Mastering Your Digital Presence: Jason Barnard's Guide to Elevating Your Personal Brand

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, when you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the Remarkable. Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Speaker 3: 0:56

Welcome to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our guest today is Jason Bernard. He is the founder and CEO of CaliCube. He is an expert and known as the brand SERP guy, and you guys will all find out why that's his nickname today when he shares his story on the podcast. Jason welcome.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Thank you, Eric. They like to be here.

Speaker 3: 1:22

We're making the time to share your story today, so talk to us about brand SERP. What is that? Well, a brand.

Speaker 2: 1:29

SERP is a search engine results page, which is SERP for a brand or a personal brand, so it's the search engine result on Google or on Bing that appears when somebody searches your personal name or your company name. And today we're going to be talking about personal branding and what Google shows for your personal name, which is, in effect, your digital business card.

Speaker 3: 1:51

Awesome. So I think you have a story you're going to share with us about something you've done with one of your clients.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Yeah Well, a lot of people think about this as online reputation management. We get rid of the bad results about somebody. But actually most of our clients come to us because they're repositioning themselves for a new career path, and it's actually how I started in this industry is repositioning myself from a world of film and cartoons, which was my previous career, to a world of digital marketing. So I had to reposition my own brand, which is a story for another day, because today I wanted to share a story about a CEO of a household name company who got a great payoff, built the company up, became what I would consider to be relatively well off, and wanted to reposition himself as an investor and an entrepreneur. So obviously, ceo is running a company and investor, entrepreneur is opening yourself up to new opportunities to help people with their company, investing and then all creating a new company. So we had to reposition his personal brand from the CEO to the investor, entrepreneur, and that involved changing Google's perception of him so that it presented him as an investor and an entrepreneur, which is the brand search, the search engine results page for his name. What was really interesting is that, as we did that, in order to change Google's perception of him. We had to change the internet's perception of him because Google simply reflects its opinion of the world's opinion of you, so the work consists of placing him in all the right places where an investor or an entrepreneur would be, and amplifying that message. Reduce the focus on CEO, and what then happened is both his audience and Google now perceive him to be an investor and an entrepreneur, and not a CEO, and his career has taken off.

Speaker 3: 3:42

So what was hard about that? It's not something that happens immediately or easily, right?

Speaker 2: 3:48

Yeah, the hardest thing is that his old persona, the CEO, still exists and it's still referenced online, but we can't delete it. We can't remove what he had done in the past. What we needed to do was reduce the focus on that by both his audience and by Google, and increase the focus on investor and entrepreneur. So the difficulty is finding the balance where we don't deny the past. We simply dilute the past to allow the present to become more to the fore and make that person an authority in their new field.

Speaker 3: 4:21

Okay, and so I saw on CaliCube's website a lot of the people that you work with on personal branding. They have a pretty big impact from this type of work. What was the impact for the?

Speaker 2: 4:31

CEO Opportunities to invest and to start companies in that people would come and now coming then talking about the opportunities that he has to work with them on new projects, as opposed to do you want to be our CEO, which wasn't his own, and the impact that it generally has on people and this I was talking about this morning to a client was if you've got a certain amount of authority or credibility within your field and somebody else is one step up and they have twice as much authority and credibility in that field, if you are organizing yours in a way that Google and your audience can understand and digest easily, in effect, what you're doing is moving yourself up a level, because the person who has twice as much credibility authority within the field, if they're not organizing it, has lost for their equity. So, in effect, what we can do is amplify the authority and credibility of a person simply by organizing what they already have. So what was huge there is that we didn't need to create anything new. We simply amplified what existed.

Speaker 3: 5:36

Okay, and sometimes people have issues with personal branding because there's other people with similar names or exactly the same name that aren't them. Like there is a rock star named Eric Eden that is not me, and there's also, in the same city that I live in, a chef that is very famous for a Japanese restaurant that is also not me. So I've wrote that in terms of people like did you just open a restaurant? It's like not me.

Speaker 2: 6:04

Well, this is a huge question. It's a common question today, but it's going to become more and more common because what Google is doing is it's understanding everybody. Six months ago, it tripled the number of people that understand, which means that the competition for your name becomes bigger in terms of what Google is able to represent. So the more Google understands, the more people will be competing for that brand space. When somebody searches your name and the only solutions you have is to become incredibly famous so that Google can only show you because it's obvious that somebody is searching for you, or Fendi9. And that means personal rebranding is going to be a huge business for us moving forwards, because what I can say to you is you need to change your name to Eric S Eden if Scott is your second name, or Eric Scott Eden, and most people are going to have to get used to that idea. If you want to be visible on Google when somebody searches your name, you're going to have to create a name for yourself that's less ambiguous than just your first and second name, and I was talking to somebody at a podcast festival talking about everything in threes At CaliCube. We do everything in threes because that's how the human brain functions and it's also how Google functions. So your name, eric Eden, is only two. Eric Scott Eden is three and actually becomes very natural for human beings once they got used to it. We had a client called Mark Preston very common name. We rebranded him to Mark A Preston and he now says, three months later I find it very bizarre when somebody calls me Mark Preston, because in my mind now, after just three months, I've become so used to Mark A Preston that it's that that I expect to hear every time.

Speaker 3: 7:47

So, tactically, what are some of the things that you do to help people own their personal brand on Google? Like, practically, what are some of the things that you guys are able to put in place for people which is a great question because I always forget the practical stuff.

