May 16, 2010 19 Comments

What I Loved Most About Bill Finn

Bill Finn's Presentation Notes After I got off the stage at the unGeeked event in Milwaukee (great place!), the next guy up was Bill Finn of Finn Digital. Look closer at the graphic to the left in this post. That’s Bill’s slides. Only, it’s a scan of several Moleskine pages. It was absolutely perfect. Bill was not only a great speaker, but he was fast, dynamic, funny, engaging, and everything you’d expect from a digital marketing professional.

What I didn’t expect was BoothTag.

In brief, what Bill’s team did was create a really engaging way to get people (attendees at events) to interact more with exhibitors at conferences. Or at least that’s the first plan. He told us a few more (not sure if I’m allowed to share them).

The idea is a blend of super high tech (special IDs to scan via a smartphone) and super obvious and easy (convincing people to do something via the game mentality).

Here’s Where Bill Earns My Praise

He did this for a client, but he retained the intellectual property on the idea of BoothTag. So now, Bill has a ready-made solution to offer other people and other platforms, and he can resell it over and over and over.

It’s an asset.

Marketers are service providers. They make things that stop the moment they stop (normally). Yes, they make ads or whatever, but those are in service of other people. Everything is a service-related deliverable.

But BoothTag? That’s one of Bill’s moneybabies now. See it?

There are LOTS of smart people in Milwaukee. I’ve met many of them. Good on ya, Bill Finn.

Related posts:

  1. Kill Bill (vol 1)
  2. Whats in an Award?
  3. Here’s a Hint- Don’t Whisper

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  • http://www.mentorlog.com MentorLog

    Nice post Chris, Data services are very popular than voice, So all this works

  • http://www.twitter.com/danieldecker Daniel Decker

    Great idea on BoothTAG for event producers + great reminder to look for the residual opportunities. That's always been a big thing for me, to look beyond the one-off and try to find the residual opportunities.

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  • http://twitter.com/AJBombers AJ Bombers

    Chris, best part…he's SUPER human. I know that's been what's attracted me to him and his ideas. You Go Bill.

  • scott bush

    Did not know Bill F until now. may be a great partner for our NPO that we are launching this summer, Give Back Ten. Have already forwarded a number of his blog posts to the development team. cheers guys.

  • http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/ Chuck Frey

    My employer, a small safety training products firm, has taken a similar approach. They created a multi-faceted training curriculum for a major mining customer – which means that customer underwrote a significant percentage of its development. But they structured the client contract in such a way that they retained the intellectual property rights. That means they've been able to develop a genericized version of the product (without the pilot customer's customizations) that they're now starting to sell to other mines. Brilliant!

  • http://www.famzoo.com/ Bill Dwight @FamZoo

    Cool and novel approach to slides by Bill Finn. It reminds me of Betsy Streeters hand-drawn presentations.

    It'd be cool to do a stick figure set of slides for a presentation ala Betsy's:

    http://www.slideshare.net/betsystreeter/anatomy…

  • rickg

    Love both ideas. Scanning a Moleskine page to use as a slide is sheer brilliance and Boothtag sounds great too.

  • http://www.mindadventure.com/ rob white

    What a great 'lead-in thought' :'What I love most about ….' Imagine if we trained our mind's to begin every opinion with; 'What I love most about life … or … What I love most about my wife … or … what I love most about my business … or … What I love most about my colleagues. What a ball life would be!

  • riteshpatel

    Chris, glad you enjoyed Milwaukee…boothtag is a great idea. Reminds me a bit of other variations like the use of Foursquare to check into booths and earn badges and also using your cell phone and a QRC to meet as many people as possible. QRC on name tags of booth participants. Use your iphone or android or blackberry to take a pic and log a visit. :O)

    All about engagement at its core and making it fun.

  • annawoods04

    Bill Finn is a real hero in a practical life. i would i respect him from the depth of my heart. He was a great speaker as well as great motivator as well at the same time. His speeches till date are absolutely awesome.

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  • http://www.memorybits.co.uk/ memory stick

    Bill was not only a good speaker, but it was a fast, dynamic, fun, round tables, and all you can expect digital marketing professional.

  • mattfagioli

    Thanks for this info Chris. I had a nice talk today with Bill about using this at an upcoming conference.

    On a related note… I met some guys last week (Boston boys actually) who are doing something very cool. There product is called “SCVNGR” (as in scavenger hunt) http://www.scvngr.com
    It's kinda somewhere between Bill's product & maybe Foursquare.

  • http://twitter.com/jasoncrouch Jason Crouch

    Looks like Bill is a sharp guy indeed. I was actually expecting this post to be a eulogy of sorts, since it was titled in past tense. :)

  • http://twitter.com/ericaconway ericaconway

    Chris, great to have you in MKE again. You're a tough act to follow and Bill rallied to the moment. I've seen boothtag in action, it's fun, silly, and does well what it is intended to do, encourage a more natural interaction at an expo booth. Hope we can see you back in MKE again soon sir… or invite me out to MC your next gig, I'm happy to be of service to YOU!

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    It’s pretty special to be a part of bringing even that small moment of lyric beauty to audiences each performance. Bill is very genuine person and very fun loving. its been great to see lots of good response from others as well.

  • http://www.yuregininsesi.com yuregininsesi

    Did not know Bill F until now. may be a great partner for our NPO that we are launching this summer, Give Back Ten. Have already forwarded a number of his blog posts to the development team. cheers guys.

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  • http://twitter.com/R8chel_Marie Rachel Howe

    Booth Tag sounds awesome! I didnt know about till it till I came across this post. One of the clients at my company would really benefit from it. Thanks for the tips and the Milwaukee shout out!