Interview with Paul Dunay - Author of "Facebook Marketing for Dummies." (Wiley)

This is the first part of a multi-part book review and interview with Paul Dunay the Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing for Avaya on his just released book called "Facebook Marketing for Dummies." (Wiley)

Aren't there enough books on Facebook:

Paul "Plenty of books on Facebook but this book is about utilizing Facebook as a business platform. That is, Facebook is rapidly becoming a platform for marketing of products and brands and is going to be even more dominant with things like storefronts, behavior targeting ads, video and coupons in ads and much more. Facebook is an evolving social network moving towards being a dominant platform with 300,000,000 users, 70% are international users, with one billion photos every month, 10 million videos every month, four billion updates every month, 45 million active groups, which nets out to be - five billion minutes of usage a day making it the third largest website behind Google and Yahoo! to name just a few of its key highlights."

That's a lot of impressive stats, but what does it mean:

Paul: "Facebook marketing gets down to the individual person rather than search term or topic essentially eliminating the waste in keyword targeting your prospects. Facebook gets you to the buyer not the idea. What this means is a vast new opportunity for targeted marketing. More importantly, it is very early stage right now. It reminds me of 2001 when savvy marketers were experimenting with Google AdWords when it just launched. Exciting times!"

Marketing has been called by the great marketing geniuses Trout and Ries the "battle for your mind," how will Facebook marketing be any different:

Paul: "If you are a marketer or SMB you can use the Facebook platform to use as your playbook for marketing. Rather than trying to figure out what marketing really is, Facebook is your marketing tool/platform. And best of all Facebook is free - where else can you build a presence on the web with a blogs, show videos, hold events, and more with all this who needs a website?"

What other secrets are in the book?

Paul: "One of the growing marketing trends is companies monitoring their "social presence." Facebook is at the very vortex center of this social firestorm. With Facebook you can also create engaging applications aligning the brand with an experience for people hitting your site on Facebook for the first time. You can direct them to specific tabs (think URLs) on Facebook. Facebook also increases viewer navigation to specific tools such as blogs, wikis and third-party applications."

How does Avaya fit into this picture?

Paul: "Avaya saw the potential of Facebook in November of 2007 for a new communication forms within social networks. Avaya saw the need to provide a solution on how to engage Facebook users privately and how to provide call center support via the Facebook platform. As well as how to create a meeting, with presence attributes, IM capability, embedded video, and a messaging suite, these are all part of the Avaya solution."

Facebook for Marketing is available from your favorite bookseller or click here.