Summary: In this episode, Tim Peter explores why we need to stop asking if AI is a replacement for social or search, and start seeing it for what it truly is: The Context Engine for your customers. As Tim explains in the episode, AI doesn’t just find links. It’s not a social site where your customers hang out. AI is a Context Engine that synthesizes your website, your social signals, your content, and your reviews to create a context that guests and agents trust.

The discussion outlines why social media and search remain critical as "human signal" providers that customers’ AI assistants and agents use to build a consensus view of your brand and business.

Key Takeaways for Leaders:

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 16m 51s

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Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. So I wrote a piece the other day. I think people who watch this show regularly know that I sometimes contribute to a series on hospitality net that they call the World Panel, where we talk about various issues in hospitality marketing and in digital marketing more broadly. And there was a whole discussion around a

question that keeps coming up again and again and again, which is, you know, is AI replacing search? Is AI replacing social? Are chat bots the new social media? And what struck me about this is we keep asking whether one channel replaces another. And that’s almost never how this works. Channels don’t die.

They accumulate. And I can’t imagine that AI is going to replace them. It consumes them. And what I mean by that is it requires the information that comes from search and that comes from social in order to do what it does. So in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you can stop chasing shiny objects.

understand how discovery actually works right now, and then decide where you can focus so you don’t have to try to do everything. Sounds cool? Let’s dive in.

So let’s talk about what happens with regard to new channels coming up. Obviously today we’re talking about AI, but previously we could have talked about search. Previously we could have talked about social media.

If you think about it, we don’t see any channel completely wipe out another one all that often. TV did not kill radio. Some of you probably still listen to the radio pretty regularly. I hope you’re listening to this right now. Even podcasts didn’t kill radio. Social didn’t kill email. Texting didn’t kill email. Mobile didn’t kill desktop. Channels don’t.

die. What happens instead is that our customers make changes in terms of validating their decisions. They need different sources. They look for different sources to check, particularly for purchases that are more complicated, purchases that are bigger, purchases that matter more in their lives.

So what changes is not what channels get used, but how many sources our customers check. So obviously, when we talk about social and we talk about hospitality specifically, this is true in B2B, this is true in a lot of different industries. But we know that customers today check social media, they check influencers, they check online travel agencies in the case of travel, they check artificial intelligence, and all of those are growing. All of those are growing at the same time.

This isn’t a one-off. This is something that’s changing every single day. When people care about a decision, they don’t look in fewer places. They look in more.

So yes, AI is growing faster than any of those others, but all of them are growing. The funny thing is even TV grew a little bit year on year in terms of where customers look for validation of the answers that matter to them. And that’s a really important thing for you to think about. Because when we think about artificial intelligence, when we think about how it works with social or how it works with search,

It’s a synthesis engine. You know, it isn’t just a place. I’m going to pick all that up. I got to take a sip of water.

Ahem.

So when we think about artificial intelligence, it’s not just another place for people to get inspiration for the things they’re looking for. That absolutely happens. I want to be really clear. That is a thing that occurs.

What it also is, is it’s a synthesis engine. It is a place that brings together content from a variety of different sources and provides some context for your customers and provides some additional information for your customers. It helps them ask deeper and sometimes more meaningful questions that matter to them. But if you think about this for, you know, a minute.

recognize that where AI gets its information, where it gains its understanding from what you say on your website, it gets it from what you say on social posts, it gets it from what other people say about you on social media and in social posts and in ratings and reviews. And it gets that information from other third party mentions. So that could be PR, it could be…

you know, other kinds of press. could be other websites talking about you. It could be things like if you have an online travel agency or if there’s another kind of intermediary in your specific industry, mentions on those third party sites that tell the AI all about you and help the AI understand the content that confirms what it’s seeing in other places.

So social still absolutely matters. still a crucial component of what you do with your business because it provides human signals on top of things that maybe you said about yourself or I don’t know, maybe had an AI write about your brand.

Social provides human signals. It adds tone. It adds credibility. It adds consistency.

You know, when we think about search engine optimization and generative engine optimization, GEO seems to be the name folks are settling on these days. Obviously, we’re not optimizing around keywords. We’re helping machines understand who we are. And there’s fancy words, you know, when we think about things like entity relationships and entity graphs and the like that help connect.

the AI to your content and help make your content stand out or help your content be better interpreted, better understood by the AI. That’s really, really good. That’s really useful and something you need to think about. But we also have to recognize that artificial intelligence doesn’t replace social. It doesn’t replace your website. It doesn’t really even replace search. It learns from it.

I’m going to talk about this in a future episode, I Google just reported its earnings for 2025 and for Q4 of 2025 and had a monstrous year. was above $400 billion in revenue for the first time. Search ads grew 17% year on year, right? So they’re getting great growth here because customers are using those channels just as AI is.

all working as part of a whole in terms of how your customers understand your brand and your business and how they can actually find the products and services that work best for them. AI is a part of that for sure, but so is social. So is the experience your customers have with you so that they can tell a story about your brand and business on social media. So we need to think about

how we operate in this new world. I am still a big believer that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. It’s something I’ve talked about many times in the book and things along those lines.

