How To Build Your Brand and Take Command of Your Online Reputation with Jason Barnard

In this episode, Mike speaks to Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube. Using cutting-edge Brand SEO, he shapes brands on Google to reflect a growth-driven vision. Jason unpacks strategies for controlling your brand story in Google and all of the AI engines so you can take full control of your online reputation, be easily found by potential customers and convert them into clients.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• When it comes to tech growth your brand is the most influential factor. 
• Your personal brand is just as important as your business brand.
• The way both Google and AI platforms represent you is critical.
• Your content needs to be packaged in a way that the machines can understand, so they can find you and showcase what you offer.
• Your website is the touchpoint AI and Google trusts and uses to verify who you are and what you offer. In their eyes, that website is the foundation stone.
• What you publish on 3rd party websites and how you reference and connect that content on your personal website makes a huge difference in getting found in the SERPS and AI searches.
• If you do not take control of your brand, it will be incredibly easy for a malicious actor to take control.
• How you structure your About page and align 3rd party sources with it is important.
• Focus on the sites and URLs the machines think are important. The Knowledge Graph will help you to do that.
• How you manage any career pivots matters.
• Publish in the places your potential customers are looking.
• Being found online is just the first step. People will research you, so everything said about you or by you, matters.
• Reputation issues can be fixed, but it takes time.
• Track what is said about your brand online and quickly deal with problems, including errors in video transcripts.
• Focus on your website. Get the structure right so the bots can understand it.

Listen here: How To Build Your Brand and Take Command of Your Online Reputation with Jason Barnard

Published by: Mastering Tech Growth. December 06, 2024. Host: Mike Sirius. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube.

Take Control of Your Brand Story on Google and Turn Search Into a Growth Engine

[00:00:00] Mike Sirius: Imagine this, you search your name or your brand on Google, and the Search results is not telling the story you wanted to. Your brand story should be driving growth, not just exist in Search results. How do you, how do you take control and make Google work in your favor? Today we’ll learn exactly how to take command of your online reputation.

[00:00:31] Mike Sirius: Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring your actionable insights and inspiring stories. I’m your host, Mike, and today we’re diving into a game changing topic, mastering your brand storytelling on Google to create a high impact online presence. This is crucial for any business looking to transform SEO from technical tasks into a driver of actual lead generation.

[00:00:54] Mike Sirius: Joining us today is Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube. Jason’s expertise lies in shaping brands on Google to reflect growth driven vision. Today, he’ll unpack strategies for controlling your brand store and Google and using it to achieve real growth. It’s great to have you on the show, Jason. Thank you for joining us today.

[00:01:12] Jason Barnard: Thank you, Mike. That’s a brilliant introduction. I think I might steal all of that. 

Brand as the Most Influential For Company’s Growth

[00:01:16] Mike Sirius: Ha! Go, go ahead and thank you. Makes me feel so well. So we have this, I want to say specific question to the show, which goes like this, when I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind? 

[00:01:32] Jason Barnard: Mastering tech growth? 

[00:01:36] Mike Sirius: Yeah.

[00:01:38] Jason Barnard: In terms of technical of my company or mastering growth through technical applications of Search and AI? 

[00:01:46] Mike Sirius: You’re giving me back questions, right? So if I rephrase this like this, Jason. You have a tech venture, so it could be any technology driven venture, SaaS platforms, SaaS platforms, anything tech related, right? And you can choose only one factor, which is the most influential for that company’s growth projection. What that would be? 

[00:02:08] Jason Barnard: Brand. The brand is going to drive your business best, long term, short term, and even midterm. I would, I would go so far as say my personal branding, at least Kalicube’s case, has been hugely important.

[00:02:22] Jason Barnard: What I found with Kalicube is that my personal brand has been very easy to build and quick to build, and it’s been a very, very good lever for growing fast in the short term. And what we’re now doing is segueing from my personal brand driving the company’s growth to the corporate brand driving the company’s growth.

[00:02:46] Jason Barnard: So if we can now successfully build the corporate brand, which takes longer to replace my personal brand as the main driver of sales and growth, then we’ve won the game. And I can take a step back and potentially exit. 

Shape Your Brand Narrative or Risk Losing Ready-to-Buy Customers

[00:03:01] Mike Sirius: Okay. The, the brand so effectively, is it trust with the brand or is it just, you know, influence of the brand?

[00:03:09] Mike Sirius: Like what really lies when you say brand? So if I’m, if I’m putting your brand in Google, I’m seeing something, right? So I’m seeing the Search results. 

[00:03:17] Jason Barnard: Yeah. 

[00:03:17] Mike Sirius: And what I’m seeing effectively is making me to reach out to you and go like, you are probably the company’s gonna solve my problems. Is that what we sort of mean by brand?

[00:03:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, in, in terms of brand, what I’ve, what, what we’re doing when we’re building a brand, and I think all corporations and people build a brand to some extent, is we are building up a brand image and representation in people’s minds. We’re talking about people, then people think that is a brand that I want to work with.

[00:03:49] Jason Barnard: And they will then search you on Google or ask ChatGPT about you. What then happens when ChatGPT or Google misrepresent you or don’t represent you as a superstar that you truly are. People lose the confidence that you’ve carefully built up when you’ve been speaking to them on different platforms around the web.

[00:04:08] Jason Barnard: So I would argue that Search engine results page on Google or the ChatGPT response to who is Jason Barnard or what is Kalicube is vitally important to your bottom of funnel. If it’s a bad result or even a suboptimal result that doesn’t recommend you explicitly make you look like the superstar you are, then you’ve lost a huge, huge opportunity and you’ve wasted a lot of work getting somebody to the point where they’re ready to do business with you because they might just jump ship and go and do business with somebody else.

Establish Authority Online to Boost Cold Outreach Success

[00:04:40] Mike Sirius: So that applies to like a cold outreach situation, right? So it’s like. 

[00:04:44] Jason Barnard: Oh yes. 

[00:04:44] Mike Sirius: People don’t actually know you to challenge that, that notion of that online presence and whatever is your online reputation. And if you’re saying, if it’s, if it’s not a superstar, as you have mentioned, you’re facing a losing your potential leads right there.

[00:04:59] Mike Sirius: ‘Cause they just go like, who is that person? Who is this service? 

[00:05:02] Jason Barnard: Yeah. 

[00:05:02] Mike Sirius: They’re getting subpar, you know, results. And they go like, I think there’s better one. Okay, I get that. 

[00:05:08] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Especially with cold outreach,, I mean, I, I’ve really not done very much cold outreach in the past. I’ve tended to build organically by being present where my audience is looking on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on forbes.com, on entrepreneur.com, and then bringing them in that way rather than outreach directly to somebody.

[00:05:27] Jason Barnard: But we’ve now started with the outreach and the fact that when you search my name, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D on Google, I look incredibly impressive. Google appears to be recommending me. It’s showing me as the authoritative entrepreneur and digital marketer that I am, and that makes a huge difference.

Users Turn to AI Assistants to Evaluate Your Credibility and Expertise

[00:05:49] Mike Sirius: I love that you mentioned or put it in ChatGPT. So it’s, yeah, we are going towards that, right? Where, where what those answers will be asked against ChatGPT or other big LLMs, Gemini of Google. And people will be, let’s just put it in Google. They will be asking that one as well. Okay. 

[00:06:09] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And, and with.. 

[00:06:10] Mike Sirius: Fascinating. 

[00:06:12] Jason Barnard: ChatGPT, Bing, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, all of these Assistive Engines, we’re having conversations with them. So as well with, whereas with Google Search, I would now go in and say, Jason Barnard. It shows me the result. Brilliant. I look really good. That’s my Google Business Card. But as you rightly said, that what happens when the person starts having a conversation and doesn’t just stop with who is Jason Barnard and starts talking about what are his specialist topics? Should I trust him for Knowledge Panels?

[00:06:41] Jason Barnard: Should I trust him with my personal brand online? Yes or no? The machines will actually give an opinion. And you need that opinion to be, yes, you can trust him with your personal brand. And that means the machine needs to understand foundationally, who I am, what I do, who I serve, and that I am the most credible in market solution.

