Scott Duffy talks with Jason Barnard about the importance of personal and corporate branding.

Scott Duffy is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and Founder of AI Mavericks. Previously, he founded Smart Charter, which was acquired by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and has been recognized as a “Top 10 Speaker” by Entrepreneur.com.

Scott shares game-changing insights on controlling your digital narrative and dominating search results. He highlights his challenges of managing an accurate digital identity when changing careers and dealing with Google's unpredictable algorithm changes. Scott also emphasizes his collaboration with Kalicube to restore his online presence showcasing the importance of expert assistance in managing digital profiles.

Learn why Google visibility is 10 times more valuable than your website, and how to leverage AI-driven platforms to establish credibility. Discover how Scott rebuilt his online presence from scratch after losing control of his digital footprint, and why a strategic Knowledge Panel is crucial for entrepreneurs. Whether you're pivoting careers or building authority, this episode reveals proven strategies for making your personal brand work harder for your business success.

What you’ll learn from Scott Duffy

00:00 Scott Duffy and Jason Barnard

01:44 How Important Is It That You Have Control Over Your Online Narrative?

02:05 What Is the First Thing Potential Clients Usually Do When They Meet Someone New?

02:24 Why Does What Appears in Google Search Results So Important?

03:39 How Does Kalicube Help Google Create Accurate Summaries About a Person or a Business?

05:24 What Online Information About Scott Duffy Has Jason Barnard Helped Organize?

07:38 Why Is It Important to Focus on Building Your Personal Brand?

08:13 Why Do You Need to Build a Strong Foundation on Google?

08:57 What Common Mistakes Do People Make in Terms of Their Personal Brand?

10:41 What Mistake Did Scott Duffy Make When an Agency Called Him, Suggesting He Needed a Wikipedia Panel?

15:00 Where Should You Begin if You Want to Build Your Brand and Credibility Quickly?

15:15 Why Should You Choose Jason and Kalicube to Help Build Your Google Knowledge Panel?

17:02 How Can You Stand Out From the Crowd and Become the First in the Search Result?

19:30 What Challenges Did Scott Duffy Face When Pivoting Between Different Projects?

20:52 What Has Scott Duffy Done to Make Google and AI Focus On What’s Important About Him?

27:05 Why Is It Important to Package Yourself and Provide Google With Clear, Accurate Information of You?

This episode was recorded live on video November 19th 2024

https://youtube.com/live/n56VpMb_gOg

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Transcript from The Importance of Personal and Corporate Branding – Fastlane Founders with Scott Duffy

[00:00:00] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody and welcome to another episode of Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I'm here with Scott Duffy. You get the intro song, Scott. A quick hello and we're good to go. Welcome to the show, Scott Duffy.

[00:00:46] Scott Duffy: I love it. I love it. You know, that's the thing is you never really get a welcome song on a podcast. Right. This is really unique. I like this.

[00:00:55] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Well, it was my past career and I still sing and I've got a jazz club opposite. I'll be playing there in a few weeks time. So I'm cheating with the voice. But what I liked about it is I don't need to record an intro and I can do it live and it's fun and people like it and you liked it and I'm very happy you liked it. But today we're talking about personal branding and corporate branding and the importance, particularly as an entrepreneur, of your personal brand. And one thing I just wanted to show before we start is that we work with you.

[00:01:28] Scott Duffy: Yes.

[00:01:29] Jason Barnard: And we built that Knowledge Panel for you. We've built it out. That looks incredibly impressive with the books. And then I asked ChatGPT about your career and ChatGPT writes a huge long essay about you and it's all correct. So how important is that?

