaker A: Yeah. Today's episode brought to you by the

Speaker C: letter T and N. More acronyms. Oh God.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Well, you know, I would say agree on all. And this kind of goes back to the importance of adjusting your KPIs to be more of that human level Promoter Score, brand lift score, sentiment score. Because knowledge is basically free and it's going to get easier and easier to just have an AI agent show your, your ROAS or your roi. So why is the human making that? The KPI? I um, mean it's just going to be able to come through like these knowledge based AI systems. We need to start measuring more of the Net Promoter Scores. Are locals happy with what's going on? Are visitors happy with your destination? I um, think you know there's just going to be a lot more um, like the expensive qualities are going to be anything that is human and that's experiences.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like Net Promoter Score a lot. I think anyone that's done marketing for a while across multiple industries knows the value especially in consumer products. Like Net Promoter Score is sort of the, the, the lifeblood or the kiss of death for any brand that's selling widgets. Right. If you have a negative Net Promoter Score, you're never going to grow sales. And so we apply it here and you touched on something that we do which I think is important. We look at both the visitors Net Promoter Score of the destination and we look at our local residents Net Promoter Score and we ask it in the form of a question. Something like um, would you recommend Myrtle M Beach to a friend to visit? Uh, you know, something along that way. So are they proud to tell people to come visit Myrtle Beach? And it's interesting because you can measure that over time. You and for those that don't know about Net Promoter Scores, you basically look at the top percentiles. I think it's like eights, nines and tens, right? The people that would most likely. And then you subtract the ones that would least likely so the ones through sixes and so you have this sort of delta of a score, which is your net number of promoters. If that's not positive, substantially positive, you're doing something very, very wrong. And so it's a number you can impact through the experience. It's one you should absolutely be measuring on a, On a. On a regular basis.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Well, were there any threads we wanted to pull in the last couple of minutes?

Speaker B: I, I have one, but I'm debating. I, I just am struggling a little bit with the, uh, comments that you made earlier about when. When all the vendors are being opportunists. Right. And, and I, I worry about. I mean, look, Emily and I are both vendors. I think there's a lot of vendors in our space who are as invested in the industry as the DMOs that they serve. And there is a fine line between seeing a problem and trying to solve it and, uh, looking for just a money grab or an opportunity. Right. And so I think that's something I'd like to dig in more to. I don't know if today's the right episode to do that, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than maybe the framing you gave it in this conversation.

Speaker C: I'd like to jump in and full circle it because, I mean, we kind of talked on this in some aspect is the cheaper knowledge is getting, the more you can call bullshit on people. And at the end of the day, if you can pull the same knowledge as they can. Yeah, don't pay for it. It's cheap to do these things for free. But what you can look at is the judgment, the taste and the ethics of that vendor or that person, because that's what you're looking at. You're looking for a discerner. You're looking for a, you know, a strategic partner that is actually there to assist in getting you where you need to be. That, that's the end goal. And I think that's the end goal for anyone in any vendor in any space. Um, so I mean, if there's any way, like, I would just go with your gut. Like, go. Like, when you're looking at these vendors, of course, ask, like, ask them every question you can from a knowledge base perspective, but then also get that judgment taste in ethics, like, what are they doing to assist you? I mean, at the end of the day, that's what we're going to be judged on ourselves. That's how we're going to be hiring. So if we're also going to be getting vendors, you have to use that same application.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I Agree. And I, you know, I use hyperbole a lot on this show just for, you know, the purposes of the, the conversation. There's certainly a lot of great vendors in the space, many of which we work with. Right? But we, But I do stand by the point, right? Which is there were and there still are a lot of vendors, not all, but a lot of vendors that will. Will put slap lipstick on a pig, right? They'll find a free or cheap tool, they'll put it in a nice package, and they'll come try to sell you that TurnKey solution for $20,000 a year. And then if you peel back the onion a little bit and you look at what they're actually selling, you can go do that same solution for like $1,000 a year. Right. That happens a lot. And so those are the kind of vendors that when, when you sniff it out, I don't work with. Right. I don't want someone that's just looking out to gain as much margin as they can from me. So I think we owe it to our, uh, communities, to the taxpayers whose money we're often spending, to ask rigorous questions to, to, to challenge the vendors to say, well, what's your methodology? What technologies are you using? You know, uh, like, in the margins, you know, we want everyone to make money. We're not saying we don't want businesses to make money, Right. But there's a point at which that becomes unsustainable for us and just unethical as well. And so there were a lot, and there still are a lot of folks that. Doing that around G8 about generative, um, engine optimization and even chatbots still, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: And I think, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I agree. If there's abusive practices out there, if there's abusive margins out there, 100%. Like, I don't disagree with you on that. My fear is painting the vendor category of the industry with too broad of a brush.

