Stelzner is a well-known white paper writer, author of the book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged and founder of Social Media Examiner.

But he literally had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto Facebook.

“I thought it was just for college kids,” Stelzner says. Then a friend he respected invited him to join, so he did.

But within a short period of time, he stopped updating his Facebook page. “I spent a lot of time on Facebook and frankly accomplished little. At least on Twitter I knew I could strictly talk business.”

So he just fed his Twitter updates into his Facebook profile and fan page. “All along I was treating my Facebook page like Twitter. I thought that by simply posting updates I would build a loyal following.”

Things changed when Mari Smith showed him the right way to use Facebook.

Watch the above video to learn more about Stelzner’s Facebook story.

Create a Facebook Page

Armed with that knowledge, he created the Social Media Examiner Facebook page in March 2010. By July of the same year, the page broke the 12,000-fan mark.

“And these folks are active,” he says. “They post questions, support each other, reply to our questions and promote our articles. A vibrant community was building right before my eyes. Almost overnight, Facebook quickly became the number-one source of traffic on Social Media Examiner.”

You may have heard that Facebook is one of the most cost-effective ways of advertising on social media. “Nowhere else can you target users as surgically as you can on Facebook [and] you can do it for a fraction of the cost of the same targeting on other Internet properties and offline outlets,” write Mari Smith and Chris Treadaway in their book, Facebook Marketing an Hour a Day.

Build a Community on Facebook

But according to Stelzner, Facebook marketing isn’t just about placing ads on people’s pages. He compares Facebook to the Social Media Examiner site. People can comment on the articles, others can respond to those comments and everyone who goes to the site can see all these comments. “FaceBook is like the comment section of our blog taken to an extreme.”

“Facebook has 500 million users,” he says. “That means that your customers are already on Facebook – a huge percentage of them. And they’re on there almost every day. I’ve heard that 250 million people are on Facebook every single day.”

And a recent Nielsen study found that those 500 million people are spending an average of 7 hours a month on Facebook. But they only spend 2 hours a month on Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.

“If people are already on Facebook and they’re already spending an enormous amount of time there,” Stelzner says, “then how can you get them to notice you? That’s where the marketing comes in.”

And that’s why Stelzner created Facebook Success Summit 2010.

16 Facebook Lessons From 22 Top Experts

Scheduled throughout the entire month of October 2010, the summit was designed to give you all the tips and techniques you need to master Facebook for business use. You will receive 16 hours of training from 22 Facebook experts. They’ll cover everything from setting up Facebook pages to growing an active fan base.

And because this conference is online, you can attend the sessions in the privacy of your home or office. For a fraction of the cost of a traditional conference. No airports, rental cars, hotel rooms or expensive restaurants. All you need is a computer, computer speakers, and a high-speed Internet connection.

When you register, you’ll receive an email with a link to a website and your login information. At the appropriate times, just go to the website and login. That’s it!

Just look at some of the speakers you will hear:

• Mari Smith and Chris Treadaway, authors of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Brian Solis, author of Engage!
• Paul Dunay and Richard Krueger, authors of Facebook Marketing for Dummies
• Jesse Stay, author of I’m on Facebook, Now What? and FBML Essentials
• Justin Smith, founder of Inside Facebook and author of Facebook Marketing Bible

You will also hear how companies are implementing their Facebook marketing campaigns, including Microsoft Xbox, Intel, SAP, Cisco and the Washington Redskins.

These social media pros—the world’s leading Facebook experts—will be your personal trainers during October 2010. They will teach you everything you need to know to successfully market your business on Facebook. You’ll learn how to:

• Develop a Facebook marketing strategy
• Customize your Facebook page
• Start a Facebook advertising campaign
• Create a community around your product or service
• Optimize your News Feed to take advantage of viral marketing
• Use Facebook analytics and apps

“The marketer’s job has changed from creating and pushing messages to one that requires listening, engaging, and reacting to potential and current customer needs,” says Erik Qualman in his book Socialnomics. “Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues, and more via social media. Today, 76% rely on what others say, while 15% rely on advertising.”

And Facebook is the biggest social network in the world.

So are you ready to dump traditional, interruptive, “in-your-face” advertising in favor of social media marketing? And can we please stop calling it an “advertising campaign” and start calling it “customer engagement”?

Your customers and competitors are on Facebook – isn’t it time you joined them?  Click here for summit details.

If you don’t agree, read these articles on Social Media Examiner:

• 3 Reasons Facebook Trumps Twitter for Business
• 5 New Studies Show Facebook a Marketing Powerhouse

If you DO agree, grab your place in line for this first-ever online Facebook marketing conference. Their online venue holds 2,500 attendees (and their last event sold out)!

“Let me get this straight,” you may say. “You want me to use Facebook to market my business? Are you crazy?”

Not if you provide products or services to postmenopausal women. Women over the age of 55 make up the fastest-growing Facebook segment, according to Paul Dunay and Richard Krueger, authors of Facebook Marketing for Dummies.