Take Control of Your Personal Brand by Teaching Google and ChatGPT Who You Are

[00:07:02] Mike Sirius: I love that. And, I learned that from you. By the way, in your email signature, you have look my name up or put it in ChatGPT, right? So I put my name in ChatGPT, he couldn’t even find it. It was like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. So I was like, there’s clearly some work I need to do. So, so this episode and that conversation is very close to my heart.

[00:07:23] Mike Sirius: So I think we just defined why it’s so important to understand what story Google is telling about you. It’s effectively, it’s essential if you, if you wanna do really well, right? So what’s the difference between this type of approach for personal brand building compared to like traditional, you know, branding?

[00:07:43] Jason Barnard: There isn’t a difference in the sense that all we are doing at Kalicube, all our techniques do, we call it the Kalicube process. What we are doing is taking your personal brand, your brand narrative, and we’re communicating it to the machine so that they can represent you the way you want to be represented.

[00:08:04] Jason Barnard: So we don’t help you create your personal brand in the sense of we won’t define who you are, we won’t help you with the photos, we won’t help you with, where, sorry, what you are saying to your audience when you are out there communicating with them. What we will do is help you to package all of that work you’re doing so that the machines, including Google and ChatGPT, and all the machines to come understand what it is you’re communicating, understand how you want your brand narrative to be represented. Then represent it the way that you choose. It gives you control. 

[00:08:41] Jason Barnard: Our process is based on understandability, credibility, and deliverability. Understandability, does the machine understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve? Credibility, does it believe you to be best in market for your particular audience? Deliverability, have you given it the content it needs to be able to communicate effectively with a subset of its users who your audience, and if you look at understandability, credibility, and deliverability from your perspective, that’s control, influence, and visibility.

[00:09:12] Jason Barnard: That’s what you want. So what we can do is take what exists, package it for the machines so that you control your influential and you get visibility because they understand that you are a credible solution and they have the content that they can deliver to their users. 

Communicate Clearly and Consistently to Ensure Machines Understand Your Message

[00:09:29] Mike Sirius: What’s the how behind this? Like how do you communicate? That message to the machines. You know, you, you put it as machines, but you know, how do you communicate that to Google? How do you communicate that to, you know, ChatGPT or the assistant LLMs? 

[00:09:46] Jason Barnard: It’s really as simple as clear, consistent, organized information. Machines learn by consistency, clarity, and repetition. And it’s up to you to organize yourself. So what I find is a lot of people come to us as clients and say, well, I’m not sure I need you, because the machines will figure it out for themselves. My advice to those people is the machines will probably get it wrong, and even if they don’t get it wrong, they’re gonna get the tone wrong.

[00:10:18] Jason Barnard: They’re not gonna understand exactly what it is you’re trying to communicate. And the other problem is that they might get it right today, but get it wrong tomorrow. You want control, you wanna stop that happening. Because once it happens, the machine changes, its mind, represents you differently, it’s very difficult to change its mind back. So be proactive. 

Build and Control Your Entity Home for Consistent Online Presence

[00:10:40] Mike Sirius: So I, I love the consistency. I mean, that, that’s everywhere. Like if you do any social media game whatsoever, like LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, Tiktoks or whatever, all these algorithms, all these services, they love consistency. They need to see a consistency for a prolonged time, a year or two where you producing content and, and then they start trusting you, which means you’re gonna get more impressions and you’re gonna be seen more.

[00:11:05] Mike Sirius: So when we say about consistency, about who you are and how you shape that message, are we basically saying that you need to have like a website, a blog, and just, you know, put out that message about yourself? Like where do you actually put that information out about yourself into what channels? 

[00:11:22] Jason Barnard: Right. It’s a really important question. You do need a website yourself. And if you don’t have one for your personal brand, build one today. It can be a two page website about page and homepage. That’s it. But these machines are actively looking for what we call the Entity Home and what Google put call the point of reconciliation.

[00:11:41] Jason Barnard: What they’re trying to do is reconcile all the fragmented information around the web about you and figure out what the message is, what the truth is, what the representation of you should be. If you give them your version of the facts on your Entity Home, on that point of reconciliation, on your own website, they have something to compare that fragmented information to, and they can reconcile all of that and create the story that you want.

[00:12:07] Jason Barnard: So the secret to control is making sure that you have one source of truth about you that you control. And John Mueller from Google says that they are actively looking for that source of truth from you about you. So make that happen. That’s the control. 

[00:12:23] Mike Sirius: Can we tell them? 

[00:12:23] Jason Barnard: That’s where you start. Sorry. 

Control Your Online Identity to Prevent Malicious Attacks

[00:12:26] Mike Sirius: Can, can we tell them, you know, what is the source of truth? Like, I’m just thinking malicious actions, right? So I do have my own website. Let’s say I do have my own brand. I’m putting out a language, or someone comes up, creates a similar domain, and starts creating a content about me, which is not through to just, you know, sort of destroy my online reputation. Like, how do we tell Google?

[00:12:50] Mike Sirius: How do we verify the source of truth? Is there like process for that? 

[00:12:54] Jason Barnard: No, there’s no process. It’s algorithmic. Everything Google understands about you, everything in the way Google represents you is algorithmic. So you have to master the algorithms. And that’s what we’ve done at Kalicube. That’s what the Kalicube process does because we build solidly from understandability to credibility to deliverability in a very intentional manner.

[00:13:16] Jason Barnard: And I’ve built a platform called Kalicube Pro. It’s a SaaS platform that’s just used internally by our team. 2 billion data points we’ve collected to understand how this machine thinks and functions. And what’s interesting is when ChatGPT came out a couple of years ago, if you asked it who Jason Barnard was, it got it right immediately without me having to work on it specifically for ChatGPT. Because ChatGPT, Bing, Alexa, Siri, Google, all function the same way. They need to understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve. They need to believe you, you’re credible, and they need the content that corroborates everything you’re saying and the content that they need to deliver to their users.

[00:14:00] Jason Barnard: So if you can take control today, somebody else being malicious and taking, trying to take control tomorrow will be impossible. If you fail to take control today, it will be very easy for somebody to do that. 

Build Understandability First with a Simple Website Before Expanding Content

[00:14:13] Mike Sirius: Okay, so are we talking as simple as a couple of pages website, you know, here’s about me, here’s my story.

[00:14:20] Mike Sirius: I feel like it’s almost like a LinkedIn type of page, but maybe a lot more details. Or are we actually talking a lot more? Are we talking about, you know, blog posts and, and talking about the topics you actually care about? Let’s say I wanna position myself in the market as a, you know, leadership coach for a example, right?

[00:14:36] Mike Sirius: We had many guests, by the way, CTO level coaches. So let’s say they wanna position themselves as that. Like, do they need to produce content around that for Google to go, like, I know you and I think you are great as a, you know, CTO coach. Like it, like that’s how it’s happened. 

[00:14:52] Jason Barnard: Yeah. When you start with the two page website, there’s no point in waiting. There’s no point in thinking, oh, I need a 20 page website with blog articles and content. Start with your two-page website if you don’t have one, because that’s how you get control. That’s the understandability aspect. You don’t need to worry about credibility until you’ve built understandability.

[00:15:09] Jason Barnard: If it doesn’t understand who you are, it can’t attach any credibility signals to you. So you’re putting the okay horse before the cart? No, the cart before the horse is the way round, isn’t it? You’re doing things in the wrong order. You need understandability. So you need this two page website that states clearly who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, and then you can build that out.

[00:15:27] Jason Barnard: And what we do at Kalicube for our clients is say after that first three month period when we’ve built understandability, when the machine understands very clearly and confident who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, we can start building your website out to include this content that you mentioned.

[00:15:44] Jason Barnard: But we would advise you to focus on standing where your audience is looking, because they’re not looking at your website, they’re looking on LinkedIn, they’re looking on YouTube, they’re looking on entrepreneur.com, they’re looking on forbes.com, Search engine land, wherever it might be, publish there and then repurpose it on your own website and then link between the two.