We have to think about what we’re doing today with content. We’re not just publishing content. We are, that’s core, but that content creates signals. It creates signals that artificial intelligence can understand and interpret to learn about us.

that content creates signals in the social media. It helps customers understand us better when they come across us. And it might plant some seeds that when they’re talking about us on social, they’re talking about the things we’d like them to talk about, about our brand and our business.

Those signals have to represent what matters to our business, what we stand for, what benefits we provide to our customers. And it’s things like consistent positioning. Who are you and what do you stand for? It includes things like engagement and replies. When customers are talking about you on social, are you engaging with them? Are you commenting back? Are you part of a conversation?

or you’re just letting it happen to you. When customers are leaving reviews, the reviews and responses matter a ton. I said for years that when you were replying to a review on social media, weren’t, excuse me, replying to a review, you weren’t replying to a review for the reviewer. You were replying to a review for the person who read that review.

Well, now the person reading that review is an AI, right? The person is an artificial intelligence. So your response helps validate again the kinds of experience you offer your customers to the AI. I’m going to come back to that in one more place in just a moment. But signals look like consistent positioning, engagements and replies, reviews and responses, and of course, any third party validation that other people say about you.

Now I said I was gonna come back to reviews and responses. Again, I mentioned a moment ago, content is king, customer experience is queen.

Customer experience is where those reviews come from and those reviews are being ingested by artificial intelligence. So what the AI reads about you in those reviews is what it knows to be true about you just like was true for customers when they read those reviews. So it’s really important that you give the kind of customer experience that will cause people to write a good review about you or at minimum

least not write a bad review about you, right? Because if they write a bad review, what is the AI going to know about you? If they write a great review, what is the AI going to know about you?

And if you respond to those reviews, actually skip that, if you don’t respond to those reviews, what is the AI going to know about you? It’s going to know you’re the company that doesn’t reply to its reviews. You’re the company that doesn’t care about what people say about your brand of business.

Whereas if you do reply, it shows you care. It shows that those reviews matter to you. And that’s another signal that we need to pay attention to. The reason that this matters so much is because AI trusts patterns and it trusts consensus.

It knows what it sees about you everywhere. And if what it sees about you everywhere is people say, hey, this place is great. This business is amazing. They take care of their customers. They create great experiences. Guess what it’s going to say about you. Hey, this place is great. Hey, this place cares about its customers. Hey, this place provides great experiences. You see how those all connect.

If you’re in hospitality specifically, that’s why what it says about your brand, what it says about your property, online travel agency, or in reviews, or in social mentions, and what you say about yourself in your owned content on your website, all reinforce or contradict one another. And that’s true regardless of the business you’re in.

But if your website says one thing and your social media says another and your reviews say something else, the AI either doesn’t know who to trust or it’s going to believe the reviews. But I would bank on it’s going to be more of the former than the latter.

OK, so here’s how I would encourage you to think about this. We need to move away from asking the question which channel wins. We instead should say what story exists about our brand, about our business on the Internet? What story is the Internet telling our customers and their AI assistants and agents about our business?

It’s absolutely a good idea at this point to be doing the work to show up in AI. You want to be, you know, doing, setting up the right schema on your website and on your appropriate pages. You want to also make sure that you’re, you know, if you’re testing an MCP server or you’re feeding your data to an AI directly, that’s something worth testing. What we don’t want to do is chase the fastest

growing channels at the expense of the channels that continue to produce visibility and awareness and revenue for your business. And that includes search and social. What actually differentiates your brand and what will differentiate your brand and AI is clarity, consistency, and your humanity. You’ve heard me say many times, your brand is the prompt.

All of these things put together show why your brand matters more, not less in an era of AI.

If there’s one thing that I hope you take away from this, it’s this. AI does not make social media, search or content less important for your business. It makes clarity and consistency and customer experience more important.

The brands that show up when AI assistants and agents start making recommendations won’t be the ones that are chasing after every new channel.

They’ll be the ones that consistently show who they are, what they stand for, how they take care of their customers, and why they’re worth choosing, no matter where a customer starts their interaction or starts their journey with your brand or business.

If this episode has made you think about a brand you work on or someone on your team who’s wrestling with these questions, please do me a favor and send them a link. Make sure you tell them why it stuck with you too. That’s how these conversations spread. I want to remind you that you can find the show notes and the full archive of our episodes at TimPeter.com/podcasts.

And if you want to go deeper on this idea, my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Custom Requisition Beyond Big Tech, expands on how brands, platforms and AI intersect. You’ll find the links in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I really do appreciate you. And in the meantime, till we’re together again, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

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