Would your product or service appeal to anyone over 35? “The fastest-growing demographic is the 35- to 54-year-olds… the next fastest-growing demographic is the over-55 crowd.”

According to the authors, Facebook has over 200 million active users, and a quarter of a million people register every day. About 3.5 million people become a fan of a Facebook Page every day.

Yes, you read that right. A fan of a Page. You don’t have to be a rock star to have fans on Facebook!

All you have to do is:

1. Buy Facebook Marketing for Dummies by Paul Dunay and Richard Krueger.
2. Register with Facebook.
3. Create a Page for your business. A Page is the business equivalent of an individual Facebook Profile.
4. Finish reading the book.
5. Start spreading the news.

Everything Starts With a Page

Your Page has multiple tabs and can include your contact information, hours of operation, recent news, upcoming events, photos, videos, podcasts, and other types of content. You can pull in blog posts and other syndicated content.

And when someone becomes a fan of your Page, they can post information to it that all of their friends will see. Their friends will even know they became a fan of your Page!

And you can respond to their posts on your Page that all of your fans will see. You can begin a conversation with potential customers about your products and services right on your own Page that will be seen by all of their friends and all of your fans!

That’s because Facebook takes every interaction and creates a “story” about it that is distributed by News Feeds. Every Facebook member constantly receives updates about their friends’ activities.

Members can even recommend a Page to their friends by clicking the Share button on every Page. If a friend raves about a product or service, aren’t you more likely to try it?

And did I mention that Pages are indexed by Google and other search engines? Are you beginning to see the business advantages of being on Facebook?

Like the business use of all social media, Facebook is all about identifying “evangelists” for your product or service. Then you let those evangelists help you build your business.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B business. If increasing numbers of businesses are getting on Facebook, that’s where your customers are hanging out! Shouldn’t you be there, too?

Engaging Customers on Their Terms

Here are some of the things a business can do on Facebook:

• Share an interesting article on your Page to engage your fans
• Comment on posts on your Page to communicate with your fans
• Update your Page to generate a story about it in your fans’ News Feeds
• Create a Discussion section on your Page to interact directly with fans
• Create or join a Group related to your industry to find more fans
• Create an Event related to your business to meet fans
• Create a Marketplace to sell your products on Facebook

Last but certainly not least, you can advertise on Facebook. There is one caveat, say the authors: “Facebook members are typically not in the habit of clicking ads. They are on Facebook for social purposes.”

On the other hand, “the Facebook advertising platform’s ability to target ad demographics is already legendary. The ad targeting capabilities make it relatively easy to get your message to the right demographic within Facebook.”

Suppose you want to target “MBA graduates who are 3 to 5 years out of school and working in Southern California who like rock music and whose favorite food is sushi.” You can!

How? Facebook indexes every member’s profile in detail, including all of those psychographic variables that make marketers drool. So when you create your ad, you can include keywords to describe your target audience.

“By adding keywords to your targeting, you can reach consumers based on the interests listed on their profile page. Never before has there been a mass medium that allows for this kind of precise targeting. Identifying and then reaching a specific audience has never been this exact and cost-effective until now.”

And because your Page has tabs – one for the Wall, one for Info, one for Photos, etc. – you can add more tabs and turn them into landing pages. “Conceivably, you can create a customized landing page within Facebook for each ad and audience segment.”

And if all of this seems too daunting, Facebook has a team of sales professionals that can help you create a marketing campaign.

Third Party Apps Enhance Customer Experience

Facebook Marketing for Dummies covers all of this and more. You can choose from over 52,000 Facebook applications created by third parties; more than 800 apps were written specifically for businesses. Here are the authors’ “must-have Facebook applications for your business”:

• My Network Value
• MyOffice
• Tag Biz Pro Business Cards
• LinkedIn Answers
• SlideShare
• Static FBML
• Phonebook

The book concludes with tips on Facebook etiquette, Facebook resources and Facebook blogs. And if you don’t want your boss to see that picture of you taken at Kelly’s Tavern, Appendix B includes extensive information about protecting your privacy on Facebook.

Social Media Examiner gives this book a 5-star rating.

Related article: 5 Ways to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

Are any of you using Facebook as part of your marketing plan? If so, please comment!

At a time when businesses are using social media to promote content and start discussions, Avaya has found that listening trumps talking.

“We’re listening to social media and responding,” said Paul Dunay, Avaya’s social media ringleader, who is global managing director of services and social media marketing.

“There is no Tweet that goes unturned. No forum post that goes unturned where our name is mentioned.”

What began as a way to engage and support customers has evolved beyond even Avaya’s expectations. And if Avaya ever doubted its investment in social media, those concerns are now put to rest.

A recent quarter-million–dollar sale, which began on Twitter, soundly answered that question.