[00:16:05] Jason Barnard: Because Google and the other machines, the big tech algorithms need that third party corroboration. They need to see that your audience is engaging with you and they need to see that you are engaging with a relevant audience. And that means doing it on a third party website and then taking control by reproducing that content in one format or another on your own website to confirm to Google and to the other big tech algorithms.

[00:16:31] Jason Barnard: This is indeed you, and this is you walking the walk around the entire internet.

Stand Where Your Audience Is Looking to Build Your Brand

[00:16:37] Mike Sirius: I always thought, Jason, that it’s actually, you put it on your website first, and then you put it on the third party. So you’re saying it’s upside down. 

[00:16:45] Jason Barnard: Yep. Yes. You’re nobody visits your website. 

[00:16:48] Mike Sirius: Why is that? 

[00:16:50] Jason Barnard: Well, you are reaching out to people. In order to get them to see you, you need to stand where they’re looking, and they’re not looking at your website. They’re looking on LinkedIn. They’re looking on YouTube. They’re looking on Search engine land. They’re looking on Forbes. So what I do for my own personal brand is I stand where they’re looking and I demonstrate my credibility to them, and I pull them towards my website, which is the ultimate destination.

[00:17:14] Jason Barnard: Nobody spontaneously goes to my website until they already know who I am. And in order for them to know who I am, I need to get out there in front of them. Stand where your audience is looking. 

Clarify Content Ownership with Canonical Tags or Repurposing Strategies

[00:17:26] Mike Sirius: Okay. So Google is capable to make a decision that the content you find in third parties and medium.com is a very, very popular when it comes to like technology articles. So Google will know that this article, which came first on Medium, is still your ownership. So it will give credit to you whatever is your home domain once it finds that duplication over there. Right? 

[00:17:51] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So you, you can either republish the article as is and then you put a, a canonical tag. Which shows that the other article on Medium is the original source and you’re just repeating on your own website exactly what it is you’ve done or you can repurpose it, write a summary, put it on a webpage and a website, link to the full article, and then it’s not the same content. It’s a repurpose piece of content or record a video on your website. Put that video on your website where you explain the basics of what you’re talking about on Medium, then link out to the Medium, article and back from the Medium article to that page. That makes a lot of sense because the machine can then see that this article on Medium, it’s not sure that it’s you. If it sees that same content represented in potentially a different manner on your own website, it then knows for a fact that it’s you. 

Use Your Name as a Domain for User Clarity, Not SEO Advantage

[00:18:39] Mike Sirius: Okay. Fascinating. I love that. do we win anything by creating a domain, which is our full name or it doesn’t matter? 

[00:18:50] Jason Barnard: Technically it doesn’t matter, but for users it will.

[00:18:54] Jason Barnard: So if I tell you, visit jasonbarnard.com, if you can spell my name, you can get to my website. If I say visit bliddilyboo.com, probably quite difficult to visit my website, but I could convince Google that, that is my Entity Home and I wouldn’t have a problem with the machine because the domain of itself doesn’t actually matter.

[00:19:12] Jason Barnard: It’s a very, very, very small signal in the overall, scheme of things. So I would advise you to use your own name simply for the user’s sake and for clarity’s sake, you don’t need a .com. If you can get the .com, get it. If you can get a .com with your middle initial. If your name is already taken, do that.

[00:19:32] Jason Barnard: My domain is jasonbarnard.com, but it could be jasonmbarnard.com. It could also be jasonbarnard.website, jasonbarnard., whatever .co. jasonbarnard.xyz. The TLD, the extension xyz, com, website .org .net doesn’t matter. Although the .com brings you a slight advantage. 

Start Building Your Online Presence by Cleaning Up and Optimizing Your Digital Footprint

[00:19:59] Mike Sirius: I love .com. I mean, everybody, it is the, it is, you know, it is the king, right? It’s probably always gonna remain the king. Um, so if I’m listening this and I’m like, I don’t have any online presence, I should think about this, or maybe I’m a business, and I’m like, you’re absolutely right. You know, we do a search and the story which comes out is not what we want to do.

[00:20:20] Mike Sirius: Can we break this into just like a bullet point, steps of what the brands can do today to start their journey? 

[00:20:28] Jason Barnard: Well, the very first thing to do for a corporation or a person is create an about page on a website you own. On that website, on that, sorry, on that about page, the Entity Home, the point of reconciliation in the HTML state very clearly, who you are, what you do, which audience you serve.

[00:20:45] Jason Barnard: Always put at the top the information that’s the most important, the most relevant today. If you want to tell your whole life story, that’s fine, but put the beginning at the end. Don’t put the beginning at the beginning. So I was born in 1966, goes right at the bottom of the page if I want to put that. We want Google and the other machines and indeed our audience to focus on what’s important today.

[00:21:06] Jason Barnard: Jason Barnard is the founder and CEO of Kalicube, a great groundbreaking digital marketing agency that helps people and brands manage their brand narrative online, especially in AI and Search engines. That’s what I want at the top, because that’s what I want people to focus on. That’s what I want the machines to focus on.

[00:21:25] Jason Barnard: From there, I need to state the facts very clearly and then link out to all the resources that confirm what I’m saying. And if possible, link back from those sources to that about page or to the homepage. Doesn’t really matter either way. So that Google and the other big tech algorithms will visit that page.

[00:21:47] Jason Barnard: Say, I’ve understood who this person is, just looking at this page. Now, can we confirm it? Go to linkedin.com. Says the same thing, come back, go to Medium.com, see the same thing, come back, go to New York Times, see the same thing and come back, and so on and so forth. And it goes on an infinite loop of self corroboration.

[00:22:06] Jason Barnard: If you can achieve that, you’ve won the game. And what it comes down to, and what we do for our clients over a three month period of understandability is cleanup and optimize their digital footprint. It takes a couple of months. 

[00:22:21] Mike Sirius: If I clean up?. 

[00:22:23] Jason Barnard: Clean up. It makes everything clear, consistent. And make sure that you are linking correctly from your Entity Home out to all of these different resources and back.

[00:22:34] Jason Barnard: And when you asked about somebody nefariously trying to steal your identity, that’s where they would always fall down. They can’t get the volume of references linking back. They can’t make that digital footprint clean the way that you can. So take control today by cleaning and optimizing your digital footprint, you’re gonna save a, you’re gonna be understood by the machines and represented by the machines correctly.

[00:22:59] Jason Barnard: You protect yourself from those machines, misunderstanding in the future. And you’re protect yourself from the nefarious competitor trying to do your damage. 

Focus on the Right Sources to Strengthen Your Online Presence

[00:23:08] Mike Sirius: Okay? So it’s effectively as simple as three steps. Create the about page, put in at the top where you, you know, what is the main message. Link out your external sources, make sure external sources link back to your source of truth. Done. Like that’s, that’s what you can do like this week. Okay. 

[00:23:26] Jason Barnard: Yeah, exactly. And one of the, one of the tough things is the consistency of the information. So all of these different corroborative sources need to be consistent. They need to say the same thing that you are saying. We have an algorithm at Kalicube that then pulls all of the references to you out of the internet and we prioritize them and we understand.

[00:23:47] Jason Barnard: We have an algorithm that understands exactly which sources Google is paying attention to, which sources ChatGPT is paying attention to. So you focus on the right things. So for example, you might go and say, well, I’ve got a Twitter profile and that’s really important to me. Is it important to Google and the other big tech algorithms?

[00:24:04] Jason Barnard: Maybe not. So you’re wasting your time. The other, the other really important thing is that URLs are, web webpages are now associated with the person or the corporation. So you need to make sure that you are focusing on the ones that the machines truly care about. And we, we have, a situation now where, for example, a third party has mentioned by name and the information is incorrect.

[00:24:36] Jason Barnard: It’s a lot of effort for me to reach out to that third party, to the New York Times, let’s say, and ask the journalist to correct the information. So I would tend to say, well, that’s too much effort. But if our algorithms tell us that that source of information is incredibly important to Google and the other big tech algorithms, it’s worth making that effort.

[00:24:56] Jason Barnard: And we will tell you, keep making the effort until they change it. Because we know that this is foundationally important to Google’s understanding of who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, and especially the credibility aspect.

