Tossing a Rock in Google’s Placid Pond Jason Barnard, CEO Kalicube: E37

In E37, guest Co-host Jason Barnard, founder and CEO of brand search consultancy Kalicube, joins Localogy senior analyst Charles Laughlin to explore a disparate set of issues, from AI search to the future of work.

Jason begins by musing on how generative AI’s application to search is leading SEOs and other search professionals to pivot back from being digital marketers to just marketers.
Charles then offers a mini-rant on the ham-handedness (his words) of many back to office efforts, notably Meta’s recent commandment that workers head back to their cubicles three days a week.

Tossing a Rock in Google’s Placid Pond Jason Barnard, CEO Kalicube

[00:00:00] Speaker: Welcome to this Week in Localology Podcast featuring lively conversations about the local digital ecosystem hosted by Localogy Analyst, Mike Boland and Charles Laughlin. 

[00:00:10] Charles Laughlin: Hello and welcome to This Week in Local. I’m Charles Laughlin, Senior Analyst at Localogy, and today I’m joined by our guest host, Jason Barnard. Jason, welcome to the podcast. 

[00:00:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you, Charles. Delighted to be here. 

[00:00:23] Charles Laughlin: Delighted to have you. So I just want to create a little bit of envy among our listeners. So why don’t you tell us where you live? 

[00:00:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Well, I live in the south of France where we eat great food, drink wonderful wine, and play a lot of music and it’s sunny and wonderful and delightful all the time, every day. 

The Impact of Generative AI on SEO and Digital Marketing

[00:00:45] Charles Laughlin: Of course it is. Of course it is and so we’re going to save your punk rock career for another episode, Jason. I’d love to get into that but it’s not really what this podcast is about. That aside, why don’t you tell us what’s on your mind today? 

[00:00:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I’ve been pondering Generative AI in search, Google and Bing launching in 2023, their approach to search for the future, which is basically Conversational AI in search results. Bing pushed it out in February. Google were then forced to push theirs out earlier than they expected which meant that they weren’t really ready. They’ve made a few trip ups and mistakes but they’re catching up fast. 

[00:01:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And from my perspective in my industry, which is SEO and Digital Marketing, it’s a huge, huge, huge change that is going to change fundamentally our industry not because our techniques and strategies are going to change to optimize for these engines but we’re going to have to think more about our acquisition funnel and our digital marketing outside of our own websites. And what I love about that is that we stop being geeks and we become marketers.

The Transformation of Marketing Strategies in the Age of AI-Enhanced Funnel Understanding

[00:02:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So at Kalicube, we have become marketers. I’ve been shifting gradually over the last 25 years from running a children’s website to becoming an SEO to becoming a digital marketer to becoming a marketer. And so the Search Generative Experience in Google and the Bing Chat in Bing are both designed to bring the user down the funnel and they bring the user down the funnel by understanding your funnel. So as a business, you now have to have front and center on your website. What is your funnel? How do you bring people down? What are the questions that they’re asking? What are your answers to those questions? Because these machines will try to emulate your funnel and then send the user to you having completed the funnel for you.

[00:02:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think that’s huge. It’s wonderfully interesting. And far from breaking SEO and breaking our industry as digital marketers, it’s actually made it a lot more fun and a lot more marketing and a lot more business oriented. So from my perspective, it’s purely wonderful and fun. And the other great thing is that they’re all based on knowledge and the index of the web. So we’re looking at a situation where we not only have to feed them with the information about our funnel but we have to feed their machine readable encyclopedias, which are knowledge graphs with information, factual information about ourselves, our business, what we offer, who we offer it to, why we’re credible in a factual manner, so that they are confident in the facts about our business, ourselves, our offers, and who we can offer to. 

The Evolution of SEO: From Technical Implementation to Strategic Business Alignment

[00:03:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Which means that the future of search, the future of digital marketing, is all about providing the right content to the right people at the right time. Making sure that’s accessible to these engines and making sure that these engines understand the facts so that they can best recommend you to the subset of their users who are truly your audience. That’s my five minutes. 

[00:04:11] Charles Laughlin: Great. Couple things there, what is the day-to-day task of an SEO under this new environment? How has it changed? 

