Building Trust in the Digital Age - Fastlane Founders with Sameer Somal - Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard

Sameer Somal talks with Jason Barnard about building trust in the digital age.

Sameer Somal is the CEO of Blue Ocean Global Technology and Co-Founder of Girl Power Talk. Sameer leads client engagements focused on digital transformation, risk management, and technology development.

Sameer talks about building trust in the digital age, with a focus on managing personal brands and handling both good and bad press. He explains the comprehensive process his company uses to manage and repair digital reputations, including reputation assessment, roadmap creation, and content analysis. He also discussed how ChatGPT and other AI tools have impacted his practice emphasizing the need for authentic and high-quality content.

Learn practical strategies for building trust across different search verticals such as Google News, Google Videos, and general search results. If you’re a business leader seeking to protect and enhance your digital presence while creating authentic, lasting impressions online, this is definitely an insightful episode to watch.

What you’ll learn from Sameer Somal

00:00 Sameer Somal and Jason Barnard
01:10 Sameer Somal’s Brand SERP
02:21 What Does Sameer Somal Do at Blue Ocean Global Technology?
02:58 What Does Blue Ocean Global Technology Specialize in When it Comes to Digital Reputations?
03:08 What Are the Areas Sameer Has Focused On in the 300 Cases He Has Consulted On?
04:15 What are the Processes for Addressing Negative Content on Google or in a Knowledge Panel?
04:31 Process 1: Reputation Assessment
05:08 Process 2: Client Goals
05:25 Why Should Business Leaders Proactively Shape Their Personal Brand Online?
05:41 How Can Professionals Manage Unwanted Information in Their Digital Presence?
05:55 How Do Different Search Verticals Impact Your Digital Reputation Management Strategy?
06:00 Process 3: Roadmap Creation
06:25 Why Do Ethical Reputation Managers Choose to Decline Certain Client Cases?
07:51 Process 4: Content Analysis
08:23 What Do Reputation Companies Not Realize About Educating Google?
08:42 What Do Companies Need to Understand About Google’s Tendency to Prioritize Negative Keywords?
09:13 How Many Hours Does Sameer’s Team Dedicate to the Technical Work to Achieve Desired Results?
09:40 How Does Sameer Somal Evaluate and Manage the Expectations of the People Seeking for His Help?
09:48 What Time Frame Does Sameer Provide His Clients to See the Results and Feel Comfortable With it?
11:26 What Does Maintenance Mode Involve in Sameer’s Process?
12:02 What is the Risk if Clients Choose Not to Continue With Maintenance Mode?
13:05 How Does Sameer Emphasize the Idea That Offense is the Best Defense?
15:18 How Much Do Successful Leaders Value Their Presence Across Search Verticals?
15:28 Why Do Successful Leaders Struggle to Navigate Their Digital Brand Strategy?
15:38 Why Does Relying Solely on LinkedIn Posts Fall Short of True Digital Presence?
15:49 What Has Become the Universal First Step in Professional Networking Today?
16:01 What Search Verticals Do People Explore When Researching New Connections?
16:16 How Do Digital Assets Work Together to Tell Your Complete Brand Story?
16:26 How Do Authentic Personal Images Help Build Meaningful Professional Connections?
16:58 What Extent Has ChatGPT and Other AI Technologies Changed the Approach of Sameer and His Clients?

This episode was recorded live on video January 21st 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://youtu.be/khCFv1J78Vk?si=92lU1XM0RTBqBG7m
https://canvasrebel.com/meet-sameer-somal/
https://www.cshlaw.com/resources/defamation-and-reputation-management-in-the-digital-age/
Sameer Somal

Transcript from Building Trust in the Digital Age – Fastlane Founders with Sameer Somal

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy. A legacy we’re proud of Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Sameer Somal.

[00:00:44] Sameer Somal: What a melody. Thank you Jason. Pleasure honor to be here and certainly have a genuine appreciation for your leadership, Kalicube and yeah, looking forward to the conversation.