[00:25:07] Mike Sirius: How do you know that that’s important to Google? 

[00:25:11] Jason Barnard: There are multiple ways we can measure Google’s association of your Entity, your person, entity, you as a person, to different URLs around the web. For example, an article I’ve written, does it understand that I wrote it? If it does, then it’s an important article. If it doesn’t understand that I’ve written it, it doesn’t actually matter. I can educate it to say to Google, I actually wrote that article. And that’s the whole process of what we do behind the scenes at Kalicube.

[00:25:36] Jason Barnard: But we can measure Google’s appreciation of the importance of a webpage or web content to a person or a corporation through multiple measurements, one of which is about this result on Google Search, another of which is the Knowledge Graph, and another of which is how all of this joins together from your Entity Home, i.e., How well we’ve built that web of information, how well we’ve joined the dots, and if we can join it tightly we can identify the closest, strongest and longest relationships, and those are the important ones. If I can develop a long, strong relationship that is close with, for example, in my case, Search engine land, if I’ve been publishing with them since 2015 and I’ve published multiple times with them and they have promoted my content off, offsite in, different social media profiles, then I have a strong long and close relationship with Search engine land and that becomes important.

[00:26:39] Jason Barnard: And it’s, you, you can guess at most of this. So I would say to anybody, go out, guess your guess is probably gonna be right. We can back it up with data and we can figure out. Is your guess, right or not? So when you are making all that extra effort, you know, you are making the right, the effort in the right place, and you’re not just making it on guesswork.

[00:27:00] Jason Barnard: From my perspective, I sleep better at night knowing that I spent my day focusing on things that are truly important as opposed to sleeping badly at night thinking I was just spent all day working on a lot of the different stuff, and I have no idea if it was important in terms of achieving my goal of getting Google and the AI to represent me the way I want.

How Managing Online Presence Drives Business Growth

[00:27:20] Mike Sirius: Yeah. I love that is, yeah, I, I can see that very easily. You know, there’s some sources which you’ll, you’ll want to make sure saying the right message in some. Which just doesn’t matter that much. Yeah. Can you give us, can you give us a success story, Jason, which is, just, you know, someone came to, you guys had the next situation with the brand or personal image, you guys did the work.

[00:27:47] Mike Sirius: What happens later in a measurable terms, like, you know, what is the growth they, they seen in, you know, maybe in a website visits, maybe in lead generation. It’s just, just to really understand like how doing the right work on your online presence or brand actually can have that huge ROI for anybody.

[00:28:06] Jason Barnard: Well, I can give you three very interesting examples and I’ll try to go through them very quickly. The first is somebody who had some bad news, negative, feedback on their brand set when you search their name. They were quite famous, so I can’t name them. The third or fourth result was very negative and they said, that’s damaging me because when people search my name, I’m trying to do business with them. They say, oh, but what about this? And it comes up in conversations very regularly. Please, can you remove that from page one of Google, please? Can you remove it from the, the answers of ChatGPT, which we subsequently did. That topic never comes up in sales calls anymore.

[00:28:46] Jason Barnard: It doesn’t come up when that person is talking to partners and it avoids that terrible point where he saying, well, actually it was a specific situation where in fact the truth is, and it wasn’t as bad as it looks. You never want to get into that kind of discussion with anybody when you’re trying to do business.

[00:29:01] Jason Barnard: Second example, yeah, is this guy behind me, Scott Duffy, who for different reasons had to stop doing business for three years, or not stop doing business, sorry, keep a low profile for three years in terms of his business achievements. What we managed to do is, although he wasn’t very active in business, he wasn’t very active in his promotion of his personal brand, we kept him with this Knowledge Panel and this great representation on Google so that the, the people who did start doing business with him during that low lying period were very convinced that he is in fact the credible solution that they want him to be.

[00:29:45] Jason Barnard: And if you see here, we’ve got a photo of Richard Branson. Scott Duffy sold a company to Richard Branson that makes him look very credible, and we managed to keep that image up there making him look credible, even though he wasn’t actually actively working on any business at that time. So being able to maintain a very strong online presence and a very good representation by Google of you whilst you’re not actually active online is a huge achievement.

[00:30:16] Jason Barnard: And it, he’s now launched AI, AI Mavericks, which I recommend to any entrepreneurs. Brilliant stuff. He’s now out there, he’s doing it. He’s, he’s got the press, he’s got his, his new business going. And the launch was so simple because his name was already out there. It was already present, and he was already, represented by Google and by the AI in a very positive manner.

[00:30:37] Jason Barnard: And the third example is a guy called Jonathan Cronstedt, who’s the president of Kajabi. Every conversation he had with people would start with, tell me about Kajabi. But he wanted to start the conversations with, how can you help me with my business, Jonathan? And he asked us to change Google’s representation of him from president of Kajabi, excuse me, to investor and business coach.

[00:31:06] Jason Barnard: So he did a pivot of his entire career. He’s still the president of Kajabi, but Google doesn’t prioritize it. ChatGPT says, Jonathan Cronstedt is an investor and a business advisor and by the way, he’s also president of Kajabi. So we pivoted Google’s perception of him. So that conversations for him now start with, how can you help me with my business?

[00:31:28] Jason Barnard: And he doesn’t have that horrible conversation or the, the conversation he didn’t enjoy of getting through the Kajabi aspect of it. And he could say, I can help your business by A, B, C, D. And by the way, I’m credible and authoritative and you can believe in me because I was the, I am sorry, the president of Kajabi. So you can pivot your career as well. 

Optimizing Your Online Presence for Better Lead Generation

[00:31:48] Mike Sirius: So effectively, when you do all that work, the return of investment comes out after you change that image, hopefully that strategically is the right thing to do. You did it well and after everything, what happens after that? It’s just the pure lead generation type of situation.

[00:32:03] Mike Sirius: You’re just getting seen in the light. You want to see. Which makes sure that the, the cold outreach is effectively becoming a much, much warmer ’cause you instantly just send the right message. You don’t need to have calls and everything like that. It just closes the gap. Okay. Yep. That’s very easy to see. And the career was actually very relevant, Jason. Yep. Go there. 

[00:32:24] Jason Barnard: And, but there’s a hidden advantage is that in order to get this to happen. If you look at this result for Scott, is that what we did was strategically get him to do the little promotion that he was doing in all the right places. So he already had the contact with the human audience on the platforms where they were looking on YouTube, on LinkedIn. We maintained the most important channels for him during that period. So in order to change Google’s perception of you, and therefore its representation of you, you need to walk the walk. Our data from the Kalicube Pro database, 2 billion data points will tell you the walk that you need to walk to be the most effective representation within your industry.

[00:33:12] Jason Barnard: So focusing on, once again, focusing on the right things, the things that make a difference. Oh, minimum effort. Maximum output. 

Focus on Content That Resonates with Your Audience for Brand SERP Success

[00:33:21] Mike Sirius: Minimum effort. Maximum output. Everybody wants that, isn’t it? Can I do at the least amount of things and get the most amount of things? Yeah. Okay. So that nicely leads into the next question which I wanted to ask ’cause you mentioned one of the cases you put in the search query and the fourth result was a actually damaging, you know, link. Right? So, which, which leads to the question, what is, a positive, you know, link? Like, is there a difference? What should be one and two and three and four, like, you know, maybe I want, want to be LinkedIn for whatever reason, or maybe I want it to be Forbes.

[00:34:06] Mike Sirius: Like, is there, is there a difference in basically all these pages? And would you say that there is a, when it comes credibility there, there, there are sources which you should be targeting to have at the very top and associated with your name. 

[00:34:21] Jason Barnard: Yeah. it’s not the same for everybody and it’s not the same in every industry.

[00:34:27] Jason Barnard: And what you are going to be aiming for in those top 10 results, we’ll say 10 results, it’s not always 10, is what your audience expects, what you are willing to do and what makes money for you. So if we are saying we’ve got a result, number four, don’t like it, let’s push it down off page one. What we don’t do is what traditional reputation management companies do, which is create lots of extra content to try to drown it.