[00:04:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s a really, really great question because in the old days, which was last year, SEOs would be looking at, yes. Yeah, the technical implementation of the site. They will be looking at the number of keywords, the number of links and all the old stuff from SEO. And today we need to talk to the marketing department. We need to talk to the business leader and figure out what they’re trying to achieve and what they actually offer. And what’s been interesting for me from my perspective, is talking to the clients. You say what do you offer and to whom and why are you credible? They really struggle to explain that. So my first job with any client is to say, please explain that to me. And that’s a kind of philosophical debate that you start every relationship with. 

Revealing Organizational Knowledge Gaps in the Digital Age

[00:05:09] Charles Laughlin: So is this exposing weaknesses in a way that existed before any of this happened?

[00:05:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It can be an uncomfortable conversation. The first thing we’re doing is looking at knowledge. We’re saying who is the company? What is the website? What are the products? Who is the CEO? And that would seem like an incredibly simple question but you can literally talk to somebody for an hour about it before they realize that they don’t have one single thing entity to be looking after. They have the company, the website, the SaaS Platform, the product, the CEO and all of it needs to be fed to Google’s knowledge. So we start off with that. What do you have? And it’s a good hour. 

The Unanticipated Disruption: Brands Caught Off Guard by Rapid Changes

[00:05:54] Charles Laughlin: Okay. All right. Well that’s brands for you. So talk to me a little more about sort of the brands, how prepared they are for all of these changes? You just said suggest not very, but maybe you could say a little more about that. 

[00:06:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Well, nobody was ready for it. 

[00:06:11] Charles Laughlin: Right. Fair enough. 

[00:06:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sprung an enormous surprise on everybody in February by just launching it Chat GPT had been around and people were getting excited about it and geeky SEOs were saying “We are using it for this, that, and the other” and it was wonderful but it was a year and a half out of date. And then suddenly out of nowhere, Bing launched Bing Chat. That’s up to date showing pretty much real-time information based on Chat GPT but an updated database which is Bing’s index. So they took everybody by surprise and for a couple of months absolutely everybody was freaking out.

Navigating the Transition Period: Preparing for the Future of Digital Marketing

[00:06:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then Google launched their Search Generative Experience which is actually quite similar but slightly more colorful and more images, initially at least and people was freaking out even more. And the last month or so, it’s kind of calmed down because people are realizing it hasn’t fundamentally changed anything today but it will fundamentally change things over the next two or three years. 

[00:07:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So business leaders don’t need to worry today. SEOs, digital marketers don’t need to worry today but they need to start adapting the way they’re approaching their digital marketing and in fact, change the way they’re approaching their SEO to make sure it’s incorporating a fully fledged digital marketing strategy that’s well balanced.

Diversifying Your Digital Presence: Avoiding Overreliance on Search Engines

[00:07:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But then any business, any sensible digital marketer would tell you “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Relying on either Google or on Bing for all of your business is a foolish, foolish mistake. So build your digital marketing strategy, stand where your audience is looking, indicate to them that you have the solution to their problem. Show them what the next steps are and it doesn’t matter if it’s on social media, medium, entrepreneur.com, in the media or on search or indeed on your website. Stand where they’re looking. Show them you have the solution. Show them what the next steps are and make sure that Google and Bing can digest that so they can reproduce your acquisition funnel in their chat engines.

The Shift in Search Engine Dynamics: Assessing the Impact on Google and Bing

[00:08:17] Charles Laughlin: So how has this changed the balance of power between Google and Bing in any way to your view? 

[00:08:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): General news has it that although Bing said they were having an immense increase in usage, none of the tools have noticed any big change. But Bing fighting back on that and saying well, actually it has. It’s difficult to judge it sounds like…

[00:08:39] Charles Laughlin: To your eye, it sounds like you haven’t seen any big changes.

[00:08:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I haven’t seen anything noticeable for my clients or for Kalicube itself. But one thing that. Fabrice Canel, who works at Bing, who’s the principal program manager there who I have chats with from time to time at a [show] or a friend, was saying is that the chat aspect and the Search Generative Experience aspect is not going to reduce search usage, it’s going to expand new uses that people didn’t have before. 

