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.
Paul, For the short term, large corporate events will decline as it is also another way to quickly and easily cut costs that impact the bottom line. Cisco recently mentioned this as a reason for cutting their in-person global sales meeting next year in favor of a virtual one.
Another benefit of a virtual event is also the ability to get detailed stats and reporting about who is there, for how long and what they watched or downloaded. Powerful when communicating ROI to the organization.
Interesting to hear about Cisco – I suspect we will hear more example of this in the coming year
and thanks for commenting CeCe
Happy Holidays …
I agree with your points, Paul. I believe 2009 will be a major turning point in the migration from physical events to virtual events. I’ve been blogging about these trends here:
http://allvirtual.wordpress.com/
The key is to redefine the event for online — there are a lot of clunky online tradeshows that literally transfer the physical event into the online space, booths and all. The ability to move from topic to topic and to facilitate both realtime Q&A and backchannel conversations are unique to online. Companies that take advantage of falling video and webconferencing costswill see real benefit.
Traditional trade shows combined the leverage of mass marketing with the conversational depth of face-to-face selling — within the limitations of a convention hall.
Internet technologies allow us to achieve the same benefits of combining marketing and sales (i.e., “one-to-one marketing”). These techniques can be more effective than trade shows — and without the limitations of trade shows.
The planning phase needs to look at which messages are timely (real-time) vs. timeless (on demand), and which messages are general (marketing materials) vs. unique to the individual (sales relationships). Then, the appropriate technologies can be applied to the mix.
@ Dennis
I agree and thanks for sharing – I am following your blog now
@ PH – good point as well – as I like to say there is no “shovelware” so you cant take the physical event and “shovel” it online and expect it to have the same result
@ Cliff
Thanks for commenting – I agree online can be more targeted that a trade show environment when it comes to lead generation – but I also think online has a place in later stage pipeline efforts when you would normally use a face to face event such as a roundtable
I agree large corporate events have slowed down. It will be temporary and reemerge as a hybrid in later part of 2009. As humans we still need the personal experiential dynamics of “live” events and interactions. I see tradeshows specifically changing. New expenses related to new booth buildouts and elaborate launch parties are going to be tough to justify through 2010.
Sales meetings will need to go virtual to keep any organization quick and nimble.
Cheers!