Episode 21: Google Business Profiles Are Doing Your DMO’s Job Now

Untangling Tourism Tech Episode 21, with Fabienne Wintle and Liz Ward. Each line shows who is speaking and when. Times match the video. We removed filler words and fixed mis-heard names.

[00:04] Liz Ward: Hi Fab.

[00:05] Fabienne Wintle: Hi Liz.

[00:08] Liz Ward: I am so excited. We are here doing another podcast, Episode 21, when we’re so busy, just like everybody is, trying to keep up with all the changes, yet we’ve managed to get here again. So that’s great. So welcome to all of our members, welcome to guests. It’s our pleasure to bring you this next episode of Untangling Tourism Tech. So today, Fab, we’re talking about… we’re getting very real today about what is happening when we are working directly with DMOs and helping them on the early stages of their AI transformation. And we just want to talk through what we’re seeing is genuinely helping them with their understanding and taking those steps.

[00:58] So I think that’s so important that we keep it real and we move past the theory and just go, what is really working? So there were three things we’re going to have a look at. One is their first stage of discoverability and understanding, if you like, and then understanding what the relationships are in their visitor ecosystem that are really influencing AI and then consumer choice. And then a really important facet of all of this, which is how they are personally, their team members are building skill and expertise in AI. I might get you to start by talking about this, how they figure out their place in an AI-driven marketplace, because you’ve been doing a lot of consulting and working one-on-one with DMOs and taking them through that discoverability phase. What does that look like? And what do they generally get from that exercise?

[02:07] Fabienne Wintle: Well, the way I approach this is, and if you can visualise this, it’ll make it easier in your tourism organisation. When we talk about DMOs, it’s just an umbrella word for tourism organisation, you know, economic development that looks after tourism within a council organisation, regional, state, local. We just call everyone DMO. So if you’ve not heard the term before, don’t feel like you’re left out. It’s just everyone that is helping, as a group of the tourism industry, succeed. So what I find is normally, I don’t know about you, Liz, but we generally get a phone call and say, “Can you help us? You know, we’ve noticed our regional website, we’re losing rankings in Google Analytics. Like, what do we have to do to make our website more visible in AI?”

[03:02] Liz Ward: That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s what they come to with us. We don’t want… We know that we’re losing visitation to our website. What do we do to fix the website? That’s the question.

[03:14] Fabienne Wintle: Yes, that’s the question, and it’s always the word website. Now, it’s not wrong, but it is not the most important thing, and if you keep listening, you’ll understand why. But it always comes with a website, the perception that the listings on the website need to be improved or the pages moved around so there’s a better conversion.

[03:42] However, when we start talking with tourism organisations, what I do, and I’ve been, you know, flying and seeing many tourism organisations recently, and I walk in the room with my phone, Liz, and I either talk to Gemini or ChatGPT, and I said, “Oh, can you tell me where the best places are to go, let’s say, for lunch if I’m meeting in the morning, or dinner in the evening?” And I just put it on voice mode, so I don’t actually look at my phone. And what happens, it returns results to me, and if I do that on Gemini or on Google, it will return results that come not from the tourism organisation’s website.

[04:30] So we’re starting to, “Oh, wow. The website’s not really important, not critical, not as critical as it was before. Those listings are not as critical.” It comes straight from the Google Business Profile of the operators. So not only that, we realised that, well, the directory that was once the golden child of regional tourism has been wiped out, thrown out of the window, and the DMO does not control the perception of the region anymore. So there is this big aha moment of, “Oh, well, we wanted to talk about our website, but you’ve just showed us that you’ve actually talked to your phone and then talked back to you without looking at the phone, and park that thought for a minute, but you’ve just shown us that we cannot control anymore how the region is perceived.”

[05:32] So that’s the number one aha moment. And by then, because it’s really important to get the founders in the room, you know, the board, and what normally happens is the board person or the CEO, once I’ve said that, they stay for the whole meeting. They might think we’re having a marketing discussion, but that has just proved that, oh, okay, no, this is not about marketing. This is about raison d’être, you know, the reason why we exist. So that’s totally shifted.

[06:06] Liz Ward: That’s right. It has just shifted forever. So that realisation shifts forever the role of that DMO in their region. How do they ensure that their region and their businesses who make up that visitor ecosystem are actually coming up in AI recommendations? So what is the response to that? What are the sorts of changes that a DMO is now starting to make? Like, how can they influence the quality of those Google Business Profiles, which is so important to those search results?