[00:01:44] Scott Duffy: Well, I think today if you're a business person, I think it's everything, you know, especially if you're an entrepreneur or you want to be a leader in your space, you know, it's all about the message and the story that you're out there telling the market and really controlling, having control of that narrative. And you know, it's interesting because I think when you meet somebody new, whether you're making a new friend or it's a business prospect or it's somebody that, for example, you're out there raising capital and you're meeting with a new investor, what's the first thing they're going to do? They're going to Google your name. And I think that what comes up is so important. I personally think that what comes up in that Google result is 10 times more important than anything you could ever have on your website. Because what that's going to do is it's going to establish third-party credibility for you. And the narrative that they see is the first thing that they're going to believe. And the more that you can control and the more you can occupy that page and control the narrative, I think the more trust they're going to have in you, which is going to lead to, you know, more likely lead to the decision that you're looking for, whatever it is. Now, some people may say that.

Some people may say that. Well, they don't Google you. I go to Instagram or I go to social media. The truth of the matter is this. The truth of the matter is most people today, I'm going to say 99 out of 100 at least, are going to Google first. They don't have your social media handle. They don't really know who you are.

They want to know what does the Internet say about you?

[00:03:20] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:03:20] Scott Duffy: And that's why this is so important.

[00:03:23] Jason Barnard: So Google's a kind of summary of the Internet.

[00:03:26] Scott Duffy: Well, so Google is a summary of the Internet, but the question is, you know, where are they getting the information for that summary? Where are they coming up with this? And I think that what is really awesome about what you do and what Kalicube does is you tell Google exactly what data to create their summary from. In fact, you teach them how to organize the data in a certain way. Again, that enables you to tell the world the story that you want them to know or you want them to believe about you as a person or as a business. And, you know, personal branding and personal marketing is so important. I was just Talking to a CEO yesterday of a company, big company, Fortune 500 company, and we were talking about his personal brand. And what I find really interesting is that it used to be that the CEO of a big, say, Fortune 500 company, Fortune 5000 company, all of the branding while they were in that role was done for the company. But now more and more CEOs are realizing that I may move around. Like, it's not just about, for example, AT&T or T Mobile or Nabisco, like, whatever it is, it's about me and my personal brand.

So in parallel, what these leaders are doing today is they're not just building their company brand, but on the side, they're building their own personal brand that's going to be portable and that they can take with them for the rest of their life.

[00:04:57] Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah. And the interesting point there is that they're doing all the work to build it, but the machines don't understand what they're doing. So the machines can't represent them the way they want.

[00:05:07] Scott Duffy: Well, that's exactly what happens. And then they come out with a book or they change their social media, or they have, you know, a hundred different profiles online for different things. And so Google does not really know what to pull from. And I think that one of the things that's really, that has been great, Jason, that you've done with me is, you know, connecting, you know, my name, connecting Scott Duffy to the books that I've written, the articles I did, to all these things that I've done so that it all kind of can come together in the way it comes together, you know, or one of the ways it comes together is when somebody types in my name and I'll do a search for my name. Well, not just see the pictures and the profile, but they'll see, I think you call them pills. But if you want to drill down, you can drill down into an overview or books or TV shows or whatever it is, and you can get even more information. And I know all of that takes time, but unless you have the right foundation set, which is one of the things that you do, none of that is really possible.

[00:06:16] Jason Barnard: Yeah, 100%. And from that perspective, we come onto your personal brand. To what extent is your personal brand driven your business ventures? I mean, one thing I learned about you very quickly is you sold a business to Richard Branson, who said you'd reinvented one aspect of the aviation industry. That's huge.

[00:06:35] Scott Duffy: Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, you know, from a personal branding standpoint, you know, it's interesting. So if you go back a hundred years, the average man in the United States lived to be 53 years old. Right. I'm 54. That freaks me out.

[00:06:52] Jason Barnard: Lucky you. Yeah, you made it.

[00:06:56] Scott Duffy: Maybe back then, being good at one thing was good enough. But today that's not the world is. Today we're going to have many careers, several things that we do all of those, this kind of stuff. Over time the world has changed and as a result, locking ourselves or our branding around one thing or around one company is really limiting. It's kind of like, I think of it in terms of athletes. An athlete will go and they'll play for a big team, right?