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

Unlock the full potential of your digital identity with Jason Barnard, the brand SERP maestro from Kalicube, who joins us to share his wealth of knowledge on crafting powerful personal brands online. He offers a blueprint for harnessing the power of search engine results to reshape perceptions, ensuring that your digital presence aligns perfectly with your career ambitions. This episode isn’t just about suppressing the negatives; it’s a masterclass in proactively sculpting your online narrative to open doors to new opportunities and elevate your professional image.

Jason shares a captivating case study, in managing an executive brand in search engines. Witness the transformative impact of a well-managed personal brand SERP, as we examine the strategic shifts necessary for Google—and the world—to see you in a new light. Whether you’re ascending the corporate ladder or pioneering your entrepreneurial journey, these insights will arm you with the strategies to command your niche and catapult your career to extraordinary heights. Join us and Jason Bernard for an episode that could be the turning point for your personal brand’s success story.

Jason also shares with listeners a free guide to building your personal brand in search engines.  https://solutions.kalicube.com/google-knowledge-panel-instruction-manual

Narrator [00:00:01]:

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 three hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing. And 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.

Narrator [00:00:49]:

This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Eric Eden [00:00:56]:

Welcome to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our guest today is Jason Barnard. He is the founder and CEO of Kalicube. 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.

Jason Barnard [00:01:18]:

Thank you, Eric. Delighted to be here.

Eric Eden [00:01:22]:

Appreciate making the time to share your story today. So talk to us about Brand SERP. What is that?

Jason Barnard [00:01:28]:

Well, a Brand 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 gonna be talking about personal branding and what Google shows for your personal name, which is in effect your digital business card.

Eric Eden [00:01:51]:

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

Jason Barnard [00:01:57]:

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. An investor entrepreneur is opening yourself up to new opportunities to help people with their company investing in them or 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 SERP, the search engine results page for his name.

Jason Barnard [00:03:08]:

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.

Eric Eden [00:03:42]:

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

Jason Barnard [00:03:48]:

Yeah. The hardest thing is that his old persona, the CEO, still exists and it’s still referenced online and 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.

Eric Eden [00:04:21]:

Okay. And so I saw on Kalicube’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 this CEO?

Jason Barnard [00:04:33]:

Opportunities to invest and to start companies in that people would come, or are now coming to him 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 aim. 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.

Eric Eden [00:05:36]:

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 bought that in terms of people like, did you just open a restaurant? It’s like, not me.

Jason Barnard [00:06:04]:

Well, this is a huge question, and it’s a common question today, but it’s gonna become more and more common, because what Google is doing is it’s understanding everybody. Six months ago, it tripled the number of people it understands, 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 SERP 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 change your name. And that means personal rebranding is gonna 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 gonna have to get used to that idea.

Jason Barnard [00:06:58]:

If you want to be visible on Google, when somebody searches your name, you’re gonna 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 Kalicube, 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 it actually becomes very natural for human beings once they’ve got used to it. We had a client called Mark Preston, very common name. We rebranded him to Mark A. Preston.

Jason Barnard [00:07:34]:

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.

Eric Eden [00:07:47]:

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.

Jason Barnard [00:07:58]:

Which is a great question because I always forget the practical stuff. 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 do, and 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, who you are, what you do, why you’re credible.

Jason Barnard [00:08:34]:

You make sure that all the corroborative sources, your social media profiles, articles, podcast, guest appearances, everything about you online, corroborates what you’re saying on that entity home on your website. And then you link to all the sources that corroborate what you’re saying. And 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.

Eric Eden [00:09:13]:

That’s great. Now, one thing you mentioned on the Kalicube website is the Knowledge Panel on Google. For everyone’s benefit, what is the Knowledge Panel?

Jason Barnard [00:09:23]:

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 that Google understands you in a 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.

Eric Eden [00:10:11]:

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

Jason Barnard [00:10:15]:

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 infinite 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 Kalicube for our clients, is I can explain to everybody how to do it.

Jason Barnard [00:10:58]:

I’ve just done it. 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 Kalicube or a company like Kalicube can do this for you, which will save you time. We’ll do it better and we’ll maintain it over time, and we’ll maintain that Knowledge Panel and Google’s understanding of you over time. And we have a platform called Kalicube Pro that automates a lot of this process. And agencies can use that platform to offer these services to their clients.

Eric Eden [00:11:26]:

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?

Jason Barnard [00:11:33]:

Ooh, 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, brand consistency. So if you’ve got relevant, consistent, clear corroboration, you’ve won the game. And I’ll give you an example. There are two people on our team at Kalicube who have built their own Knowledge Panels. Neither of them is famous and neither of them, in fact, has an entity home.

Jason Barnard [00:12:03]:

But they’ve managed to build Knowledge Panels based on Kalicube because Kalicube has authority to the people who work at Kalicube, 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 Kalicube’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.

Eric Eden [00:12:34]:

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

Jason Barnard [00:12:50]:

Yes indeed. You can sign up for the Kalicube newsletter. It’s Kalicube.com. K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E.com/newsletter. And the newsletter is just full of free information where we help you to learn to educate Google. Because the entire SEO game, the entire Digital Marketing game, your personal branding game is about educating machines like Google, Bing, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and 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, billion. Sorry, we only need a few hundred clients so we can give the information for free.

Jason Barnard [00:13:41]:

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.

Eric Eden [00:13:50]:

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.

Narrator [00:14:09]:

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 remarkablemarketing.io 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.

Narrator [00:14:54]:

See you next time on the Remarkable Marketing Podcast.