Speaker A: Like, calling them evil dockside vendors. What's that like, calling them evil dockside.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Dark side.

Speaker B: But making it sound like anybody trying to solve a problem is actually only in it for a buck. I think we've got a lot of vendors that are really trying to solve the same problems DMOs are. And the other thing I would probably remind you is, yes, you at visit Myrtle beach with the budget. Budget that you have, you have the talent on staff to solve just about anything internally, which allows you to solve, uh, problems that a lot of these vendors are trying to solve. A smaller destination That's a two to five person operation, cannot survive in a lot of cases without some of the vendor solutions that are out there. And, and so again, I just want to make sure that, that we're not branding the vendor category, which, by the way, it would be in my best interest to do so. If I'm the only righteous vendor and everyone else is just easier evil, that's in my best interest to paint.

Speaker A: I don't think anyone's ever called you righteous on this show, I gotta say. Don't go back and listen to trans. Oh, look, look at the transcripts.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm saying if I painted it that way on this show, right, like, that would be in my best interest. But I, I, I feel like there's a lot of great vendors really trying to solve problems with the right intentions that also have to turn a profit in the process. Right. So it's a balance. It's a balance. And I think we all have to find it on both sides.

Speaker C: Sides.

Speaker A: Fair. Totally fair. Emily, any last thoughts from you?

Speaker C: Um, my last thoughts are this is a evolving world. And just be vigilant like this, like, everything is changing at such fast pace. Um, there will be a whole new topic probably in two weeks that LLMs are destroyed and the world is puppies and rainbows. Not, not dying. But I mean, there's just so much that's changing. So that's my advice is just give, like, take time to do some research and really look out there and, you know, be the discerner.

Speaker A: Yeah, discernment is critical skill and we need to be teaching all our employees to be better at that for sure. Um, if they want to find you, Emily, where can they do that and learn all about your new cool technology that you built?

Speaker C: Yes, LinkedIn. Go to my LinkedIn page. Um, I also have a substack. Um, Emily Caesar Tucci. Substack. Com. That's where I write all my fun things. And then, um, my new company is Zertura. Um, you can also find me there. Z E R T U R A dot com.

Speaker A: It's a cool name. Sounds fancy. Um, Adam.

Speaker B: And hey, Stuart's hard to impress on the naming side. Emily. So congrats to you.

Speaker A: Um, better than I. I'm not gonna do it. I was gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it.

Speaker B: I want to, I want to also plug Emily's substack because it's, it's excellent. It's not, it's not just good, it's excellent. So anybody that is not following Emily's sub stack. You need it in your inbox every. I don't know if it's every two weeks or every week, Emily.

Speaker C: Or does it every two weeks? Ish.

Speaker B: Every two weeks. Okay, well, I think everybody needs to be receiving that. Um, I also want to invite you back, Emily. If we do get to the point where LLMs are dead and everything's puppies and rainbows, I want you to be the person that comes on and.

Speaker A: And.

Speaker B: And talks about that topic with us.

Speaker A: Oh.

Speaker C: Ah, man, that will be the day.

Speaker B: Um, you can find me Adam thebrandrevolt.com you can find me on LinkedIn or of course, on Tourism IQ.

Speaker A: Thank you. You can find me at stuart butler@visitmodelbeach.com and thank you for listening, everyone. Until next time, this has been Destination Discourse.

Speaker B: Thanks, everybody. Uh,

Speaker C: This was bicycle. I liked this one.