[00:34:57] Jason Barnard: That doesn’t work. What we do do is look at your Brand SERP, the Search engine results page for your name, pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and we figure out which are the pieces of content that exist on those five pages that we could replace the the negative content, and we would then work on them. But we would work on the ones that make sense for your audience, for you and for Google.

[00:35:27] Jason Barnard: That’s how we win the game. We can’t force you to work on LinkedIn. If you don’t like LinkedIn, what we can do is find an alternative to LinkedIn. LinkedIn that would make sense to you and to your audience and to Google. And then we take it a step further. We can say to you, who are the people you aspire to be like, and you give us a list. We push them all into our algorithm and it will pull out what the commonalities between those people are in Google’s eyes. And that will tell us where that audience is looking, what that audience is looking for, where you can serve them and how you can serve them. And also, once again, Google will be watching this, and it’s the most effective, efficient, and fastest way for us to be able to get you the result you want on your Brand SERP.

[00:36:13] Jason Barnard: So if you say, I want a specific, set of results with LinkedIn, let’s say Facebook, YouTube, and your articles are Medium, we can get you that and we can get you that both from analyzing the Search results for your page, the ChatGPT results for your name, but also your competitors, your peers, and the people you aspire to be like.

[00:36:37] Jason Barnard: And especially if we take the people you aspire, aspire to be like the, the people who aspire to emulate, we can move you up a notch because by copying the commonalities of that group of people, you’ll become one of those people. So we move you up one step in the ladder. 

Order Your Environment and Walk the Walk to Achieve Success

[00:36:54] Mike Sirius: I love that. It goes the same to like real life. I, I think there’s, not like a saying, but maybe unwritten rule where, where people, successful people always invite people to order their, their environment and they go like, what is the six people you spend the most time with? The results will be an average of all of those six people. So if you want to really up your game, you know, order your environment.

[00:37:19] Mike Sirius: So it’s a very similar situation, isn’t it? It’s like if you have people you aspire to be, if you know what they’re doing, where they are, what they’re saying, if you do the same as, you know, the, the outcome is basically that you’re gonna be one of them. That’s very. 

[00:37:33] Jason Barnard: I really like the way you put that. And what, what we can do is take six people, 10 people, 20 people, 70 people.

[00:37:40] Jason Barnard: And because we’re doing it algorithmically, not only can we do more people, so we can take 70 people to create a better representation of what you should be doing, how you should be walking the walk. And we do it algorithmically and we can prioritize. So we can tell you within this group the commonalities of this.

[00:38:00] Jason Barnard: This is the cohort, this is the group of people that you want to belong to, and we can place you right at the center because we can see exactly what the 20 things that need to be done are in order for you to be the perfect representation of that group of people. 

[00:38:18] Mike Sirius: I love that. I, I would probably add the caveat that you said that Jason, you said you need to make the walk and I think like that’s a, you know, could be a missing piece of people listening.

[00:38:29] Mike Sirius: And it feels like maybe it’s easy just as, you know, using the service, but you do need to produce an actual content to Google to, you know, to deal with, you can’t just sort of, you know, exist with one homepage and do nothing else and expect to be associated. And, and, and as good as, you know, these people, you aspire to be, you’ll need to, you’ll need to do some, some work, right?

[00:38:50] Mike Sirius: But, then result with the, yep. 

[00:38:53] Jason Barnard: Yeah. No, but once again, you have that advantage I think, kind of, you think, oh, I’ve gotta create this content and it’s a lot of effort and, but if you are putting that content and standing where your audience is looking, you’ve already got the audience, you’ve got people who want to do business with you.

[00:39:13] Jason Barnard: They will Google your name and they will see that great result. But for me the point is, if, if we at Kalicube can tell you where to stand, where to produce the content, where to be most efficient with your production of content. And where you place the content and where you focus with that content, you are already winning clients, you are already making partnerships, you are already building your network with the right people in the right places. 

Building Trust Through Brand Storytelling to Convert Leads

[00:39:34] Mike Sirius: Excellent. I love that. Can we talk a little bit about lead generation? ’cause we’ve talked a lot and it, it cannot escape my head that the end result is that you just getting seen in proper lights, which by default answers a lot of questions to people looking for you or your, for your service, which leads them to very likely go into your website and then, you know, things are being sort of greeted with the same message.

[00:40:02] Mike Sirius: So it’s, it has this almost like a path of least resistance for them to become a much warmer lead. You know, at the, at the top of your funnel. If we think about same results, you know, we wanna achieve same results. And we are thinking about a, a general SEO practices is like, is there a difference between like brand storytelling and being, you know, seen in good lights or doing, you know, SEO, which, you know, all the market is doing to actually generate leads? Like, like is there a difference in between those two? 

[00:40:37] Jason Barnard: Yeah. The, the SEO point is really interesting. I come from a world of SEO. I was an SEO expert and I still am, I know more about SEO than is healthy. But my vision or my view of SEO and what role SEO plays is very different to most people in the community.

[00:40:57] Jason Barnard: I see SEO as simply packaging the branding and marketing you should already be doing for the machines. So you should be, you should have a strong brand message. You should be doing marketing around that brand message in the right places where your audience is looking. And the job of SEO is simply to package that information, package, that marketing and that branding for the machine so that they can find it, understand it, digest it, and use it to represent you to the subset of their users who, your audience.

Drive Success by Aligning Your Brand with Customer Research Intent

[00:41:32] Mike Sirius: So we, so we effectively what we’re saying, you need to align your SEO work or strategies to align with your customer’s intents. Yeah. So if the customer’s intent is to find you, make sure that you’re findable, you know, if your customer intent is to find you, and then, you know, talk about your services, make sure that that’s exactly what the SEO is doing, right?

[00:41:56] Mike Sirius: So it’s not just to be in Google SERPs. Because, because like, it’s very often, like, and I had some and worked with some companies before where we use SEO agencies in the past. And the success would always be like, we wanna be in the SERPs top 10 SERPs for a given keywords, and that would be definition, you know, of success.

[00:42:19] Mike Sirius: And they would go like, well you need to produce a lot of content around that keyword, so make sure you’re putting out the blog posts around that, start talking about it. Right? So you, you basically saying it’s, it’s just upside down. Like you need to start from a, from really just the brand image itself and then go down to this lower levels.

[00:42:37] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well I think, the idea I need to rank for this specific keyword number one is very shortsighted. And it makes the huge mistake of thinking that people click on the first link they see and buy. They don’t. People research. People spend time looking at the different options. They, they spend time, thinking about what it is they’re gonna do, making a decision about who they’re going to do business with.

[00:43:05] Jason Barnard: And that means you need to be visible at all different levels of the funnel and all points of research, which includes Google includes the different platforms that your audience are hanging out on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, the New York Times, and it includes potentially ChatGPT, Bing Copilot and other Assistive Engines where the conversations are happening.

[00:43:27] Jason Barnard: You need to be involved and you need to be visible in a regular manner. And I’ll give you a good example. at Kalicube, we don’t rank number one in the traditional SEO sense for very many keywords, very few because we don’t focus on that. We’re not interested in that. What we do manage to do is be visible across the entire research environment for the topics we specialize in. Which is controlling brand narrative on Google and AI, building Knowledge Panels on Google, making Google’s representation of you exactly what you want. Building a digital marketing strategy based on data, data from Google who know more than anybody else in the world about what should be done.

[00:44:19] Jason Barnard: And we simply have an algorithm that figures that out for you. And the what happens for me is people come onto sales calls and they say, I know what I want. I know what you do, and I know you are the best solution because I’ve researched it. How long is it gonna take? How much do I need to invest? Those are great sales calls to be having.

[00:44:41] Mike Sirius: I do agree. 

[00:44:43] Jason Barnard: The reason they know who we are and what we do and that we’re the best is they say, I keep seeing that red shirt everywhere. I keep seeing, you mentioned all over the place, every time I research the topic, your name comes up, your advice comes up, that red shirt pops up. You are obviously the market leader for managing personal brand narrative online.