Speaker 2: 8:01

I like the theory. It's really simple. You create a website for yourself if you don't have one. If you do have one, you create an about page where you describe who you are, what you're doing, why you're credible. At that point you can then focus Google's attention on that web page and your website and you can start to educate it about who you are, what you do, why you're credible, and it will come to you for information about you. The simple things you do is create the about page, which we call the entity home, write a clear description of who you are, what you do, why you're credible. You make sure that all the corroborative sources your social media profiles, articles, podcast appearances, everything about you online corroborates what you're saying on that entity home on your website, and then you link all the sources that corroborate what you're saying Back from those corroborative sources to the entity home. Google goes into a cycle, a loop of infinite corroboration, and it will end up understanding by pure repetition. That's how you educate Google today. Google is a simplistic child that learns by repetition and if you can be clear, consistent with your corroboration, you've nailed it. Simple as pie.

Speaker 3: 9:13

That's great. Now, one thing you mentioned on the CaliCube website is the knowledge panel on Google. For everyone's benefit, what is the knowledge panel?

Speaker 2: 9:23

The knowledge panel is the panel sorry on the right hand side. When you search on desktop for somebody famous like Johnny Depp. If you search for Jason Barnard, you'll see the same thing. I look as famous as Johnny Depp when Google presents me. Obviously, I'm not as famous as Johnny Depp. All I've done is educate Google so it understands me, because the knowledge panel is Google's representation of its understanding of the facts, and anybody in the world can have a knowledge panel. You don't need to be famous. All you need is the Google understands you, the manner that makes it incredibly confident that it can represent you factually in the knowledge panel, which is, I repeat, google's understanding of the facts about you. So everybody should be out getting a knowledge panel today.

Speaker 3: 10:11

Is that a hard thing to get or is it easy medium? Just curious.

Speaker 2: 10:16

It's easy and hard at the same time. So the easy thing is what I described to you. It's simply that entity home on your website your personal website, not your company website the corroborative sources that all repeat the same thing, and that incident loop of linking from the entity home out to the corroborative source. Google sees the same thing, it comes back, sees the same thing, goes out to the next one, sees the same thing, comes back, sees the same thing, and so on and so forth. That's easy. The difficult part is actually finding all the corroborative sources, setting it up and being clear and consistent. You need a certain level of OCD to be able to actually do that properly and do it over time, and that's what we do at CaliCube for our clients is. I can explain to everybody how to do it. I've just done. It took me less than a minute to explain exactly what you need to do. You can all go out and do it free, or you can understand that CaliCube or a company like CaliCube can do this for you, which will save you time, will do it better and will maintain it over time and will maintain that knowledge panel and Google's understanding of you over time, and we have a platform called CaliCube Pro that automates a lot of this process, and agencies can use that platform to offer these services to their clients.

Speaker 3: 11:26

Great. Is there a lot of collaboration or evidence that Google needs? How much evidence does Google need for you to get something like a knowledge panel?

Speaker 2: 11:33

Oh, that's a great question. I love that question because people don't often ask me that People assume you need more. You don't need more. You need relevancy, clarity and consistency. So if you've got relevant, consistent, clear, corroboration, you've won the game. And I'll give you an example of two people on our team at CaliCube who have built their own knowledge panels. Neither of them is famous and neither in fact have an entity home, but they've managed to build knowledge panels based on CaliCube because CaliCube has authority for the people who work at CaliCube in the industry that we work in. And then they link that to their social media profiles and they get knowledge panels. And they've only got three social media profiles and CaliCube's website, and yet they get a knowledge panel. So relevant, clear, consistent, corroboration you win the game, whether it's three pieces of information online or 300 pieces of information.

Speaker 3: 12:34

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for sharing these insights with us. On personal branding, jason, I believe you guys have a newsletter at CaliCube that people can subscribe to that has a lot of insights on personal branding. Is it on your guys' website?

Speaker 2: 12:51

Yes, indeed, you can sign up for the CaliCube newsletter. It's calicubecom k-a-l-i-c-u-b-ecom slash newsletter. The newsletter is just full of free information where we help you to learn, to educate Google, because the entire SEL game, the entire digital marketing game, your personal branding game, is about educating machines like Google, Bing, Facebook, Apple, Twitter. They all learn the same way by simple repetition, clear, relevant, consistent corroboration. And in the newsletter we'll teach you how to do that for yourself for free, because what we've realized is there are 8 billion people on earth. We can't possibly build knowledge panels, build a personal brand for all 8 million or billion. Sorry, we only need a few hundred clients so we can give the information for free. And the clients who come to us are those who don't have the time, don't have the energy or simply know that we'll do it better for them.

Speaker 3: 13:50

Awesome. Thanks so much again, Jason, and this is truly remarkable to be able to build your personal brand in these ways, get knowledge panels and be found. So thanks for sharing these things. Remember that marketing is never easy, but should always be fun.

Speaker 1: 14:10

You've been listening to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our passion is to bring you the marketing rock stars who share stories about the best marketing they've done, how it delivered and how they handled all the challenges that go along with it. And we do it all in 10 minutes. We only ask two things. First, visit the Remarkable Marketingio website for more great insights. Second, this podcast has been brought to you by the Next Generation Social Networking app, workverse. You can download and use the Workverse app for free to build your professional brand, become a paid expert advisor and discover the best business events to attend. Download the Workverse app today. See you next time on the Remarkable Marketing Podcast.