[00:00:53] Jason Barnard: Yeah, me too. So we’re going to be talking about Building Trust in the Digital Age, particularly personal brands, bad press, good press, how to protect yourself, how to defend yourself, and how to overcome bad press. But also I think as you said, the best defense is a great offense. So be proactive. But before that, I look at search results for people’s names and this is what comes up for you. You’ve got your own website, which is great. Google and the AI are looking for that, what we call the entity home website that they can use as a source of information from you, about you and then build their understanding of you through corroboration around the web where you should normally get a Knowledge Panel which I’m sure you’re not very far away from. And if people watching this want to search my name, Jason Barnard, you’ll see what a great Knowledge Panel looks like.

The pink box is the top Knowledge Panel cards. Google really understands who I am and that’s the fact it understands about me. But then I thought I’ll look at you in ChatGPT and this is what ChatGPT comes up with. And what’s great is I don’t need to read the entire SERP, I can just read its summary. It’s using Bing search results and it’s summarizing them and that’s pretty good. So as long as your search results on Bing are great, ChatGPT will represent you the way you want. That’s what we do at Kalicube. And what do you do at Blue Ocean Global Technology, Sameer?

[00:02:16] Sameer Somal: Well Jason, I’m glad you didn’t scroll down and show them all those negative links. Just kidding. You know, look, I always share with folks that I’m an accident into the reputation business. You know, I didn’t held back by technology resources when as a former investment banker I launched a wealth management firm. In 2012, I did a global search. I found some great partners and I said maybe I should share these resources, given I’ve spent 18 months finding really good people. And so we started out and focused on the technical work, working with public relations agencies. They did what’s called spray and pray, putting content out there, hoping that it ranks.

We were really good at all the work behind the scenes and understanding Google’s algorithm. So Blue Ocean Global Technology specializes in building, monitoring and repairing digital reputations. We also do technology development, litigation, consulting. I’ve had the pleasure of being an expert witness and consulting on 300 plus cases. Many of them related to Internet Presence, Online Reputation, Search Engine Optimization, source code, Internet defamation, quantifying damages. So I come at it from a different lens. Not just being a resource for business owners, entrepreneurs, executives to take all the trust, goodwill, relationship capital they have offline and how do they represent it thoughtfully online, but also understanding the downside and the reputation risk and what happens when things reach the internet and people are able to take legal recourse or in many situations they’re not able to. And how do you do to, what do you do to address those challenges?

[00:03:51] Jason Barnard: Right. So when you come in, when somebody has a problem of something showing up on Google that’s negative, or in the Knowledge Panel even worse, which is the fact, according to Google or in ChatGPT, what’s the process you go through to help them solve that problem and what are their expectations and are they reasonable?

[00:04:13] Sameer Somal: Wow, loaded question. First and foremost, I think that the vast majority of our work is actually done building positive brands when people don’t have issues. But I’m proud of the fact that most of our clients who have come because of a challenge end up being our clients in perpetuity because we do really good work. And it starts with, one understanding what’s out there, doing a reputation assessment. What is out there? What do you like? What is false, erroneous, harmful, defamatory, negative? What is kind of neutral? I was speaking with a family office earlier today and the gentleman who runs that organization was saying, I’m so frustrated. We have AAA rated PR and digital assets, but none of them are ranking on the first few pages. And he’s right.

[00:05:01] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:05:02] Sameer Somal: You know, this real estate deal he did 25 years ago is one of the things on the first page. So one, understand what is out there. Two, each person has an idiosyncratic, a unique view of what they want out there. And oftentimes I speak at events to sophisticated investors and high net worth folks. And I explained to them that, you know, Eric Schmidt said it best. Identity will be the most valuable commodity for citizens of the future and it will exist primarily online. And if you don’t control the conversation and narrative about who you are, your strengths, your capabilities, well then somebody else can. And so you need to be proactive.

