Paul Dunay is an award-winning B2B marketing expert with more than 20 years’ success in generating demand and creating awareness for leading technology, consumer products, financial services and professional services organizations.
Paul is the global vice president of marketing for Maxymiser a leading web optimization firm, and author of four “Dummies” books: Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009), Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies (Wiley Custom Publishing 2010), Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley 2010) and Facebook Marketing for Dummies 2nd Edition (Wiley 2011).
His unique approach to marketing has led to recognition of Paul as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2010 and 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008. He is also a finalist for the last six years in a row in the Marketing Excellence Awards competition of the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), and is a 2010 and 2005 gold award winner in Driving Demand.
Buzz Marketing for Technology, Paul’s blog, has been recognized as a Top 20 Marketing Blog for 2009 and 2008, a Top Blog to Watch for 2009 and 2008, and an Advertising Age Power 150 blog in the “Daily Ranking of Marketing Blogs.”
Paul has shared his marketing thought leadership as a featured speaker for the American Marketing Association, BtoB Magazine, CMO Club, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), and ITSMA. He has appeared on Fox News, and his articles have been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, BtoB Magazine, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.
Paul holds an Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Computer Science from Ithaca College.
About “You have to get up close and personal with your customers – you will never get this kind of insights by reading a chart or a fancy spreadsheet.”
I think this is true and when I translate it to social media it means you have to do more than monitoring and join in. A good social media platform for that matter would have to put more spin on qualitative than quantitative. Quantitative aims at being able to understand the brand online by having full overview of what is happening…. On the other hand, qualitative means finding the communities where your costumer socializes online and who are the experts and having full overview of those + build relationship with them.
@ Laurent
I really like how you translated this to Social Media – but I think one of GSK’s main points was sometimes you just have to go face to face to get really content that you cant get elsewhere
SM is great and is WAY better than any focus group but nothing beats face to face communication
@ Paul
All right, got carried away by my passion for social media ;-).
Nothing beats face to face, it’s just sometimes not possible/easy. SM would be somewhere in between nothing and face to face, probably closer to face to face than nothing in term of value it provides for creating/starting relationships.
It always makes sense to connect to a consumer through emotion besides rationality. I think there is nothing new in this, heaps of ads bear testimony.
@ Atul – again you make a fair point – I think the new part for me was in the how GSK was doing this. Sure you can take out tons of ads or even connect emotionally with prospects on an emotional level (think Dove Beauty campaign) – but sitting down with customers face to face, shopping with them, and then designing products for them – now that’s nothing new – but in this era of too much information too little time – it certainly is a refreshing approach!
Getting close to customers thru some emotional characters is very important for a perfect marketer or a product owner
because that is all about attracting the diversion of the consumer
I agree! You must connect emotionally. Customers aren’t merely numbers or names on a spreadsheet, they are humans with feelings. It amazes me that connecting to the emotional side of a customer is a more recent “discovery.”
Great read and interesting stats to back it up. Knowing this, it’s still blatantly obvious that the churn and burn school of thought is alive and well. Exactly who’s left to respond to this? My theory is people that are new to the Internet or the ones that see it as the next vehicle to help them arrive at riches and fame. Ugh. Hope they weed themselves out and stop polluting the social media space…and soon. @bizcoachdeb
You hit the nail on the head with that post. Creating an emotion, preferably a positive one, is a very important part of selling your product or service. This gives consumers a motivation to buy and spread the word about what you have to offer.