Finn Digital Cheer-O-Meter

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Integrates Twitter feeds into a fun, graphical comparison.


Just our way of saying "Happy Holidays" from our entire team.

- Bill, Tiff, Jill, Tim, Travis, Chris, Dawn, and Tracy

Testing out ping.fm feed across all Finn Digital social media outlets.

Finn Digital Holiday Spirit

Finn Digital Team
Originally uploaded by Finn Digital

We were out and about at the BMA-Milwaukee's annual holiday party, held this year at the Crowne Plaza in Wauwatosa.

The entire team, sans Jill S. and Tracy C., enjoyed food, fun, and good friends. Our own Chris even won a raffle prize!

Enjoy the photos from our night!

-Tiff P.
Media Project Manager

Finn Digital Wins 2008 Silver Davey Award for Contest Microsite Branding

Finn Digital won another award!

The Briggs & Stratton Corporation Diamonds in the Rough contest microsite won a 2008 Silver International Davey Award in the Promotional/Branding category!

This was our first year working on the Diamonds contest, and our main focus was to redesign the site so that it was kid-friendly while adhering to strict COPPA rules. We added some neat features like interactive icon movements, the "Create My Baseball Card" feature, prominent "Tell a Friend" links, and an interesting display of the regional winners and their stories.

In all, we had a great time working with the Briggs & Stratton and CKPR staffs on putting such a fun project together!

Congrats to the development team here at Finn Digital, Javier Centeno for his fantastic design, and John Feld and his staff at CKPR for their PR work on this project.

Read the full press release here.

-Tiff P.
Media Project Manager

FD Email Newsletter

Finn Digital is proud to announce the creation of our newsletter, the Finn Digital Hot Sheet: Marketing Tips and Trends.

This is a great feature for our partners and friends to get a bead on what's new in the world of interactive marketing.

Check it out here.

You can also sign up for our newsletter on our website.


Feel free to send us your tips and trends too!

-Tiff P.
Media Project Manager

Finn Digital Wins Silver W3 Award!

Finn Digital is proud to announce that we have been awarded a Silver W3 Award from the International Academy of the Visual Arts for our design and development of the Briggs & Stratton "My Dream Backyard" website.

The W³ Awards honors outstanding websites, web marketing, and web videos created by interactive agencies and marketing professionals worldwide, and is the first major competition to be accessible to agencies of all sizes, both nationally and internationally. The awards are organized by the International Academy of Visual Arts and sponsored by AdAge Magazine.

Finn Digital partnered with Briggs & Stratton Corporation and LittleWood Inc. to design and develop the interactive contest microsite that showcased six-themed prize packages featuring over 80 products, with big-ticket items in each prize package featured each month. The “My Dream Backyard” contest, which ran online from April to September, allowed users to enter daily for their favorite “prize package”, which consisted of outdoor lawn-and-care products and furnishings donated by participating sponsor companies, with winners being chosen monthly.

Nearly 39,000 unique individuals entered during the contest period with an average of 80,000 entries per month, exceeding Briggs & Stratton’s website traffic goals. Additionally, online users were provided with lawn-and-garden tips with links to Briggs & Stratton’s YardSmarts website as a value-added takeaway. This is the fourth year for the “My Dream Backyard” contest, and the third year that Briggs & Stratton has partnered with Finn Digital.

We are just honored to be recognized for our efforts!

-Tiff P.
Media Project Manager

Word of Mouth Marketing

At the October Business Marketing Association, Milwaukee Chapter meeting, we listened to a fantastic presentation about word of mouth marketing from Spike Jones from Brains on Fire.

Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing "encompasses dozens of marketing techniques that are geared toward encouraging and helping people to talk to each other about products and services", according to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association or WOMMA.

