In July, we helped Xeko launch an interactive Web community, offering a robust interactive experience to enhance the real-life card game enjoyed by thousands of kids.

Xeko, an eco-adventure entertainment platform developed by Matter Group, provides an incredible tool for kids to have fun and learn about science and conservation issues. Through its four mission sets, which include Madagascar, China, Indonesia and Costa Rica, Xeko’s inventive game takes kids through a journey of beautiful wilderness and wild animals, teaching the importance of sustainability, conservation and biodiversity.

We developed Xeko’s new interactive Web community, greatly enhancing the game’s experience by extending it well beyond the box and cards sets, allowing kids to connect with peers from all over the world, take and create quizzes and accumulate points.

“Xeko is an incredible resource for educating children, and we’re proud to help Matter Group expand the game’s reach,” says associate creative director Carrie Byrne. “This project included everything that we’re passionate about at Worktank: creativity, innovation and connecting people through stories and technology.”

The launch is part of our broader effort to expand into casual gaming, where we see a huge opportunity. From desktops to laptops to mobile, casual gaming is exploding. Not as time-consuming or complex as many massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), casual gaming appeals more to consumers who have a little time to kill while waiting for their next appointment or chore to begin.

Casual gaming represents a huge market of fun and easy to learn video games that can be played across mobile, PC, Mac and console platforms. Companies such as BigFish Games and PopCap Games cater to this audience, offering subscriptions or downloads allowing consumers to easily access simple yet engrossing games that they can play in short bursts.

“Beyond the hardcore gamers, there’s a huge audience out there that wants to play games but don’t want to spend their entire day doing it,” said Amy Tucker, CEO and inventor of Xeko. “Casual gaming is a growing market, and we believe that Worktank is well-positioned to help the industry connect with consumers.”

And with our experience in consumer product launches, online media consumption and the recent Xeko project, we bring a unique set of skills to the casual gaming industry. We have a deep background in crafting online experiences, including UX capability, video production and social media, and we’re an expert at bringing consumer brands to the market.

“With our experience and commitment to casual gaming, we’re a great partner to this industry,” says CEO Melinda Partin. “This market will be a key focus of growth this year.”

Although Carrie Byrne only recently moved to Seattle, our associate creative director is fitting right into the Pacific Northwest—she’s an avid snowboarder and mountaineer—and making a significant impact on the level of service Worktank provides our clients.

Carrie’s background—from her MFA in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design to her work researching human-computer interaction—allows her to bring a unique approach to her client work that combines both left- and right-brain thinking. She’s got a knack for combining her functional design experience with a depth of knowledge and passion for the purely visual.

“The left brain part of me is analytical—it’s the part that’s extremely process-driven and is constantly asking, ‘What motivates human behavior?’” says Carrie. “The right brain side allows me to really visualize a brand’s essence and create a dynamic experience that both compels and engages.”

During her nearly 15-year career, Carrie has delivered multi-faceted campaigns for some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including BP, FedEx, Mc Donald’s, Microsoft and more.

Most recently, Carrie has leveraged her unique skill set to help create an interactive Web community and online game system for Xeko, an award-winning trading card game that teaches kids about endangered animals, ecology and conservation. She was responsible for the project’s art direction from top to bottom, and her expertise was instrumental in helping Xeko recreate the game’s rich look and feel online.

“Carrie brings tremendous experience and talent to Worktank,” says CEO Melinda Partin. “Her focus on processes and best practices enables her to create campaigns that are built for success from the very beginning. She’s an extremely valuable asset to our team.”

Outside of Worktank, Carrie balances being a new mom with her love for adventure sports, and hopes to try her hand at kite-boarding in the near future.

Earlier this year, Vertafore launched an effort to consolidate its disparate products and services under one brand, better aligning the businesses to meet its customers’ needs and more effectively communicating to the market all the solutions Vertafore offers.

Today, Vertafore represents the only software and services provider to the insurance industry that offers nearly every solution that an insurance business would need. Because many of its businesses have strong brands and reputations on their own, Vertafore struggled to communicate this broader message.

To help change its brand, the Bothell, WA, company reorganized to unify its products and services under the Vertafore identity. The initial roll-out effort included extensive internal education and branding campaign, as well as a press release to announce the change externally.