[06:56] Fabienne Wintle: Well, it’s really, when… Obviously, first of all, being aware. Monitoring it is not, you know, obviously in a world of AI, you’re not going to use human monitoring. You’re going to have to set up AI or digital monitoring, otherwise you’re never going to be able to stay up to date. But it’s about education and showing leadership, and ensuring that, think about it like the equivalent of the region being more, you know, not under the four star on Google, if you think about it, but being top notch, better than their rivals, or rival destinations. So that’s the one thing that happens.

[07:39] But I still just wanted to mention that when I walked in the room, people think about our website. You know, they come to us, “I want our website to rank better on AI when people go on ChatGPT to search.” The other thing that happens, they realise by me talking to my phone, I have basically instructed an AI agent, which is Gemini, to go and find information for me and report back to me.

[08:15] So by doing so, that the initial perception of it is going to be humans interacting with AI is also out the door. It’s actually the underworld of AI agents. My assistant… I always visualise it as the Devil Wears Prada assistant running behind me, talking to other assistants, where there might be a website, but it’s most likely going to be a database that is readable to bring the information back. So then it’s like, not only we’ve just realised that our marketing and our website is not as influential as it was, but we’ve also got to put the processes and the tools in place to be read by not humans, but be read by the agents that human may use to do the work for them.

[09:11] Liz Ward: Which is in our Compass framework that we talk about in the DMO AI Playbook. And that Compass framework, that’s very much about the O, out of heads, isn’t it? Making it queryable. And that is one of the implementation phases that we take our DMO clients through, is mapping out all of the opportunities to take that incredible amount of content and knowledge they have got about their destination and making it queryable.

[09:44] I’d love to move on to, and you mentioned the tools, and being able to measure the AI visibility, the queryability, the health of the Google Business Profile, all of the things that are really important in that ecosystem pertaining to a tourism business. So one of our recent tools that we’ve just started using, but already there’s hundreds of them done, is the AI Digital Health Check. And that is, when we talk about what is working, that is really working for both the operator and the DMO, because that is about being able to provide a tool to the operator so that they understand what they can do to improve their discoverability and bookability. And the DMO understanding, getting a read of what the health is in terms of those AI metrics, and being able to help the operator move through. So that answers that leadership role at this stage of AI transformation.

[10:58] So that AI Digital Health Check has been so brilliantly received in that it is a practical tool for the operators to be able to find opportunities in their Google Business Profile, in their websites, how they behave on social media, what their presence is like on other websites that are going to be searched by AI, but all with that AI lens on it. So that’s been really great, and I think the work that you’ve done, Fab, in terms of creating that dashboard for the DMOs is fantastic, because they can see at a glance how it is shifting when there are periodic AI Digital Health Checks done for operators. So I love that.

[11:44] Fabienne Wintle: And with, you know, an AI health check is a tool, but what AI enables you to do now is to close the loop. So, okay, we’ve got these results from these operators. What dial do we need to shift to ensure that that’s being catered for, they know how to improve that? What do we do next? How do we feed that into the next thing that we do?

[12:08] So a lot of people use AI like you and I would have used it in 2023, you know, getting ChatGPT to write a response to a review. I see a lot of DMOs still doing that. And definitely, if you’re listening to us, please come to these two webinars we’re running next week, because this is not how to use AI. The tools are here now for you to get AI to do the 80%, and then you need to train it on how to close that loop, do that other 20%. Not the other way around. So that’s… Did that answer your question?

[12:47] Liz Ward: Well, I think I just wanted to share with the audience, because we’re talking about what is working now, is those AI Digital Health Checks, and I’ve sat one-on-one mentoring tourism operators who received them face to face last week in New South Wales, and the response was incredible. They’re like, “This is amazing. This tells me exactly what I should be doing. I did think I probably had gaps there, but I didn’t really understand it.” So it is a really great tool that I know is really working, and it’s exactly what is needed at the moment to be able to work on and provide leadership within the region to be able to shift that AI visibility and understanding.

[13:31] It’s about knowledge and skills as well. But your point moving into knowledge and skills is really important, and I think we can see, I agree with you, I’m seeing a lot of DMOs still playing around the edges of using an LLM like ChatGPT to be able to craft responses to reviews or reports or whatever, write emails for them, that kind of thing. But if we think about personally our shifts to be able to really know how to instruct AI, to be able to get all of the knowledge out of your head, out of all of your other resources that are queryable, that’s where the real benefit comes from, is that AI literacy. And so when you’re working with the DMO teams, Fab, what do you see as those behaviours in staff members who are making progress? What does that look like?