Ensure Your Brand Appears at Every Stage of the Funnel to Be the Perfect Click

[00:45:05] Mike Sirius: Okay, I love it. That’s a very powerful one. And when you said about people research, I instantly thought about people, you know, becoming quite lazy when it comes to research and starting to trust tools like ChatGPT. And going and simply going like, look, you know, here’s my problem. I want to be seen online much better. Can you just give me a top 10 list of people, you know, books or services, you know who can do that for me?You want to be in the list, right? 

[00:45:36] Jason Barnard: Exactly. And I’ll give you a really good example. I mean, you’ve, you’ve brought this straight to a point I have in my slide decks, which is the funnel. If you ask ChatGPT, what is a Knowledge Panel or how do I get a Knowledge Panel or how much does a Knowledge Panel cost? It will cite Kalicube as a source of information it is using. Same with Bing Copilot. Same with Google Gemini. Then you say, who are the world’s experts in Knowledge Panels? Bing Copilot says Jason Barnard, number one, Olaf Kopp is the second it mentions, and Dixon Jones is the third.

[00:46:15] Jason Barnard: Then you say, who should I choose? Who should I contact right now for my Knowledge Panel? Bottom of funnel. Bing Copilot says, I advise you to contact Jason Barnard. Bing Copilot has just brought somebody from what is a Knowledge Panel? How do I get one? Who are the experts? Who should I choose? In the space of 10 minutes, the person clicks on the link to my website, and that’s what Fabrice Canel from Bing. Who’s Mr. Bingbot, the guy who builds Bingbot. They call the perfect click. And the aim of Copilot is to bring the person down the funnel to the perfect click as efficiently as possible. All of these Search engines work the same way, Search engine and Assistive Engines. What is their aim to bring the user to the solution, to their problem as efficiently as possible?

[00:47:09] Jason Barnard: The perfect click you want to be, the perfect click. You need to be present at every stage in the funnel. And a great way to see if you are is to go to Bing Copilot or ChatGPT or Google Gemini and start the journey and have that conversation with the machine and see if you’re included in the answers.

[00:47:26] Jason Barnard: And my bet is you probably aren’t. And what we can do at Kalicube is make sure you are, and by the way, this, this side, sorry, that QR code gives you a free download, 60 pages free download explains exactly what we do. Our business comes from people who want us to do it because they know that we will do it efficiently, we will do it effectively, and we will do it fast, and we will take the weight off their shoulders so we can afford to give this away for free. Download the guide, do it yourself, knock yourselves out. 

Understanding Knowledge Panels and Their Impact on Credibility

[00:47:56] Mike Sirius: I love that. Very great example. And then we, we’ll have, you know, all of that, all of these links in the show notes. So for anyone listening or watching, just scroll down, check them out over there. What is a Knowledge Panel, Jason, just, just for listeners who potentially doesn’t even know what is a Knowledge Panel?

[00:48:17] Jason Barnard: Well, you can see one behind me here, but if you’re listening on audio, you won’t be able to see what I’m pointing at. Yeah, it’s the information box that Google shows when you search for a famous person or a famous company on the right hand side on desktop. So if you search for IBM, you’ll see a Knowledge Panel on the right hand side, and it’s a statement of the fact as Google has understood them.

[00:48:39] Jason Barnard: Fact is, anybody and any company can and should have a Knowledge Panel. I said famous people, famous companies. But in truth, Google only wants to understand the facts, and if it can understand the facts, it will represent those facts in a Knowledge Panel on the right hand side. In that information box on the right hand side when you search on desktop. And if you look here on the example behind me, at the top, you can see the photos of Scott Duffy.

[00:49:04] Jason Barnard: Those are called Knowledge Panel cards, and they’re actually generative AI. So if you are really good at the job, which we are, as you can see from Scott Duffy’s example, you get across the top the generative AI results and down the right hand side the facts. That’s what you want because it makes you look credible, it makes you look authoritative, and it will help people make that decision to do business with you.

AI Impact on Bridging Search and Conversational Engines

[00:49:26] Mike Sirius: Fascinating. Love that. We wouldn’t be a technology podcast, Jason. If I wouldn’t ask how AI is throwing a wrench in all of this. Like, is it helping, is it creating more problems? You know, do you maybe see your algorithms misbehaving? ’cause you are being saturated with information which is generated by Gen AI or something like that.

[00:49:50] Mike Sirius: Like, do you guys see any type of impact in, in, you know, in a couple of years of, of, you know, ChatGPT going mainstream? 

[00:49:58] Mike Sirius: Yeah. 

[00:50:00] Jason Barnard: what we’re talking about or what we’ve been talking about today becomes even more important because. What’s happening is search still exists. Search is still vitally important.

[00:50:11] Jason Barnard: It’s still the jumping off point, which is what Fabrice Canel from Bing says. Search is still the jumping off point. Generative AI is a different beast. Generative AI ChatGPT, Gemini, Bing Copilot has created new demand. It hasn’t replaced Search. It’s added a new way for people to work. So supply creates own demand is a thing that I learned in economics years and years and years ago.

[00:50:41] Jason Barnard: People are using more rather than moving from Search to Assistive Engines like ChatGPT. But the key here as well is that all of these platforms, Google, Bing ChatGPT, Perplexity, are all building bridges between Search and assistive, assistive conversational. So if you are on Search. And you are obviously starting to get into a conversation, they will push you across to the platform that is conversational Gemini ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever it might be.

[00:51:16] Jason Barnard: And if you are on one of those platforms and you are obviously in a research searching mode, they will push you over to a Search result. And that’s what Fabrice Canel calls bridges between Search and Assistive Engines. So you can consider you need to control both because people are gonna be coming down both funnels.

[00:51:34] Jason Barnard: And from that perspective, you need to make sure that you don’t need a different strategy for each. And I was talking to somebody the other day who said, oh, I’ve mastered Google now I’ve got my strategy from Mastering ChatGPT. I would argue that shows that the strategy isn’t maintainable and they’re gonna run into trouble.

[00:51:55] Jason Barnard: Because if you have to maintain a different strategy for each of the different big tech algorithms, you are gonna struggle in the future. You are gonna get it very wrong. What we do at Kalicube, we work using the similarities, the commonalities between these machines. They all use Large Language Models. They all use Knowledge Graphs. They all use Search results. They all need to understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve. They all need to believe your credible, and they all need the content that allows them to deliver you to the subset of their users for your audience, and I also talked to Fabrice on a slightly different topic, which is are the machines using less and less resources or sources?

[00:52:41] Jason Barnard: For example, Perplexity as well known for having a very small index and yet giving great results. What’s interesting there is that if you ask Perplexity a very long tail question, a very complex question, it won’t be able to answer because it doesn’t have the data. But all of these machines are increasingly focusing on a small set. Have hugely trusted sites in each niche, and it’s really important for you to bear in mind niche. You don’t need Wikipedia. You need the sites that are trusted within your niche and you need to figure out which ones those are. If I’m a poodle parlor in Paris, the poodle parlor of Paris Association website is more powerful than Wikipedia because it’s niche, because it’s relevant, because it’s authoritative within my niche industry.

[00:53:33] Jason Barnard: So focus on niche industry specific, authoritative sources when you are building out your strategy, especially on, on the third party sources. 

Harnessing AI for Smarter Services While Keeping Human Control

[00:53:43] Mike Sirius: From technological perspective, Jason, for you as a service creator, is there a place for AI to make your services better? Are you guys utilizing, ’cause you’re scraping a lot of data, you’re making a lot of business, you know, intelligence data crunching situations, like do you guys use AI to accelerate any of your own processes? 

[00:54:05] Jason Barnard: Yes, we do. We analyze, sorry, I’ll come back a step. We, we track Search results. We track assistive engine results ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity. We track all of those. We use NLP analysis to understand how well the machines understand different parts of the text and the copy that we’re creating for our clients.

[00:54:28] Jason Barnard: And we use AI to drive the algorithms that figure out exactly what it is that Google and the other big tech algorithms are looking for. So we do use it, but what we found is that what makes the difference is our human element. And for the moment at least, we’re still smarter than the machines. So I, I rely on my team to make that difference and to make sure that we’re doing the right things in the right order that makes sense to human beings. So although our algorithms tell me, for example, Mike, you should be focusing on LinkedIn. You tell me I like Medium better. We can adapt and we can start focusing on Medium and push LinkedIn back in our strategy because we need to understand that you as a human being are more comfortable or Medium and we can make Medium work for you.

