Where is Digital Marketing Headed in 2015? – Part 1- Here’s Why with Mark & Eric

In the first episode of this two-part edition of Here’s Why, Mark asks Eric for his industry predictions for the year 2015. Specifically, Eric reveals his thoughts on the changes that may come in terms of Google and social media. In light of the recent news that Twitter and Google are rebuilding their relationship, 2015 may prove to be a big year for SEO and social to work together.

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Links Mentioned:

• Official: Twitter To Give Google Access To “Firehose” Of Tweets
• Twitter to Google: Can We Be Friends Again?
• 10 Key Factors That Will Determine the Future of Google+
• The Deep Mind of Demis Hassabis
• All of our “Here’s Why” Videos
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Full Transcript:

Mark: Welcome to a special two-part edition of Here’s Why with Mark and Eric. In these two videos, I’m going to be asking Eric about his predictions for where our industry is going in 2015.
Mark: So Eric, let’s talk about the social media realm and how Google is involved in that. What changes do you think we’ll see in Google involving social media in the coming year?
Eric: First of all, the interesting thing is what became public yesterday. Twitter confirmed in their earnings call that they are doing a deal with Google to give Google the Twitter data feed via “fire hose” as we might call it. This means Google will have direct access to Twitter’s API once again. There’s a lot of reasons for this deal. From Twitter’s perspective, as you wrote about not too long ago; we’ll be sharing the link for that down below, Twitter really needs SEO to be working for their benefit.
From Twitter’s perspective, incorporating their feed and letting Google use it is going to get a lot more Tweets indexed, which is a very good thing for them. It is also going to give a lot of information for Google to process and think of it this way: it’s data and data is good. That is just the most recent news and you asked me for my prediction. One of the things I believe is that Google+ will not die and I love saying that because there are so many pundits out there who talk about it being dead. I agree with part of what they’re saying, its small compared to how some of the numbers may read.
We talk about 300 million active users and the like, but it’s not really as many active users as that if you’re trying to get to people with high volumes of activity. From my perspective, Google+ is a data source, it does make money. It makes money because the personalization in it enables Google to tweak search results on a personalized basis. This allows for better ads and higher click through rates, which they do make some money off of.
Also, the whole space is of strategic importance for the reason I mentioned earlier, it’s a data source. Finally, there are 1,200 people working on the Google+ team, that’s a lot of people so they must be doing something. And given the strategic importance of this, I suspect we’ll see something coming up. We did recently see some confirmation of that.
One of the founders of Deep Mind, which is an artificial intelligence company who was acquired by Google not too long, said in a recent interview that they’re working on some stuff to really enhance engagement and interaction within the platform using their AI technology. We can expect to see that in 6 to 12 months, that’s a long time horizon for a hint to be put out there about something that they’re doing.
Mark: What about beyond Google+? Do you expect Google to do anything else in the social realm this year?
Eric: Yes I do. I think you can expect that Google will do some acquisitions as well, maybe 1 or 2. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they are going to go out and try to buy Facebook or Twitter or even a Pinterest. They may be smaller companies, but I do expect them to do things to enhance their overall social media data sources.
Mark: Great! Thanks for those predictions Eric. We’ll watch to see if those predictions come true because your predictions always come true, right?
Eric: That’s the way it is.
Mark: Be sure to come back next time for part 2 of this edition where I’ll put Eric on the spot for more predictions about Google in 2015. Also, be sure to check out the description below for any resources we might have mentioned and check out the link that will come up in a moment to subscribe to our channel so you never miss any of these videos. See you next time on Here’s Why.