If you’re in Salamanca throughout the month of May, stop by the chamber of commerce! Mellon & Co. is the featured member for May, and will be on display in the chamber’s office. We will be promoting our IllustrateYourStory.com business builder web sites, along with our extensive tech services. Specials will be available for chamber members. Contact us at 716-372-5996 for more information.

The New York Concrete Promotion Council is “Innovative to the Last Drop.” That’s the message boasting its mission on its new corporate identity piece, created to help complete their campaign appealing to contractors and other stakeholders in using ready mix concrete. After several months of planning and design, Mellon & Co. has completed a branded folder design for the New York State Concrete Promotion Council (NYCPC). Lisa Stephen, president of the council, worked closely with Mellon & Co.’s art and marketing department to produce a new distribution folder to promote the use of ready mix concrete throughout New York State.

The council will use the promotional pieces to distribute information at seminars and home shows, as well as spreading the word to architects, engineers, home builders, developers, and home owners.

Mellon & Co. Celebrates Grand Opening of New Olean location with Remote Broadcast and New Service

Mellon & Co. invites you to celebrate the Grand Opening of its new location at 2438 Constitution Avenue in Olean from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, April 17.

We will be hosting a remote radio broadcast with The Mix 101.5 and offering a free computer diagnostic to anyone who drops off their computer during the broadcast. The diagnostic includes virus & spyware removal, cleaning and hardware diagnostic. That’s a $25 savings. So if your computer has been acting up, Thursday’s the day to bring it in!

We’ll also be giving away gift certificates for up to $100 off of computer service, offering some great deals on Dell & Lenovo computers, we’ll officially launch our newest service, Illustrate Your Story, and we’ll be selling hot dogs to benefit the Olean YMCA.

Mellon & Co. launched a new web site for the Cattaraugus County Arts Council last week. After working on the Routes to Art site, the priority became sprucing up the organization’s main site.

The layout, designed by the Arts Council’s executive director, was applied and programmed by Mellon & Co. Mellon EditPro, an intuitive content management system was applied to the site, along with a database to allow for members and community artists to upload their work for display on the site.

Visit www.myartscouncil.net to see the project… and if you’re an artist, sign up for your free account!

We are happy to announce that Kim Trimboli, a past intern from Saint Bonaventure University, has been hired as a marketing assistant.

Kim fulfilled a portion of her graduation requirements by interning with us during her sophomore year. Throughout her tenure as an undergraduate student, Kim majored in Journalism & Mass Communication and studied at Oxford University. She participated in the American Advertising Federation’s national collegiate competition, and was on the national dean’s list, as well as St. Bonaventure’s dean’s list for six consecutive semesters.

Upon graduating, we hired Kim to assist the marketing department with research, writing, and other routine communication functions. In addition to this role, she is also working at the Cattaraugus County SPCA, where she has been active in gaining national attention in the Zoo Too competition to win a $1,000,000 shelter makeover. Next semester, Kim will enter Saint Bonaventure University’s master’s degree program in integrated marketing communications. Being the same program completed by the marketing principles, Heidi Ofinowicz and Kate Wolcott, it is an ideal fit for the company

We are excited to have Kim on board once again, and look forward to having yet another St. Bonaventure alumna on staff!

Top Ten Reasons:

• To clarify your goals and objectives: Think of your plan as your roadmap; you know where you want to go, but you need a route to get there. The plan is your route.

• To clarify the relationships between audiences, messages, channels, activities and materials: Going through the communications planning process will help you identify who you need to reach, tell them what you want them to know, and how you will reach them. You will find that each of your audiences has unique characteristics, needs, and motivations. Through planning, you will discover the most effective ways to communicate with them.

• To identify and implement a variety of communications activities: There are many different ways to spread your message. This will help you to settle on which activities you will engage in so that you aren’t continuously pulled in different directions.

• To clarify staff members’, stakeholders’ and others’ roles in the process: People need to know what they will be contributing to the organization and what they are responsible for. A plan will help manage people and their responsibilities.

• To develop creativity and camaraderie among your team: Involving many people in the planning process will bring in different perspectives and diversity of thought. Bring in staff, stakeholders, constituents, interns, and junior staff members.

• To help your staff members and stakeholders get on the “same page.”: A well articulated plan will help people get on the same page and articulate a consistent message.

• To include stakeholder input in the communications process: These people are important to your organization, and this will show them how much you do value their input.

• To ensure that you’re reaching out to your stakeholders and constituencies effectively: This is an extension of the previous point: when you go through the process and identify strategies to reach stakeholders from the start, you will communicate with them more effectively. This will also create a scenario in which they’re willing to give you honest feedback so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

• To allow everyone on your team to have a stake in your success: Getting involved in the process and integrating participants’ opinions brings a sense of ownership.

• To gauge your plan’s success and areas in need of strengthening: Organizations will often do a mid-course review to determine strengths, weaknesses, and obstacles and then create and implement new approaches. You can develop a unique, tailored evaluation strategy that will gather the information you need to improve your plan.

Source: W.K. Kellogg Foundation

April 4, 2008

Mellon & Co. has launched a new service at IllustrateYourStory.com tailored to small businesses and others looking to get started on the Web with an affordable solution.

IllustrateYourStory.com offers business builder Web sites that come with three to five prebuilt pages in one of several design themes. Essential Web design elements are placed in fixed locations to keep the sites affordable, but each is fully customized to the brand of the business or organization they promote with a custom-designed top banner.

“We realize that not every business needs an elaborate, flashy Web site,” said Heidi Ofinowicz, director of marketing at Mellon & Co. “IllustrateYourStory.com is a service that allows even the smallest organization or business to take advantage of the unlimited marketing potential of the internet with a professional website that can grow with them.”

Each Illustrate Your Story Web site, developed with the end-user in mind, is built with the Mellon EditPro Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a tool designed to allow for the creation, modification, organization and removal of information from a Web site.

The Mellon EditPro CMS was custom developed by Mellon & Co. to allow clients to easily make changes and edits to their websites. Changing around text and images is as easy as a click of the mouse. A browser-based application, Mellon EditPro allows Web site owners to make changes from any computer with an internet connection. No software downloads or purchases are required.

“We use the Mellon EditPro as the foundation of our websites,” said Jeff Mellon, owner of Mellon & Co. “It not only allows our clients to easily maintain their own Web sites, but also allows for future growth. Creating new pages, adding features such as photo galleries and flash animation, even e-commerce, are all possible on a site built with our CMS.”

IllustrateYourStory.com Web sites come with a number of available upgrades, including email contact forms, two varieties of photo galleries, Google directions and a catalog option.

They also come with basic search engine optimization (SEO), which is one of the most important elements of web marketing, according to Mellon & Co. SEO involves a number of different tactics with the main goal of increasing ranking on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.

“SEO is a vital element in web marketing success. Every web site we develop has a marketing focus. We don’t develop a site without at least basic SEO, and the IllustrateYourStory.com Web sites are no exception,” said Ofinowicz.

To learn more or purchase an Illustrate Your Story web site, visit IllustrateYourStory.com.