Yet, Vertafore hadn’t supported its new brand with a large ad campaign. To complete its brand transformation, Vertafore turned to us to help drive its message home in the market.

We developed three concepts, including a testimonial-based campaign to allow Vertafore’s customers to share insight into working with a unified Vertafore. This story featured customers’ personal experiences and praise of Vertafore’s services.

The concept, called “I Heart Vertafore,” takes customer testimonials to a new level. Our goal was to strongly reinforce Vertafore as one entity—the one company that can service all the needs of its customers. And what better way to convey this message than through Vertafore’s customers.

“We’re proud of our work to help Vertafore enhance its reputation in the market as the only player that can offer its customers all the solutions they need under one roof,” says Account Manager Julie Greenberg. “Through ‘I Heart Vertafore,’ we’re strongly positioning the company as the leader in providing solutions to the insurance industry.”

The campaign’s ads expand awareness of the Vertafore’s new unified structure and reinforce the value proposition and high-level benefits of the company’s new model, as well as reassure current customers that they will continue to receive the same level of service and satisfaction experienced with the company’s sub-brands.

The campaign, which includes one corporate ad about Vertafore and four product ads, focuses on impassioned customer testimonials for Vertafore and includes stories about how adopting and implementing its products have improved their businesses. The ads include photos of customers clutching or embracing laptops, representing the sentimental relationship between user and product.

“We’re thrilled with the ‘I Heart Vertafore’ concept,” said Linda Caudle, director of corporate marketing with Vertafore. “It’s the perfect way to convey the message that we want the market to hear: Vertafore provides a superior suite of solutions to the insurance industry to meet all of our customers’ needs. No one else can say or do that.”

It’s official: the new xeko.com site is live, thanks to design and development by Worktank!

To bring xeko.com to life, we partnered with the Xeko team to develop and launch an interactive Web community and online game system. This site functions as an extension of Xeko’s award-winning animal trading card game that teaches kids about endangered species, ecology, and conservation.

Through this new interactive platform, Xeko “agents” ages 8 to 12 now have a safe and robust online play space and community. Here, they can create their own unique interactive experience, whether it’s creating challenges and activities to share with the greater Xeko community, voting on their favorite activities, cracking codes, or taking “Quizzles” to test their eco-knowledge and rack up points and badges as rewards.

We collaborated with Xeko during the information architecture and visual design process to ensure that the site was an organic part of the larger Xeko universe, and we also explored ways to create new touch points to further immerse Xeko players in the world of the game.

Read the full press release here for all the details, or visit http://www.xeko.com to experience the magic firsthand.

Recently, I was asked to contribute a week’s worth of guest blog entries to www.fastcompany.com. Topics included viral campaign strategies, customer retention in touch economic times, corporate social responsibility, incorporating data tools into marketing campaigns, and connecting with your audience through brand storytelling. You can read them all here: http://www.fastcompany.com/tag/melinda-partin.

At Worktank, we’re proud of our talent and diversity and believe it better equips us to serve our clients. As it turns out, we’re not alone in thinking our diversity makes us stronger. DiversityBusiness.com, the nation’s leading multicultural business website, recently recognized Worktank in its ninth annual ranking. Worktank was ranked number 10 of the top 100 women-owned businesses. In a ranking of Washington state businesses, Worktank was ranked 17th of the top 50 diversity-owned businesses.

These rankings are exciting and reinforce what our clients and employees already know: We are proud of our talented, diverse team and the great work they do for our clients.

With more than 46,000 members, DiversityBusiness is the largest organization of diversity owned businesses throughout the United States that provide goods and services to Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies and colleges and universities. Winners of top business rankings are selected from industries including the technology, manufacturing, food service and professional services.

DiversityBusiness.com presented the awards at a special awards ceremony at the Ninth Annual Multicultural Business Conference, which took place April 29 - May 1, 2009 at Disney’s Contemporary resort in Orlando, Fla.

For more information, visit DiversityBusiness’s list of top companies.

Today, everyone wants to drive more qualified leads into the sales funnel, boost sales conversion and retain their best customers forever. The challenge is that competitive pressure, advertising saturation, and shrinking budgets are making it harder for you to do the job.