[00:55:19] Jason Barnard: It’s not because LinkedIn is slightly above Medium as a focus point according to the algorithms that we have and according to Google that you should necessarily focus on LinkedIn if it makes no sense and you won’t engage and perhaps you won’t engage your audience. So that human adaptability remains crucial.

[00:55:37] Jason Barnard: And I think we all know, but we don’t always fully accept. AI doesn’t replace the human being. You need the human in the loop. 

[00:55:47] Mike Sirius: For now. 

[00:55:48] Jason Barnard: For now. Well, and you say for now and the moment of singularity when the machines do become smarter than we are, is a day I’m actually quite looking forward to. Because anybody who doesn’t have control of how the machines understand them when that happens, has a huge problem on their hands.

[00:56:09] Jason Barnard: The only people and corporations who have a hope of surviving, when machines become more intelligent than humans, the only people who will have a hope of being able to adapt and change and influence the way these machines represent them are those who have control when it starts. And for me, that means if, if, singularity is gonna come, let’s say in five years time, in five years time, you already need to control your brand narrative in the Brainz of these machines because once they start running away with it, you’re gonna be lost.

[00:56:44] Mike Sirius: Yeah, I mean, five years seems maybe that, you know, way too quick Jason, but maybe I’m being skeptical. 

[00:56:51] Jason Barnard: No, I think you’re being. 

[00:56:52] Mike Sirius: But at some point it’s. 

[00:56:53] Jason Barnard: You’ve been realistic. I’m being naive, but that’s, that’s my nature. 

Manage Your Brand’s Narrative by Correcting Misleading User-Generated Content

[00:56:56] Mike Sirius: Yeah. Okay, so we have one question, from the audience, which I’ll just put it on the stream and I’ll, I’ll read it. So effectively, how much control can a business realistically have over its brand store in Google, considering the influence of user generated content like reviews and media coverages? So I think we touched that a little bit when we talked about malicious, you know, sort of rebranding of you. But let’s say you have a lot of content.

[00:57:25] Mike Sirius: Let’s say you are service, you know, you have reviews on G2 or other platforms where accumulate people and, and you have a lot of that which projecting a certain image, and you actually believe that, that that’s a wrong image. Like, what can you do in that, in that case? 

[00:57:43] Jason Barnard: Well, number one, if people are saying something about you on G2 in large numbers that you don’t agree with, then you should ask yourself, why are they saying this?

[00:57:51] Jason Barnard: And you should correct whatever it is that’s making them say it. But that’s something we can bring out, and that’s something the process will bring out because you’ll see these weaknesses, and these are weaknesses that we don’t like to see. We don’t wanna look in the mirror and admit to things like that.

[00:58:06] Jason Barnard: But managing your brand representation in AI and Search means that you have to address these because they won’t lie. They’re like children. They don’t make things up to make you happy. They tell you things straight. So number one is you need to fix those problems. Yep. Number two is, I gave an example of pivoting Google’s perception of Jonathan Cronstedt.

[00:58:32] Jason Barnard: We also changed the AI’s perception of him. So instead of saying, Jonathan Cronstedt is the president of Kajabi. Which is what it said when we started it now says, Jonathan Cronstedt is an investor, a business advisor, and the president of Kajabi. So we’ve just turned around the perception. So I would argue you obviously don’t control 100%, but you can change perception and change representation.

[00:58:57] Jason Barnard: And if you put your mind to it, you can always do it. We can always do it. From our perspective at Kalicube, we don’t say it’s a question of if we can do it, it’s a question of how long it will take. So if you have a huge reputation problem, it will take longer. If you have thousands of people saying on G2 one thing and only two people saying the thing you want to say, that’s gonna take some time to correct.

[00:59:22] Jason Barnard: But we can at least point exactly to what you need to change, what information is causing the problem. And I’ll give you an example about that as well. Is. When I say everything is algorithmic, people say, oh yes, but you can ask for a change in your Knowledge Panel. You can write to a Google employee and get ’em to change it.

[00:59:39] Jason Barnard: You can do that and they can change some things, but they cannot change them permanently. So for example, we had a client who had who, who wrote two or three books and she had a namesake, somebody with exactly the same name as her who had written other books, and Google mixed them up. She asked a Google employee, can you remove that other person’s book from my Knowledge Panel? The Google employee remove the book. Two weeks later it came back. Why? Because the algorithm decided that the human being had made a mistake. If the algorithm decides that something is true, it will be true. And if it decides that it’s true, you have to figure out why it thinks that’s true and correct the source of information.

[01:00:31] Jason Barnard: In order to correct the machine’s perception of the truth. So we’re basically manipulating the machine’s perception of the truth, and we do that very successfully. 

Maintaining Consistency Across Multiple Channels While Delegating Control

[01:00:41] Mike Sirius: Okay, so the consistency piece, Jason, is, is playing in my head as a huge challenge operationally speaking for businesses. So let’s say I have, you know, a lot of presence as I’m a big operation, right?

[01:00:59] Mike Sirius: So I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook, I’m everywhere, I, you know, I’m on Medium on blog posts. So having the consistent message being sent everywhere will be challenging to, you know, to, to some extent, right? So there’s gonna be more people involved. I’ll have a media manager, which does my Facebook.

[01:01:18] Mike Sirius: I have a media manager which does my LinkedIn, you know, another does Twitter. They all take information from. The source, which is the company, maybe we, you know, do like a video production and then they repurpose that content or whatever. So it’s, it’s, it’s easy to see how that message can be skewed a little bit, you know, by, by the people.

[01:01:37] Mike Sirius: So if, if that’s my challenge is like, how do I control that? Like, is it more of like, is it internal or is it external? Is it that I allow my operations to run and then I use, you know, a, a, a tool like Kalicube to actually see what’s happening and then controlling that? Or is there a way internally I can put in some type of controls to make sure that whatever goes out, it’s actually consistent across all the channels?

[01:02:03] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean, internally you would put in place some kind of brand bible with images, colors, and messages that are to be used everywhere. But at some point, if you want to have any scalability, you have to let go and let your team get on with the work that they’re specialized in. And as a CEO, founder like myself, I would imagine you’ve come to the point where you say, if I, if I don’t trust them, there’s no point in having them on board.

[01:02:31] Jason Barnard: I should just do all myself and that’s obviously impossible. So you have to delegate and you have to, you’re, you’re gonna have to let go of the brand message and your absolute control over the brand message, at which point you need a tool like Kalicube in order to track so that you can see when things are going off message.

[01:02:49] Jason Barnard: And especially you’ll notice when the machines like Google and ChatGPT start to misrepresent you. But also from our perspective, because we’re refreshing our data every week, it’s an opportunity to systematically go back in and double check everything every week. So it’s a really good way to bring it all together and make sure that everybody’s staying on track. You can’t do it at a micromanagement level, but you can definitely do it over time. 

Empower Teams to Track and Manage Brand Image Effectively

[01:03:16] Mike Sirius: Okay. So it sort of answers my next question, which was about empowering teams to own the brand image or own the brand story online. So it’s sort of like you mentioned, if you have some type of brand value to or brand handbook, which people can follow if they’re responsible for, for different channels.

[01:03:35] Mike Sirius: So you know, the message is as unified as you can be, you’re still not gonna be able to fully control it. As a result, you need a tool which tracks the image and then rectify whatever is not to your, to your likings. Okay. So that’s, effective answers the question. Can I ask this? Yep. Go to it. 

[01:03:55] Mike Sirius: Well, and, 

[01:03:56] Jason Barnard: and in addition, you mentioned earlier on user generated content reviews. All of this stuff is, needs to be tracked. You need to be aware of it and you need to know when it’s going to be a problem. And one advantage is if you track Google Search results for your brand name. You look right down pages 8, 9, 10, you can see trouble brewing. You can see where things are starting to go wrong and act before they become a problem. So that’s what I would recommend. 