So one, it’s understanding what somebody’s comfortable with, what they’re known as. There are a number of ways and strategies that we explore when somebody doesn’t want information out there and they want to be, they still want to remain anonymous. And I could certainly highlight some of those. So first, understanding where the client wants to go, what they currently have out there, what can be moved up and then you really create a roadmap and educate them on all the different options for controlling search on the main search, the image search, the video search, the news search and all these different sub components of Google search results specific to negative content. When there’s a harmful narrative that depends on. I’m proud of the fact that we do say no to many clients that reach out to us because I feel like I don’t want to be the person that works on that situation. But many times, you know, and I can think of some examples, you know how about this for, for somebody who’s co-founded a company called Girl Power Talk, we employ women in 35 countries. I’m particularly sensitive to issues that associate with women.

And there was somebody who was referred to us 2019 I believe and this gentleman was a prominent attorney, a Silicon Valley attorney and he had a false me too accusation. He was accused of sexual assault and he was completely innocent. Now how do you know that Sameer? Because that’s normally the next question that I’ve asked is. After he was forced to resign they did an independent investigation. They hired another firm, a top firm actually Gibson and Dunn, this particular law firm and they published 160 page report that showed the day after he was supposedly sexually assaulting this other partner in Rio de Janeiro. She’s emailing her assistant asking to sit next to him on the plane ride home. And there were all sorts of other emails that went back and forth. But this person Jason has 68 out of the first 70 links are negative because this woman went to you know, high profile law firm and you know they published everything they could about how he’s accused of these challenges and she was over billing a client and that’s why that was the reason for her wanting to go and do that. So you look at the negative links, you gotta analyze how strong they are.

And Google’s algorithm, as you’re acutely aware of, wants to have a balanced approach. So you may have 200, 300 negative things, but one negative thing will feature prominence. I’ll just pause there. And you need to assess things and then you need to come up with a strategy that of course is going to either suppress the content and where possible, remove the content. And we certainly explore both. It’s not always possible and I can opine on any more detail.

[00:08:23] Jason Barnard: And the key there for me is balanced view. And I think that’s what a lot of reputation companies don’t realize or don’t work on is if you can educate Google about what a balanced view looks like, it will show that balanced view. But that balanced view can still contain the negative information.

[00:08:42] Sameer Somal: Yeah, you know, the balance is actually skewed towards featuring the negative keywords that, you know, anything associated with rest, assault, you know, anything that will, you know, quote unquote, compromise. They, they want to feature that. So people are sometimes frustrated. They’re like, you know, we moved out some of the negatives on the first page and those other ones from, you know, page eight and nine, they popped up quickly. So that’s something that you have to address and almost reverse engineer how you control the different slots on Google. And then to get those results there’s you know, a 24 hour work cycle that we deploy on the technical work to strengthen assets and you know, relative to others that are weaker.

[00:09:25] Jason Barnard: Right, okay. And what’s the time frame that you give your clients in terms of how long it will take to start seeing results and how long it will take to see the results and feel comfortable?

[00:09:36] Sameer Somal: Well, you know, you asked the question about managing client expectations and you know, I always try to under promise and over deliver. Having said that, I also found that sometimes when I’m too candid, you know, they feel like it’s not even worth moving forward because you really don’t know how long it’s going to take until like, you know, maybe two or three months in, then you get a better sense of what’s working and what’s not working. It will depend upon the number of links, the number of keywords that those have permeated to where those links are ranking and are there differentiated Google? I’m thinking about a gentleman in Houston and he’s attacked on YouTube and they don’t know who is posting the videos on YouTube, but they’re all ranking and featuring prominently. So much so that a judge in a separate business litigation is bringing up, well, I saw all the things about you on YouTube. You seem like a bad actor. So one you have to look at kind of all those things and then you say, look. Hey, look. Based upon the number of links, we estimate that we’ll be able to give you a better idea in three months.