Enhancing User Experience: New Possibilities in Search with Answer-Driven Chat Bots

[00:09:13] Charles Laughlin: Talk about that. Could you illustrate that a little bit? I’m sorry. That was interesting. Where do you think those new experiences will be?

[00:09:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Well, the principal example they use is bringing the person down the funnel is somebody who’s saying “Right, well, I just want to come down the funnel from the top of the funnel for a particular brand right through to figuring out exactly what they can offer, why I should buy for them, where I can get it.” Another example is instead of searching for bus 141 from Sommieres to Nimes and then going and looking at [PDF], I can just ask the chat bot what time is the next bus and it will extract that information from all the results and just present it to me.

[00:09:52] Charles Laughlin: That’s kind of an answers based experience, right?

[00:09:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. We’re looking at answer engines now and in fact.. 

Beyond Answer Optimization: The Evolution towards Assistive Search Engines

[00:09:59] Charles Laughlin: So that was the direction it was already going, sort of optimizing for answers, right? This is just accelerating that and blowing that up faster.

[00:10:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And taking it to a new level, which is assistive engines, which is that it’s suggesting what your next question might be. It’s suggesting the follow up and bringing you down the funnel. So not only is it answering your initial question, it’s saying this is your next step. So we need to also educate these machines so that they know what the next steps are and we come back to funnel again. 

[00:10:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So it’s going to change user behavior as much as it changes their interfaces, as much as it changes the way we need to approach how we communicate both with people and with the machines.

Navigating the Shift in User Behavior: Anticipating the Accelerating Pace of Change

[00:10:39] Charles Laughlin: Do you have a sense that change of user behavior is an interesting point? Because that’s always like, if you have to change behavior, don’t do it, right in this case, but I mean, search created behavior that we didn’t have before search, right? So, do you have a sense of how significant the change of behavior is and how long it will take? That may be a ery difficult question, I imagine faster than we think probably but give us your thoughts. 

[00:11:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. It’s a really interesting question from the perspective as in fact, it’s changing our behavior as business leaders and business owners back to what it was when we just did marketing, i.e.we know who we’re speaking to, we know what we’re offering and we know how to convince them and we got lazy and started relying on Google and Bing to do that for us.

[00:11:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The rate of change is really interesting because it’s taken us 25 years to get to this point. It isn’t going to take another 25 years to get to a similar huge seismic shift in what’s going on. And Fabrice tells me people don’t really sit down and consider what exponential means. We are making progress exponentially in terms of machine learning and artificial intelligence and people don’t realize that exponentially means accelerating at an accelerating rate.

The Pandemic-Induced Remote Work Shift: Implications for Office Spaces and Commercial Real Estate

[00:12:00] Charles Laughlin: Right. 

[00:12:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s hugely frightening and hugely encouraging depending on how you look at it. 

[00:12:04] Charles Laughlin: Well, it depends on what’s at the end of that. 

[00:12:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Exactly, yeah. 

[00:12:10] Charles Laughlin: End of that rainbow. Is it a pot of gold or something else? Yeah. Okay. I’m going to shift gears to something that’s completely. Well, it’s completely different. Okay. So I talk about, there’s a handful of things I keep coming back to and one of them is I’m always fascinated by this shift in the way we work that happened during the pandemic. This comes from my perspective as a almost, it feels like a lifelong work at home type. You’re sitting in your lovely home in France as well. I imagine you have some sense of this as well, but this whole idea that felt like the world was moving to remote work, now we’re seeing these very clumsy efforts to kind of end that and bring people back to offices. And I’ve talked about this from a few angles. One of which is that we have all these empty office buildings. What do you do with them? There’s a commercial real estate crash around the corner. I keep reading and it just looks that way to me. And then you have companies that have these massive leases. Well, what do we do with them et cetera, et cetera. 