[01:04:25] Mike Sirius: Before they become a problem, in the sense that you are being shown in the SERPs in not in the image. You don’t want to be shown in. 

[01:04:34] Jason Barnard: Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yes. You can catch things early if you’re tracking. 

Focus on Structuring Your Webpage for Better Search Engine Understanding and Annotation

[01:04:39] Mike Sirius: Yeah, a hundred percent. What is the best SEO secret or one, or one big SEO advice you would give Jason?

[01:04:51] Jason Barnard: Right now, the SEO advice I would give is focus on the structure of your webpage, how you’re presenting the information on that page, and focusing on making it easy for the machines to find and digest. And the key to everything that happens in terms of Search engine results, in terms of brand representation by AI and Search engines is how effectively they can understand the structure of the page, the content of the page, the meaning of the content of the page, and how accurately and confidently the bot can annotate the page.

[01:05:35] Jason Barnard: Because what happens when the bot comes in is it breaks the page down into chunks. It identifies what each chunk of the page does, what it contains, an image, a piece of text, what the text is about, what the image is of, is it a video, is it a heading, is it an answer to a question? And it annotates what it believes the function of that piece of content to be and what the content represents and gives it a confidence score.

[01:06:03] Jason Barnard: And when I talking to the team at Bing, I interviewed five team members at Bing. The person who runs the Blue Link Algorithm, Fabrice Canel, who builds Bingbot, Meenaz Merchant, who does video and images, and, Nathan Chalmers, who does the whole page algorithm. Oh, and, Ali, I’ve forgotten his second name, who does the featured snippets, this was four or five years ago, and all of them said the same thing.

[01:06:33] Jason Barnard: Without Fabrice Canel’s Bingbot annotations, we could not function. We do not look at the content itself. We look at the annotations to decide if the content is a candidate to be included in a results set. So if you can get your content properly chunked by Bingbot or Google Bot, properly labeled, annotated, and annotated with a very high confidence score, that’s when you’re in with a chance of being included in the results.

Analyze Content Structure and Text Accuracy to Improve Annotation and Bot Understanding

[01:07:03] Mike Sirius: Is there any tools which can help with that? Like if I, if I have a piece of content, how can I know if it’s gonna be annotated? 

[01:07:09] Jason Barnard: Well, well, you would actually need multiple tools. It’s a, it’s a great question. Perhaps we should build one. We have an HTML5 and our, analyzer on the Kalicube Pro website for geeks, and it will show you the HTML5 and whether or it makes sense.

[01:07:23] Jason Barnard: HTML5 structure for the page is very, very important, but also HTML5 tables, headings, all of that incredibly important because it gives structure and reliable structure that the bots can understand and rely upon. Then you need to analyze the chunks that that would naturally pull out using an LP to see if the machine would understand it at that point.

[01:07:52] Jason Barnard: For example, if you analyze a piece of text about Jason Barnard, does it identify the correct Jason Barnard, does it identify the correct Jason Barnard explicitly, or is it guessing? So you can actually analyze both the structure of the page to see if the machine can chunk it down logically, and you can analyze the chunks of text and the chunks of content to understand whether or not it actually understands what it is you’ve written.

[01:08:19] Jason Barnard: That would be my foundational piece of advice. Another piece of advice is video. 

[01:08:24] Mike Sirius: Video? 

[01:08:26] Jason Barnard: Video is increasing is is increasingly important and I think what we fail to realize is AI is very good at doing transcripts, but it gets a lot of stuff wrong, especially people’s names and company names. I would advise anybody who’s creating video on YouTube to go through the transcript that’s automatically generated by YouTube and correcting it by hand because that is the version Google will use.

[01:08:52] Jason Barnard: That is the version that any bot will use. In order to understand what’s going on in the video, and it’s necessarily more aKalicuberate than the auto transcript and necessarily more trusted. And we’ll get a higher confidence score when the machine is putting that into its index because it knows it’s been human corrected and can therefore trust the results more than something generated automatically being YouTube.

Improving Transcript Accuracy by Addressing Technology Terms and Sentence Structure

[01:09:19] Mike Sirius: Okay. That’s a, that’s a very valuable insights. And, as we produce, as well for YouTube. Yeah. It, it’s very evident that the transcript, sometimes they actually not sometimes very often they, they, they’ve wrong on, on very specific like technology terms or, you know, people names. As you mentioned, Jason and his sort of brand naming as well. Tool naming, it just gets, gets it totally off and, and within the transcript we do these mistakes manually and upload it. That’s a very variable insights. And yep. 

[01:09:54] Jason Barnard: When it gets it wrong, the brand mention becomes completely useless. But another thing is that as human beings, we often don’t finish our sentences and we come back halfway through and start again. And when you read it as a transcript, it makes no sense at all. I generally don’t do that very much. I make a huge effort to keep my sentences when I’m speaking very, very structured because what you just did before was go back halfway through a sentence and start it again, and as a transcript that wouldn’t make sense to the machine. So you can actually go back in and correct it to make it into a proper sentence that will make sense and is easy for the machine to digest, and it will be able to label that piece of content more confidently. 

[01:10:40] Mike Sirius: So I need to learn to speak better, Jason, that’s why you’re saying. 

[01:10:45] Jason Barnard: I’m sorry. 

[01:10:46] Mike Sirius: That’s a tip I need to get home, right?

[01:10:48] Mike Sirius: I need to, I need to be short sentences. But you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I mean, if you read the transcript just like that, and I did it many times ’cause what we do on the website as well, you know, we give the show notes, the resources, but we do, we do give the transcript just, just purely for SEO.

[01:11:08] Mike Sirius: And I was preparing these transcripts in such a way that people can read it better and read it almost like a, you know, like a book or a, or a blog post. And in, in many cases what you just said, it is just makes no sense. Once you have a context, you sort of can make the sense. But if you don’t have a context and you’re just reading it, it’s, it’s just not readable.

[01:11:27] Mike Sirius: So if human cannot comprehend, how do you expect the machine make any sense out of it. 

[01:11:32] Jason Barnard: Yeah, a hundred percent. 

[01:11:33] Mike Sirius: Okay. 

[01:11:33] Jason Barnard: Agreed. 

How to Connect with Jason Barnard and Learn More About Kalicube

[01:11:34] Mike Sirius: Excellent. Alright, well. Thanks everyone for tuning in today, as, as Jason has shown us today. You know, controlling your brand story in Google is not just about ranking higher, it’s about crafting a story that drive growth and leads towards an actual lead generation possible positive results by leveraging SEO, Online Reputation Management, and actionable tactics, you can turn your Google presence into your powerful asset for yourself and your business. Jason, if people want to more learn about Kalicube you and in general, the topic which just talked about, how do they get in touch and where do they find you?

[01:12:15] Jason Barnard: Well, they can search my name on Google, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D, or my company Kalicube, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E, and the results will be absolutely perfect because we walk the walk and we are actually very good at our jobs, even with ourselves. But you can also ask ChatGPT. What’s nice there is I don’t need to tell you.

[01:12:36] Jason Barnard: For example, go to Twitter. You get to choose. If you search my name on Google, you’ll see my personal website if you wanna learn more about me personally. My company website if you wanna do business with me. My Twitter profile if you wanna engage with me on Twitter. LinkedIn profile if you want to engage with me on LinkedIn. And my articles if you want to read more about the things that I am communicating and I’m expert in Knowledge Panels, SEO, managing brand in generative AI and Search engines. 

[01:13:06] Mike Sirius: Excellent.

[01:13:06] Jason Barnard: You choose. 

Discover Brand Storytelling on Google and Boost Your Online Reputation

[01:13:07] Mike Sirius: Thank you Jason. So, and as well, people listening or people watching, just scroll down, see the show notes. You’ll have all the links in our resource. Thank you again for tuning in for this mastering take of the episode where we explore the brand storytelling on Google and how you manage, protect, and grow your online reputation.

[01:13:26] Mike Sirius: If you find value in the show, please do subscribe. Leave us a review or a comment of Apple Podcasts, Spotify books, or wherever you get in your parts from. And as always, stay safe and see you online.