[14:38] Fabienne Wintle: Well, actually, first I see the mourning phase, mourning, of them saying, “Why didn’t anyone else… anyone tell you that, you know, tell us that? Our regional body, our council, our national body, no one’s told us this. Why is that?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s not humanely possible to actually stay on top of AI because it is AI.” So if you’re expecting the government to bring you up to speed, that’s out the door. The government machine, the administration, is already slower than private enterprise by default. It’s going to be… It’s not going to be them bringing you how to use AI. So you’ve got to roll up your sleeves.

[15:25] It’s… I find it, it’s either people literally play with AI in their area of interest at work, you know, whether it is about learning to do music and you’ve, you know, discovered all the different ways of doing music with AI, and it’s those transferable skills of going, “Oh, hang on, I’ve learned about this. How about that?” So that internal discussion of championing anything AI in your business is really important, and that self-discovery as well. I’ll give you an example. You know, we were talking earlier about how Google Business Profiles are so important for influencing the perception of the region. But when I say that to a DMO, you know, they immediately think, “Oh, yes, reviews are really important, or recent photos are really important.”

[16:15] No, no, no. That was five years ago. Yes, of course they’re important, but since then there’s many other signals that have come. So I’ll start talking about, you know, like the more often people click get direction on your operator’s Google Business Profile listing, that’s a signal. “Oh, so if we did encourage them to put a get direction link in the confirmation email?” Yeah, that’s right. Or, you know, if you are a property that’s recommended people go to the restaurant, well, how about you have their get direction on a QR code, on RFID at reception, that gets tapped? Like, all that is massaging. But not only that, how does AI explain or define a great customer experience at a cafe? Well, if people stay there longer, maybe they’re having a better time.

[17:09] So they track your phone, so they know if you’re local, they know where you’re from. And then when you see these little charts on the Google Business Profile listings, again, that’s a signal that if it’s busy, you know, you’ve got your restaurant, there’s people there, must be good. So that’s another signal, just like the way that you can see if there’s a traffic accident on the road if you’ve got your Google Maps on. So how can you as a DMO influence that? You can keep doing industry advocacy, leadership, and having that human touch, that human meeting outside of AI, and just knowing how to show them, you know, these on your phone, when it’s busy there, that’s a signal. When you log in in your Google Business Profile, that’s a signal that you’re active.

[17:58] And yesterday I was sitting down with a cafe owner where I live, and she’s got a few different Google Business Profiles, like many of us do, and she could not… she could never remember which one she’s used to use to get into her Google Business Profile account. You know what she did as soon as I told her that it was really important? She wrote it next to the coffee machine, the Google Business Profile account that she needs to log into every day and post, because she’s noticed she’s gone down the rankings of Google Business Profile. So not… she understood it’s not just about creating content or putting a photo every now and then. It’s about showcasing your region, but interacting with these signals as well.

[18:46] Liz Ward: We always knew, didn’t we, that the Google Business Profile was a mammoth asset that Google owned. So when they started two years ago to make their shifts into AI, we knew that this would come into play, and we’re seeing the evidence of it. So just as a side note, that fine-tuning, that activation, the regular posts, the updating of the Google Business Profile is one of the most critical things that an operator can be doing, that the DMO can be showing leadership on presently.

[19:16] Fabienne Wintle: And stop telling them to respond to reviews. That is not… Yes, that’s a given. But start changing, talking about photos, videos, logging in, updating your categories, making sure you’ve got the categories, making sure you’ve got the offer post, making sure you’ve got the services listing, making sure you’ve got the products listed. And the only way you’re going to know what to do is if you actually do it for your DMO. And the number one listing you can use for your DMO to be on top of is the VIC Google Business Profile. So if your staff doesn’t have managerial access, and you, to that Google Business Profile, and get the notifications the same way an operator would, that’s where you need to start today.

[20:00] Liz Ward: So, talking of starting today, another thing to do is to join us for one of these webinars. So next Tuesday, the 18th at 1pm, and following day, Wednesday the 19th of August at 4pm, Fab and I are going to be doing a presentation where we’re going to step through a DMO AI transformation journey. We’re going to be really honing in on what are the mistakes you can avoid on this journey and map that out, and we’ll be using our Compass framework to be able to do that. So please join us for the webinar, DMO only, and we’ll really focus in and share latest knowledge and a good road map for you to follow. Thanks, everybody.

[20:55] Fabienne Wintle: See you next time.

[20:56] Liz Ward: See you next time.