Making the Case

Avaya started in 2000 as a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, but its legacy goes back more than a century to the original Bell system. From the earliest phone systems to advanced, unified communications, Avaya and its predecessors have been – and continue to be – at the forefront of the field.

It makes sense then that Avaya would be wherever people are communicating today. The company’s social media activity started informally and grew organically. First, it was mostly a matter of supporting – and keeping – existing customers, many of whom need replacements as old phone systems are retired.

At the time, Dunay followed Avaya mentions on Twitter, which were mostly questions that he forwarded to support reps.

“The old 1.0 way was a call center or inputting tickets on the web,” he said. “2.0 is we’ll try to reach out to Avaya support which is, by the way, me on Twitter.”

With the growth of social media, those mentions soon became too much for Dunay to simply watch on his own. He brought his case to Avaya’s CMO, and left with official backing to build a cross-functional, global, and virtual social media team.

“It was very easy for me to build my business case on retention of existing customers because it’s so expensive to get new ones,” he said

Customer Conversations ‘Everywhere’

Through word of mouth, Dunay found early social media adopters within Avaya’s 15,000 employees, starting with seven people across communications, marketing, support, legal and other business units. As the team began organizing Avaya’s social media strategy, they chose to focus on four main tools: Facebook, blogging, forums and Twitter.

From there, Avaya’s social media was “literally an explosion,” according to Dunay. That team of seven employees has now grown to 50 – all of whom volunteer to participate in social media on top of their regular jobs.

Today, the company has 42 Facebook groups, five Facebook fan pages, one external blog with 10 regular Avaya writers, 10 global Twitter accounts, and 12 LinkedIn groups. Internally, Avaya leverages social media just as much, with 14 internal blogs, 15 wikis, about 3,000 employees on Yammer and some on the recently launched Socialcast.

Facebook serves as the hub, with events, news, discussions and links to blog posts. The blogs discuss trends, innovations and cultural insights. Twitter allows them to post quick bits of information, respond to support requests, and monitor mentions of the brand and competition. Forums enable customers to get help from each other or from Avaya tech support.

With significant momentum, Dunay reported back to the CMO. “She asked, ‘Where are we talking to customers?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ She asked, ‘Where are we holding conversations with partners?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ We’re holding all the conversations in the same places with each one of those constituencies – and then some.”

Contests, videos and other resources engage Avaya’s Facebook fans.

The Eyes and Ears of Avaya

With active listening as the team’s main approach, members found they simply couldn’t be everywhere at all times – especially as mentions of the Avaya name grew to between 1,000 and 2,500 weekly. They turned to Radian6 technology to listen to and measure all social media mentions of not just the company’s name, but competitors’ names, product names, and types of conversations.

“We identified conversations we wanted to go deeply into,” Dunay said. “Wherever conversations about small business and communications happen, we need to be there.”

Avaya tracks a dashboard of mentions, and can choose to either ignore or respond to each. When one member “hears” something requiring further action, he or she posts it on an internal wiki and it’s assigned to someone on the relevant team to address it. That might be support, billing and finance, engineering, a partner, and so forth.

Dunay stresses that none of Avaya’s responses are automated. Who knows what a customer or prospect might say? If your response isn’t tailored to their comments, then you’ve missed the opportunity to connect on a personal level.

The 58-Character Sale

On average, Avaya interacts with a couple of dozen customers through social media on a weekly basis. By listening, the team also comes across sales opportunities. In June of this year, 58 characters of a simple Tweet started the relationship with a potential customer.

“shoretel or avaya? Time for a new phone system very soon,” the Tweet read.

“In less than maybe 15 minutes, we had seen it and figured out what the heck to say to this guy,” Dunay said. “I wrote back, ‘We have some highly trained techs who can help you understand your needs best and help you make an objective decision. Give me a call.’”

Dunay referred the gentleman to a business partner, and 13 days later, they closed a $250,000 sale. At the same time, the new customer’s follow-up Tweet went out: “…we have selected AVAYA as our new phone system. Excited by the technology and benefits…”

“We were there. We were listening. It pays to listen,” Dunay said. “I can’t say we hit 100% of the conversations where we’ve wanted to be, although it’s probably 60–70%. But on our brand name, it is 117%. We’re on every one of those.”

Avaya proactively identifies and responds to support issues using Twitter.

One Tweet Away

By proactively looking for mentions and conversations, Avaya sees issues before they even arise, before anyone contacts the company. A response to a social media mention truly makes an impression on customers, prospects and partners. “We are the early response center for things happening in the marketplace,” Dunay said. “They love knowing you’re one Tweet away.”

Avaya’s social media team grew quickly, but Dunay has an even bigger vision for social media.

“I don’t think it should be 50. I think it should be 15,000. Everyone should have a hand in it,” Dunay said. “We definitely want more people deeper and broader in the organization.”

“Our goals are to have deeper, more interesting and more pervasive conversations with as many people as we possibly can,” he added. “Why wouldn’t you take every opportunity for your brand to build better and deeper relations with every customer you can?”