Campaigns that are simple, I think usually for us to do it right where you follow, of course, the white hat SEO practices and stay according to Google’s code. It’s going to take at least six months to do things right and get organic results. We’ve had campaigns that have gone three years. We’ve had campaigns where we say six to eight months, and after four, we’ve made way more progress than we thought. And we can drop down to maintenance mode.

[00:11:13] Jason Barnard: Right, and what does dropping down to maintenance mode involve? I mean, you talked about clients for pituity, which I can’t now say, do clients stick with you forever on maintenance mode?

[00:11:25] Sameer Somal: You know, we usually try to do maintenance for six months to a year. That is continuing to do the technical work. So the big mandates in a reputation and online branding campaign are public relations, content creation, and all the SEO work that you’re doing behind the scenes to create these lattice work of interconnections that tell Google particular assets are stronger. So maintenance mode, we’re just doing the technical work, and usually that’s anywhere from, you know, 25 to 60% of the original mandate. And then we’re doing that for six to 12 months. And if you don’t put it in maintenance, those things can reverse. I don’t think people need to now. There are people that, you know, kind of hire us and engage us to monitor things, but we end up doing more work in perpetuity, is what I meant in terms of positive branding.

And people say, wow, this is great. You know, I’ve gone from, well, whispering down the lane about me to really being an asset and fostering trust in relationships, you know, or even people that contact us and they’re like, you know, somebody has the same name as me, and I can’t go on any dates because after I meet, you know, somebody, then, you know, they’re looking me up and they’re ghosting me. So there’s plethora of reasons that people approach us for addressing issues.

[00:12:42] Jason Barnard: And so that moves us nicely onto the idea of offense is the best defense. Building up a great presence will not only protect you, but it will also build up your reputation, build up your authority, and mean that when people do Google your name or search for you on ChatGPT, do their due diligence on you, you’re incredibly impressive.

[00:13:05] Sameer Somal: Yes, I think that maintenance ends up being keeping what you’ve done. But many times clients say, well, I want to keep going. Actually, this has helped me in whatever I’m trying to accomplish. And I always relate it, you know, as I was yesterday. I was at the airport and somebody had been referred to us. I’m usually pretty responsive, but too many horses, not enough oats, as Abraham Lincoln said. And this gentleman said, you know, look, Sameer, I am really want to feature my expertise as a doctor and also the fact that I go and volunteer in Kenya and Uganda at these different clinics, and I think that’ll be very important. And he’s like, you know, he came with kind of expectations in terms of price, and he’s like, you know, I’ve talked to a couple different firms and, you know, I’m willing to, you know, spend $1,500 a month or something.

And I said, well, we’re probably not the right firm. It’s not that we don’t have clients for $1,500, but if you’re looking to create high quality content and you got to hire writers and not do it by AI, because search engines are able to understand that, and I think over time they’re going to penalize content more significantly than they already are versus original, authentic. And I said to him, what’s your reputation worth? And if you think about how much time you spend on the Internet, on your phone, on the computer, and you’re trying to be pennywise pound foolish and you know, you’re somebody, dare I say, sir, that, you know, may have savings of seven or eight figures, but you want to only think about a really small, and that’s okay. And I’m not here to change. What I’m here to tell you is that if this really is something that’s important to you and your business, your legacy, we get many folks now that we’re working on, it’s like, what do they want to be known as to their grandkids, their great grandkids, when somebody looks them up and they want that story to be told of what they’ve accomplished in life and who they’ve helped, hope that’s helpful.

[00:14:59] Jason Barnard: Yeah, no, absolutely. Makes total sense. And you were talking earlier on about the different verticals, Google News, Google videos, and the general search results. To what extent do people care about that?

