We met up with Herman Tumurcuoglu from SearchReputation.net at Pubcon 2017 and asked him a few questions about the future of online marketing. He provided some great tips about what people should be focusing on in 2018.

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Naeem: “What has you most excited about the future of online marketing?”

Herman: “Just the whole automation part of it, the fact that it’s unavoidable that machines are becoming more intelligent. AI is here and I think it’s here to stay, so how is it that we in the service industry are

going to adapt to going from very much face-to-face situation, where it’s very labor intensive, to incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence into the functioning of online marketing.

So I think that integration is the next phase and I’m very excited to see how companies, agencies, entrepreneurs, e-commerce companies adapt to that.”

Naeem: “What is one piece of advice you find yourself telling your reputation monitoring clients?“

Herman: “The best reputation management: offense is really defence. Meaning that if you’re serving your customers while going out of your way to make them happy, that’s going to be the best thing for your ORM.”

Naeem: “With the coming generation of business owners being born online, with long chronicle histories in social media, the good and bad, how might the world of ORM change and grow in the next few years?

Herman: “I think there’s tremendous growth in the next few years for ORM as people become aware of how their whole lives have been documented and how everything has come to this moment in terms of reputation.

I think there’s going to be a huge demand for the need for monitoring. That’s going to be very important – the need for consulting and crowd-sourcing in this area is going to be huge. It’s all about your personal brand.”

Naeem: “Can you make a prediction about the future of search marketing?”

Herman: “I’d say in the mid-term, we’re probably going to get a lot more voice activation, searching with voice, with video. Right now you don’t see too many people doing it, but it’s growing steadily.

So voice is going to be huge, what’s inside the video is going to be huge as well. You know, more detailed algorithms going within the content of images and videos in the short to medium term.

Longer term, where Google is headed and the world is headed, is AI. Intuitive, knowing what it is that you’re going to look for in this moment and maybe you don’t even have to say it anymore – just think it and it’s going to be there. You’re going to be more closely connected.”

“Search is going to be, in my opinion, more integral than it was in the past, and even more important. I think we saw almost a decade now where social is starting to compete very well with search, but I think search is going to come back. I think we’re going to be more closely integrated, we’re going to have a second wave of growth in search in the not so distant future.”

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Tags: digital marketing, online reputation management, ORM