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heyG20 Morse Code Project

heyg20_240_biggerOn September 24-25, 2009 the G-20 Summit will take place in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, where G-20 leaders, representing 80% of the world’s trade and two-thirds of the world population, will determine policies affecting our economic and financial futures.

To foster engagement despite the insularity of these talks, Osman Khan, an artist, and our team at Elliance, are collaborating to develop heyG20 as a forum that will allow concerned citizen’s of the world to voice their thoughts and opinions to the Leaders of the G20 Summit. The project is an interactive installation that will take place during the G-20 Summit in the windows of Elliance’s offices located directly across the river from the Pittsburgh Convention Center.

Interested participants may tweet their message to @heyG20 (http://twitter.com/heyG20), whereby their messages will be transformed to a multicolored morse code light show, illuminating not only the night sky but also the concerns of the world’s citizens.

The morse code project goes live within the next 10 days.

At Elliance, we have made a tradition out of capturing the spirit of the moment, the zeitgeist. The last project where we did that was the Pittsburgh2050 project (http://www.pittsburgh2050.com). More to come soon.

Posted in digital life. Tagged with , , .

Phipps Conservatory picked by White House for the G-20 dinner

The White House has announced that it will hold an inauguration dinner at the upcoming G-20 summit in Pittsburgh at our Client, The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens.

“President Obama will host a working dinner for world leaders at the Phipps, chosen in part because of the green-friendly features of the facility that include an earth-sheltered welcome center and a Tropical Forest Conservatory described as the world’s most energy efficient.”

Pittsburgh Business Times

There is an interesting story behind this. Over a year ago, Phipps chose Elliance to build a beautiful website that will move their revenue needle with a marked increase in attendance, memberships, classes, and venue rentals. During our discovery process, we un-covered a latent desire that was being championed solely by Phipp’s visionary Executive Director, Richard Piacentini. He wants Phipps to become a national icon, and wants it to be nationally known as “The center for sustainable gardening”, not unlike how Monterey Bay Aquarium had taken a larger than life status, almost an iconic status of ‘The National Aquarium’.

On the ground, Phipps had already attained quite a few ’sustainable’ achievements already. It had built a earth-sheltered welcome center. It had built the world’s most efficient tropical forest conservatory. It had amassed information on sustainable plants. It had created a certification programs for nurseries which supported sale of sustainable plants. It had built a database of gardeners and landscapers who embodied and lived sustainable gardening practices. And more. But to get to this information on their old website, you had to have hunter instincts. The wonderful information was buried deep in the website, not even findable by Google because it was created in the form of images, not text.

In a characteristic Elliance fashion, we decided to take on the challenge by drawing the conversation out and helping craft the new Phipps 2.0 brand, which would now evolve into a more sophisticated composite brand. On the one hand, Phipps would continue to remain a sanctuary for citizens to visit, relax, and experience a sensual getaway with exotic plants from exotic lands; On the other hand, Phipps would now welcome the gardening pros and passionates into a prominent center for sustainable gardening practices, tips, communities, and more.

We agreed that the destination was a long-term journey that needs to be broken into attainable milestones. As a first step, Phipps will become ‘the center for sustainable gardening’ in Pittsburgh. Next, it will extend that platform to attain the more ambitious status of building a national reputation for ‘The Center for Sustainable Gardening’ in the US, almost an iconic status of ‘The National Garden’.

There is much more to this story, which I will tell you in future blog posts. But just to see the partial roll out of the first phase of Phipps 2.0 brand, visit their beautiful website at www.phipps.conservatory.org.

I would like to believe that the White House chose Phipps partly because of the most beautiful website we built for them, which amplifies not only its beauty, but an entire new section for ‘Sustainable Gardening’ practices, plants, nurseries, tips, and more.

Stay tuned as the Phipps 2.0 brand unfolds.

Posted in Branding. Tagged with , , .

Cool vs. Smart

I presented at a higher ed conference recently. I was intrigued by another presentation, which was all about cool. I started thinking about the anatomy of cool and communications in general. I decided to capture the repetitive patterns in the presenter’s speech. Here is the list of repetitive words I heard (some two word combinations were spoken as one words):

Kindof
Neat
Might be able to
Sortof
Freak out
Obscene
Somebody
Quick stats
Alotof
Andso
Gonna
Youknow
Getinto
Aaann

It made me think about my own vocabulary, which is biased towards smart and performance. I think clients need to know that we are both cool (right emotional brain) and smart (left logical brain).

Posted in eMarketing. Tagged with , .

Elliance named one of the Top 10 Agencies of 2008 by Interactive Media Awards.

2008-top-10-agency-winnerIn winning this award, Elliance shares spotlight with firms from London, New York and Miami.

Companies like Elliance are the real reason why President Obama has chosen Pittsburgh for the upcoming G-20 summit. When President Obama talks about “renewed industries that are creating the jobs of the future”, he is in fact referring to companies like us. Despite the recession, Elliance has been growing, hiring people and creating a global footprint.