Here are just a few types of WOM from WOMMA:

1. Buzz Marketing: using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.
   
2. Viral Marketing: creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email. Example: YouTube videos.
   
3. Community Marketing: forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums) providing tools, content, and information to support those communities. Example: Adobe Users Group for programmers
   
4. Grassroots Marketing: organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach. Example: political action groups
   
5. Evangelist Marketing: cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.
6. Product Seeding: placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals. Examples: Free samples at trade shows
   
7. Influencer Marketing: identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinion of others.
8. Cause Marketing: supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause. Example: "Truth" television ads about smoking
   
9. Conversation Creation: interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity. Example: "How many licks does it take to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop".
   
10. Brand Blogging: creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about. Example: Microsoft and Apple
    
11. Referral Programs: creating tools that enable satisfied customer to refer their friends. Example: "Send to a Friend" links on websites and emails.

While WOM has been around in various forms for ages, the key take-away is that people buy from other people first. We may be inundated with advertising on television, radio, newspapers, emails, texts, billboards, bus signs, and pop-ups; but when we really want the facts, we get it from people we trust--family, friends, co-workers, etc. It's these people that talk about the products, services, and companies that can influnce our purchasing, whether we know it or not.

Copesan.com Re-launch

Finn Digital, in partnership with Lanex, has just launched a wholly redesigned web presence for Copesan (http://www.copesan.com), a pest management solutions provider serving corporations in North America and globally.

Copesan's total solution included a full-fledged .NET Content Management System, branded visual design, and a selection of page templates for different kinds of content. 

Interactive features included:

• Google Maps API integration of all Copesan Partner locations across the United States, Canada and Mexico
• Custom Flash/XML vertical market slideshows with text on the home page; Copesan has the ability to update the slideshows quickly and easily through the content management system.
• XSLT hierarchical menus

Google Analytics was deployed on the site to help Copesan gather traffic statistics and help in the continual adjustment of website content for keyword and search engine optimization.

Out of many Content Management Systems (CMS) available, Finn Digital selected Umbraco, an open-source CMS that provides secure, user-friendly operation. The open source license allows for free use for non-commercial purposes, and Copesan elected to pay a very modest licensing fee for commercial use. 

Finn Digital recommended Umbraco on the basis of its performance, ease-of-use and suitability for replication.

In fact, the Finn Digital/Lanex team will be providing a full templated CMS website package that Copesan will distribute to any of its numerous Partners across the country.

That way, Copesan wins with a consistent, high quality branded website presence for all Partners, and the Partners win with a low-cost, out-of-the-box website solution that improves their ability to communicate with customers!

SEO efforts are ongoing, and based on traffic/statistical analysis.

You're welcome to contact me directly any time to talk about aspects of the Copesan solution.

_Bill 

(twitter: billfinn)

Happy Birthday Travis!

Today is our developer Travis's 26th birthday!

Be sure to drop him a note, or embarrass him as necessary.

Flash and 3D online Environments

A colleague recently asked on LinkedIn :
Is SecondLife going to grow -- or will a newer, improved environment take center stage?A number of answers surrounded the use of Second Life and Google's product Lively.

As an interactive house, we fully support use of these technologies in the business environment (obviously).

However, I responded with the following, that takes online Flash and 3D environment gaming to a whole new level. We've developed interactive architectural and engineereed product environments for clients, and believe that online Flash 3D has a LOT to offer (particularly in a B2B marketing environment) in the very near future. Just wait till we hook it up to a Wii controller!

A completely different alternative is one that is a custom-built 3D environment using Flash-based engines, such as the open-source Away 3D... see more (PaperVision, as well) and the *really* interesting Alternativa (honestly, check out the demo).

Both elevate the online Flash environment to the level of 3D gaming, which is an incredible leap forward possible through Actionscript 3. We're exploring the real-world applications of these for some clients, which are similar to just what you suggest. It does mandate more detailed attention to actually building the environments, but then, you do have full control over access, function and design.

I think we can see online gaming using Flash coming...and it might be interesting to use SL as a pre-viz tool for a more customized game experience.

_bill