The Perplexing Push for Office Return: Examining the Motivations and Surveillance Implications

[00:13:19] Charles Laughlin: And so I just was reading the other day or this morning. I’m going to be honest about Meta’s latest effort to bring people back to the office. And it just seemed like another example of just the ham-handedness of all of this. They want people to come back three times a week. You have to apply to become a full-time remote worker and you have to be there at least 18 months. That’s standard HR stuff, I guess, but Zuckerberg was a big advocate of remote work at one point. Now he’s like, now we need you back in the office three times a week. We’re going to use the key card swipe as the sort of data capture to monitor our workforce, et cetera, et cetera. 

[00:14:01] Charles Laughlin: And I think this key card swipe is becoming an interesting data resource for monitoring how this forcing people back to the office thing is working out. To the degree we can see this data, we know how many people are coming back to the office, how often, how long they’re staying. It’s become sort of a surveillance mechanism in a way. I guess it always has been, you know? But anyway, my point really is why is this happening and why from Jamie Dimon now to Mark Zuckerberg, why are they insisting that people come back and why is it always, I don’t know why it’s always three days a week. I think that’s just a compromise that’s just sort of landed on their desks and they all just sort of glommed around the three day a week notion. I don’t think it makes any particular sense. 

Trust and Control Dilemma: The Underlying Forces Driving the Return-to-Office Debate

[00:14:50] Charles Laughlin: And I think it comes down to two words. One word is that we talk about a lot which is trust. We talk about trust and brands talk about trust all the time. If you create a product, does the consumer of that product trust your brand enough to try it, et cetera. So trust is always an important theme to this podcast and to what we talk about all the time. So I think it’s about trust. I don’t think most of these leaders trust their people. 

[00:15:19] Charles Laughlin: And I think it comes to down to control. I think people wouldn’t be in these positions if they didn’t have this sort of almost pathological need for control. So these things are raging into the forefront and leading all these companies to force people back. And I’m sure some people are happy to go back for the free donuts or whatever it is. Others are kicking and screaming because they have childcare or elder care issues, or they just like working from home like me. And so anyway, I don’t know what you think about all this, but I think there’s a ham-handedness to much of this. There’s I think a sort of a white knuckle desperation to some of this as well and I don’t know where it ends up, if it comes down to two days a week or if people just capitulate and start coming back to the office and that becomes our new normal. I don’t know where it goes, but it just seems very erratic and ham-handed right now and I don’t know, I don’t know what you think Jason, I don’t know what your experience with this is.

If I can’t trust you to do your work then I don’t want to work with you and if you don’t trust me to pay every week, you don’t want to work with me. If we don’t trust each other, there’s no future.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[00:16:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Quite a lot, but I, I like, well, I don’t like but I appreciate your insight into saying there’s going to be a commercial real estate problem even if it’s three days a week. You’ve lost two fifths of the need for office space which is huge and mind-blowing and I don’t think human beings will go back to the pre-COVID way of thinking and the pre-COVID way of acting and the internet makes that so simple. 

[00:16:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): From my perspective, I’ve been working remotely since 1989, so I don’t know what it’s like to work in an office. And we have a team at  Kalicube and they’re all remote.

[00:17:02] Charles Laughlin: I’d say all over the world?

[00:17:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yes, they are Slovenia, Slovakia, Vietnam, Philippines, and Switzerland and France. And you were talking about trust. I think that’s huge. You work from home, your boss trusts you. I trust my team. And one of the things I had in an interview earlier today with a potential hire is she asked “Do you use tracking software?” And the answer is no. If I can’t trust you to do your work then I don’t want to work with you and if you don’t trust me to pay every week, you don’t want to work with me. If we don’t trust each other, there’s no future. But trust and control, tell me more about that. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t trust anybody and he wants to control everybody.

The Trust Deficit: Leaders’ Reluctance to Embrace Remote Work Productivity

[00:17:48] Charles Laughlin: I don’t know. I don’t have an insight into his soul, but I think everything about this general movement, let’s get these people back into the office, comes down to a fundamental lack of trust. On the part from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg, whether or not they fight, I think they may share this trait as a leader in that. I don’t think they trust their workforce at large, at scale to work remotely and be as productive as they are in the office with eyes on them. I think that’s garbage personally. But I think that is what they think and some of them have said this out loud others are merely implying it by saying, we got to get people back into the office. And I’ve seen with my own eyes leaders go through the stages, I don’t know, the stages like the stages of grief, the stages of reconciling themselves with the idea that a remote workforce is sort of what we have to come to grips with. 