Click here to see the list of other winners.

Posted in eMarketing. Tagged with , .

Conversation Marketing, Marketing 2.0 & PR 2.0

A copy of my presentation that I gave to non-profit and for-profit members of Business Volunteers Unlimited in Cleveland is included below.

Enjoy it.

Posted in Web Strategy, eMarketing. Tagged with , , , .

Buzz Monitoring Tools

The bad old days of expensive brand monitoring tools are finally coming to an end. Here is a listing of a few free tools that you may want to bookmark:

1. Google Blog Search

2. Nielsen blogpulse

3. Tweetdeck

4. Tweetbeep

5.Twitter Search

6. Google Alerts

7. Compete.com

Happy brand and buzz tracking!

Posted in Branding, Social Media. Tagged with , .

‘World Wide Rave’ & Linkbaits

worldwiderave Just finished this poignant book by David Meerman Scott. The fundamental premise of this book is that the you should be creating interesting and valuable content that your target audience wants to ‘rave’ about to their friends. The content could be served up in the shape of blogs, e-books, tools, contests, videos, etc. The important thing is that ‘buzz’ factor should be built into the content; that automatically excludes happy talk about your products and services.

Interestingly, a couple of years ago, we came at this very concept from a different angle as part of our Search Engine Marketing Practice. To get top rankings on search engines, a website needs to win on three clusters of factors: on-page factors, URL factors, and off-page factors - with the latter being the most important, and comprising of in-bound links from especially social media websites. Here is how we had captured this thought in an infographic.

the-power-of-link-baiting

In fact, we too created a ‘World Wide Rave’ by creating a weekly SEO infographic, which we simultaneously posted on our website and on ‘Search Engine Land’, the second most popular marketing blog in the world. As a result, we have thousands of blog links, twitter chatter, delicious shortcuts, and many top-rankings on search engines. Furthermore, we are now known as the ‘SEO Infographic Guys’ or the ‘SEO Infographic Company’ in the marketing space.

If you wish to see the entire series of our SEO Infographics, visit our SEO microsite at searchengineoptimization.elliance.com. Cheers.

Posted in Branding, SEO, Social Media, eMarketing. Tagged with , .

It Pays to Play with Steeler Crocs

My colleague, Debbie Wilson’s true story about Crocs. Enjoy

Being a first time mother, my husband and I capture every moment we can on video. We post videos on YouTube on a regular basis to share with family and friends.
My husband wears Crocs and my son, Jordan loves to play with his Daddy’s Crocs. It is quite amusing to see a small 11 month old child playing with Daddy’s size 14 huge shoes.

He puts them on his hands and claps with them. I posted the video, as usual, on YouTube.

The day after posting the video on YouTube, I received a personal message from a man who runs Social Media for Crocs, Inc.

He said he saw my video, thought it was soooo cute and asked if they could use it on the Crocs blog. http://blog.crocs.com

I was thrilled and excited and gave my permission.
I received a response back offering me a complimentary pair of Crocs.

I am so thrilled and excited that my son’s video will be on the Crocs blog and I am so impressed with the Social Media department at the speed of finding the video and the way they handled the situation. I will be a Crocs customer for life.
My husband always wore them and liked them, I will now get some for myself and my son. We will become one happy Crocs wearing family!

Well done, Crocs.

Posted in Social Media. Tagged with .

5 Hallmarks of Great Brands

If you think about it, we trust great brands for very simple reasons. They:

1. create an emotional response

2. resonate with us

3. listen to us and talk to us

4. embrace simplicity

5. pay attention to details

In a nutshell, we are willing to reach deeper into our pockets for great brands because of their humanity, relevance and simplicity.

Posted in Branding. Tagged with .

Conversation Marketing

Here is a summary of my presentation I gave yesterday at the Pittsburgh Technology Council.

1. Marketing is conversations.

2. The consumers have shifted from tv/print to web and are now increasingly mobile. Marketers better move too, if they want to connect with their audience.

3. Consumer psyche has changed. They expect conversations. They reject authority. They want transparency. They love stories. They are both content consumers and content producers.

4. Great websites are conversation starters. Conversations begin by great storytelling at the site blogs+communities, and buzzworthy linkbaits.

5. Emarketing tools carry the conversation starters outside the organization. Email marketing, event marketing and sweepstakes are examples of these.

6. Social Media sites are conversation hubs.

7. PR2.0 aims at influencing conversations.

8. Search Engines are conversation finders.

9. A whole breed of conversation listening tools have emerged, such as Google Alerts, Blog Pulse, Tweetdeck, Ennect Survey, and the major search engines.

I wrapped the presentationn with a couple of real world case studies. If you want a copy of my presentation, let me know.

Posted in eMarketing. Tagged with .