Part of the problem is reaching customers at the right time. Organic and paid search, contextual advertising, and social marketing provide new ways to efficiently connect with your customers when they are looking for what you sell. That’s the easy part.

The more important part is delivering the right message at the critical moment. So, what’s the answer? Precisely aligning your message, or brand story, to your audience’s expectations and desires.

The concept is simple… but it’s in the execution where most marketers fail. The answer can be found in a simple statement: “Know your customer and know yourself.”

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The staff at Worktank will be rallying the community later this week to overcome our challenges and proactively “Embrace the Lemon.” This innovative campaign seeks to leverage the abundance of lemons in the public psyche to “make lemonade” on an unprecedented scale, creating a community of optimism to turn things around and drive positive change.

“I think we speak for most people when we say that we’re tired of all the lemons and the negativity,” said Melinda Partin, CEO of Worktank. “What we all need is a little optimism and positive change. It’s time to turn the page, take action, and embrace the lemon.”

Through this community outreach effort, Worktank has developed an ongoing, multifaceted awareness and community-building campaign to provide promising lemonade-makers with a forum to share stories, propagate pragmatic optimism, and make a promise to action.

The campaign includes an integrated social media and marketing campaign that will leverage street teams and traditional marketing to spread the word; branded collateral, such as T-shirts, bags, lemons and stickers; and a website, www.EmbracetheLemon.com, where people can share their ideas and personal experiences on how to make lemonade from the daily deluge of lemons.

“With everyday life constantly handing us new lemons, we all have to make a choice: sit around and moan about our problems, or work together to make things better,” said Corey Pilkington, Account Supervisor with Worktank. “Through ‘Embrace the Lemon,’ we’re doing our small part to inspire the revolution to free us all from negativity.”

Embrace the Lemon will kick off on Friday, May 15. On Friday, Embrace the Lemon street teams will be available in the metro bus tunnels starting at King Street Station from 7:00 a.m. to10:00 a.m., at Westlake Center and Pike Place Market from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and outside Safeco Field -prior to the Mariner’s game from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Street teams will offer opportunities to share lemons-to-lemonade stories and learn more about getting involved with Embrace the Lemon.

To join the community, share your ideas on how to make lemonade out of the lemons you’ve been given, or just to find some inspiration, visit www.EmbracetheLemon.com.

While Worktank is one big, happy family, we also have our divisions, and one of those divisions is focused on online event services.

Over the last eight years, this “quiet” division of Worktank has produced close to 13,000 events, building a reputation for delivering strong and measurable results for clients. From product launches to internal corporate announcements to virtual training seminars, our team provides a broad range of event production services to help clients with their communication needs. As business strategist Toby Holmes will tell you, “Worktank’s specialty is helping clients tell their stories—and events are just another channel through which we can help tell them well.”

Though online event services represent a very competitive market, our experience in video production and webcasting gives us a huge advantage. Just ask Ryan Olsen, our director of Online Event Services: “We have the ability to bring our video, interactive design, and webcast experience to our online event service offerings, which few of our competitors can.”

And with businesses searching for ever more ways to cut costs, our Online Event Services team is turning economic lemons into lemonade by helping clients reduce costs while still achieving their desired results. If you want to learn more about this powerhouse group, stop on by their brand-new website, worktankevents.com.

Systems engineering and visual art sound like divergent paths. But not for David Sherwin, who is Senior Art Director, UX Strategy at Worktank.

User experience design is a critical component of any successful online endeavor, especially in today’s increasingly complex marketing landscape. At Worktank, David focuses on interactive projects—the more complex the better—helping clients tell their stories and reach key audiences through highly experiential websites.

“Well over a decade ago, I’d studied systems engineering, but I was always the guy in the back of the room with my nose in Raygun Magazine or Paul Rand’s A Designer’s Art,” David said of his foundation in interaction design.

“I inevitably chose design over engineering. But over the years, working as a designer and art director at various creative agencies, I’d been quietly practicing UX until the discipline began to mature more fully. But it wasn’t until I came to Worktank and worked with the talented people here that everything clicked.”

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