The Evolution of Leadership Perspectives: From Office-Centric to Embracing Distributed Work

[00:18:54] Charles Laughlin: Howard Lerman, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this gentleman. He formed a company called Yext, exited that at some  point the company still exists, still quite large. And got into a remote tech, something we call remote tech. All the software that’s being created to enable remote workforces and he even initially said remote work’s terrible. I want everyone back in the office. And that’s because he had started, he had got this huge office in New York and he wanted people in it. And then the pandemic happened. Of course that happened to a lot people, a lot of leaders. Eventually gave into the idea and understood that kind of what he calls distributed work which is a mixture of office, remote, hybrid, et cetera is the future. And I tend to agree with that. I’m not saying offices are completely dead, there’s a role for them, but I think any company over a handful of people. Yours is a small organization. I work with small organizations generally that are a hundred percent remote. I think if I started a new small company, it would be a hundred percent remote.

[00:19:58] Charles Laughlin: I think a large company’s probably going to be some mixture in the office and work from home, et cetera, et cetera. And there’s an emerging software community being created to support this new world of work. And I think trying to and I think that’s what the future is. It’s some sort of distributed scenario where maybe there’s a couple of offices people can go to if they want to or need to. They’re all over the world as your organization is. And there has to be a strong foundation of trust, as you say and as I’ve said. And I think without and I think trying to squeeze people back into an old model is just going to blow up and fail.

Addressing Remote Work Challenges: Self-Motivation and Collaboration in a Distributed Team

[00:20:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A hundred percent. From our perspective because we’re completely remote. One of the problems we have is self-motivation, feeling alone, feeling unsupported. And those are the problems we need to deal with and we’re trying to deal with. We’re dealing  within the best way we can. And you’re talking about the software that’s being created for this and we’ve just started trying Roam R O. A M.

[00:21:09] Charles Laughlin: Howard Lerman is the person who founded that. I didn’t realize you actually were using it but that’s who I was referring to a moment ago, the founder of that particular piece of software.

[00:21:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, okay. Right. Well, we’ve been on it for eight days and we’re trying it out. We’re all going to have a vote at the end as to whether we keep using. 

[00:21:28] Charles Laughlin: Okay. We’ll come back to you later and see how the vote went. This podcast is not sponsored by RO.AM but that said, it’s an interesting coincidence that that is what you’re trying, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Balancing Collaboration and Privacy: The Fine Line in Remote Work Monitoring

[00:21:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. From my perspective in terms of the people I’m working with is I don’t know if it’s creepy because I’m now potentially tracking them or if it’s friendly and lovely and people can knock on each other’s doors and that’s a lot of fun and it makes us feel closer. And I think the latter, but I’m not sure. 

[00:21:58] Charles Laughlin: Well, I think that is ostensibly what it’s supposed to be for, but if it ends up being used for tracking that gets back to the whole trust conversation. Yeah and the question your potential employee asked you about do you use tracking software? I know people have to log in who work remotely, they have to log in and out, so they’re things are being tracked and that’s companies do that. They did that in the office seeing what time people come in and time clocks. You know that these things are age old and I guess a shock that they’re applied to a remote setting, some monitoring of people’s performance and just FaceTime as it were. Yeah, that said, I don’t want to work in that kind of environment and I think increasingly people are getting used to it.

The Evolution of Work: Acknowledging the Inherent Flexibility of Knowledge Work

[00:23:03] Charles Laughlin: Knowledge workers, let’s just talk about that. If you’re digging ditches or delivering anything or any sort of physical work that doesn’t change that much if you’re a plumber or an electrician or whatever. But if you’re typing all day. My girlfriend just says, all I do is type all day. That’s my job is typing. But I try to explain it a little more to it than that. But any rate, if that’s what you’re doing all day, you can do that anywhere. And I think most people understand that by now. And that is just fundamentally changed everything and trying to squeeze that back into some old box is just I think a fool’s errand.

