If you've ever worked in marketing in a professional services firm (and I have), you'll know that daring and leading edge are not concepts you're likely to trip over much around the office. At the two big accounting firms where I worked for many years, the objective was more to stay out of the news than to make a splash. They were boring organizations and liked it that way.
That usual abundance of caution makes Paul Dunay's emergence as a leading voice of the social media revolution all the more striking. As director of global field marketing for BearingPoint, the giant management and technology consulting company, he could probably have safely ignored blogging and podcasting and other social media for a very long time. Instead, he became an early and prominent evangelist of buzz marketing.
"By the time I got to BearingPoint five years ago, I had already spent more than 15 years in marketing, creating buzz for leading technology companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Avaya and Cisco and so I was familiar with, and predisposed, to the possibilities of Web 2.0 technologies like blogging, podcasting, videocasting, RSS, wikis, interactive search, and so on. I became convinced that our firm needed to embrace these new technologies to create an environment of conversational marketing."
His challenge then became: how to spread the word and get BearingPoint people to actually use social media to build reputation, brand and differentiation. His answer? Demonstrate it by example.
"It occurred to me that I had access the best business-oriented content and content creators on the planet," he says. "The best way to show what a thought leader does in a social media world was to become one."
He began by developing an internal Buzz Marketing e-newsletter for colleagues within BearingPoint and then launched his very popular Buzz Marketing for Technology blog which now ranks number 8 on the Junta42 list of top market content blogs. Over the past year and a half, he has also done dozens of podcasts with most of the leading figures in social media and Web 2.0.
"I was thrilled when Apple announced that iTunes would accept podcasts," he says. "We were the first consultancy to get a podcast posted on iTunes. We are always looking for new ways to create buzz for our firm."
Over the past two years, Dunay has become one of the web's most respected marketing and social media bloggers and networkers and a very busy speaker on the buzz circuit. He has been a featured speaker for AMA, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, BtoB Magazine, ITSMA, CMO Council, Marketing Operations Management and his articles and research have appeared in CMO Magazine, Information Week, Marketing Sherpa, iMedia, and quoted frequently in BtoB Marketing Magazine.
Dunay holds a degree in Leadership from the Yale School of Management, a degree in Strategy and Innovation from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a bachelor's degree in marketing and computer science from Ithaca College. He is married and has two sons.
But, his biggest achievement (for those of us who have been there and suffered through it) is proving that professional services firms don't have to be dull marketers and boring conversationalists.