[00:15:15] Sameer Somal: Well, you know, everything is the bell curve. I think that people who are in some degree of prominence or success, they realize it’s important, but they have no idea how to move forward. So there’s kind of choice, overload, or they think, well, well, you know, I’m posting stuff on LinkedIn and you know, that’s making sure. And that doesn’t necessarily work either. So, I think that you have to educate people and let them understand that, hey, when you meet somebody at an event, at a conference, do you Google them? Oh, yeah, I do. You know, whenever I ask an audience of a couple thousand people about how many people have gone off to the corner and Googled somebody or they got an email from someone, everyone kind of like, gives, like the guilty hand raised. So when you Google them, do you click on the images? Do you click on the videos? Do you click on the news? I do, and many people do. So you need to work on those different components.

And many times the content, of course, is interrelated amongst them both. So, like, the stronger digital assets that you rank and put effort in, those photos will feature more prominently on, you know, on the image search. And it’s also about telling the story. People have said, you know, Sameer, I clicked on your image search and I got to see, you know, you working in a school that your foundation, you know, funds in Girl Power Talks offices in India. And that created a conversation. That person was reaching out to me for, you know, a legal case, for example. I’m thinking of law firm partners. But those things help you. Help you become more relatable.

[00:16:49] Jason Barnard: Okay, brilliant. And now last question, which is a big one, is to what extent has ChatGPT and other AI changed the game for you and for your clients?

[00:16:58] Sameer Somal: Yeah, well, one, we, we’re getting all sorts of questions like, do you use ChatGPT or why should it cost this amount of money? And we leverage ChatGPT for research and doing outlines, but we have an internal writing team of 25 team members. We have about 35, maybe 40 independent contractors that write for ourselves and our clients. I think that ChatGPT helps you get to a certain point, but I also think that it’s the law of diminishing returns and that if you respond to an email to someone or you’re posting articles that, excuse me, are straight from, you know, ChatGPT or one of the others, it’s gonna be content that maybe is devoid of a voice. It’s not gonna be authentic. And so, I think you need to leverage artificial intelligence one on tools to monitor and search. And we do that. But also you need to have a voice in what you’re doing. And I think that’s been a core area of frustration for individuals seeking to build their brand is that, you know, they’re like, well, you know, I hired an SEO company for 1250 and it worked for three months and now there’s all this bad stuff out there and it’s like, yeah, because people are really sensitive to what’s out there.

So I always approach any situation to help an individual build their brand like we would approach mine. Make sure it’s AAA rated. It’s better to have less out there that’s of higher quality so that somebody 10 years from now that reads something about you, you still feel good, that, hey, that was, that was something of note. So that, that’s been, you know, incredibly helpful. And so like anything, if you don’t like change, you’ll like your relevance even less. And I think that artificial intelligence has a place for it. At the same time, I think the authenticity of original high quality content is ultimately what is I think a differentiator in people connecting with you, liking you and fostering mutual trust and respect.

[00:18:55] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And so from that’s from the perspective of creating content. What about people researching me on ChatGPT, asking ChatGPT or Google Learn About for that matter, Or Gemini, who is Jason Barnard? Is he an expert in his field? What do you think of him? These machines are assistive engines. To what extent is that changing your role and your job?

[00:19:15] Sameer Somal: Yeah, well, well, fortunately I think I even do have the Knowledge Panel on Bing. It’s not something I like proactively do, but I think it was created. And yes, people are looking for the easier outlet. Like once we got search engines that became a source. Now you don’t have to use a search engine, you can use ChatGPT in some ways. It is a search engine, it is a competitor to that. So, I think people are going to use that. But all the work that you do on Google, on the Internet to curate your capabilities, who you are, your experience, what you want to be known for, how you’ve helped people, all of that ultimately amalgamates into being your story on ChatGPT.

[00:19:58] Jason Barnard: Right. Which is a brilliant conclusion. Delightful, wonderful conversations. Thank you so much, Sameer. Thank you everyone for watching and you get the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you Sameer.

[00:20:15] Sameer Somal: I will spare the audience my voice. But Jason, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your industry leadership. And yeah, I hope your audience finds some value in today’s conversation.

[00:20:23] Jason Barnard: Thank you. Sameer. Brilliant. Wonderful.

[00:20:25] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control.

Kalicube.