[00:23:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, I’m a huge fan of remote working. I’m a huge fan of working from home. I’m a huge fan of flexibility of working hours because it’s all I’ve ever known. But I do see that it’s difficult to just let go as a boss you want to know and I’ve struggled with that a little bit, but I think I’ve got a lot better. And it’s self-training. It’s saying I have to trust them. If I don’t trust them, I shouldn’t be working with them and vice versa. And once you do let go and you say, I trust them and I know it’s all going well and this person is doing their job, that person is doing it her job and helping the other people, I think it’s a huge relief on my own mind. And so if I were to give some advice to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is get some mind relaxing going guys. 

Bing’s Disruptive Impact: Winning the Year with Innovation and Progress

[00:24:34] Charles Laughlin: Yeah. Maybe if they had that cage match, they would chill out after that. I don’t know.

[00:24:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg wants that but Elon Musk is just so full of that. 

[00:24:44] Charles Laughlin: I think Elon Musk keeps complaining about ailments that are preventing him from having this. He sounds like me. But anyway, why don’t we pivot then and why don’t you tell us who you think won the week? 

[00:24:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well won the week for me is Fabrice Canel and Bing. It’s actually won the year because I really, really believe and feel and enjoy the fact that in February they just took this huge rock and they threw it into Google’s very, very kind of stable placid lake. And made huge waves and have completely thrown everything up in the air. And this week Fabrice was talking about how Bing have moved forwards and how quickly they’re moving forward. So he wins the week, but Bing generally so far have won the year by such a long way. I love it. 

[00:25:35] Charles Laughlin: Okay, well we’re at the end, roughly the end of August, so there’s still a bit of your left. We’ll see. Maybe we’ll check in mid, late December and see if you still say that. 

[00:25:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yep. 

The Chilling Reality of the Chinese Metaverse: Digital Surveillance and Social Credit System

[00:25:46] Charles Laughlin: Okay. I have one bit different, it’s not really a who won the week or unless you use the term won with a bit of irony and it’s the residents of the Chinese Metaverse and the reason I say that  is and we generally don’t do politics, geopolitics on this podcast but this has a strong tech angle. Read today that China is looking at applying its social credit system to the Metaverse. I don’t know who’s living in the Chinese Metaverse, if anyone but essentially if you exist in a virtual world in China, you will have its social credit system and it’s basically a digital surveillance system in effect applied to you so that apparently there’s no freedom in the Metaverse. At least for the foreseeable future. 

[00:26:44] Charles Laughlin: Not that I was planning to move to the Chinese Metaverse. I’ve been thinking of taking an expat year but I was thinking more like ,the south of France perhaps, but not Chinese Metaverse. But it’s definitely off the list now for sure.

South of France Metaverse: A Digital Escape from Surveillance

[00:27:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You could come and live in the south of France Metaverse or you could live in the Metaverse and pretend to be the south of France Metaverse.

[00:27:06] Charles Laughlin: No surveillance system there. As far as I know. I don’t know if the wine is as good, but I have to find out someday. Anyway, I think we’ll just have to end it there. Jason, it’s been a lot of fun and thank you for joining us today. 

[00:27:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you Charles. That was delightful, almost co-hosting. I think I didn’t do as good a job of hosting as you did because I didn’t ask the right questions at the right moment. But thank you. 

[00:27:28] Charles Laughlin: Oh, you know what? We use these terms loosely, but thank you for joining. It was a lot of fun. And thanks everyone for listening. This has been this weekend local. Stay tuned every week for more episodes. I’m Charles Laughlin, my co-host is Mike Boland. Thanks again to today’s guest host Jason Barnard of Kalicube. You can find this show on all major podcast networks and you can learn more at localology.com.

[00:27:51] Charles Laughlin: Please subscribe, like, and review this podcast. Your engagement really helps others find us. Our producer is Dara Sweatt . Thanks for listening. See you next week. 

[00:28:00] Speaker: Thank you for tuning in to this week’s episode of Local Colleges This Weekend Local with Mike Boland and Charles Laughlin. Be sure to subscribe for more.