PITTSBURGH — As the Steelers try to clinch their sixth Super Bowl victory this weekend, Pittsburgh officials are using the invaluable exposure and free advertising that comes with the game to market their city as the place to be.

Using savvy marketing — including e-mails encouraging people to "Pass It On" — and the media frenzy surrounding Super Bowl XLIII, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development is capitalizing on the Steelers' success to tell people Pittsburgh is a livable city with diverse job opportunities and a low cost of living.

For the Allegheny Conference, a Chamber of Commerce-type organization responsible for helping attract new businesses and tourists to the Pittsburgh area, the Steelers are not only its hometown football team, but also in any given year one of its best marketing tools as a well-known brand name.

Now, with the Steelers going to the Super Bowl for the second time this decade, the conference is putting its top people front and center on any national TV station willing to listen. Most recently, Chief Executive Mike Langley appeared on Fox Business News, touting the city as a good spot to hide from the recession.

At the same time, he sent out more than 3,000 e-mails with the headline "pass it on" over the black-and-gold war-painted face of an ardent Steelers fan telling people there are more than 20,000 job openings in the Pittsburgh area.

And the conference set up a new Pittsburgh fan page on Facebook, all part of an effort to let people know the city is no longer the financially battered, smoky steel town of yesteryear.

"It's a message of check Pittsburgh out. We're a champion city, our city is in the Super Bowl for the seventh time; we plan on winning it for the sixth time this weekend," Langley said.

"It's a great place to live, work and raise a family, and go Steelers," he added.

Although Langley has no real way of tracking how many people pass on his e-mail, Bill Flanagan, the group's executive vice president, said proof the marketing tactic worked will be if people from the conference receive the note from people passing it along to them, unaware it originated with them.

In the meantime, Langley and Flanagan are rattling off Pittsburgh's attributes: Named the most livable city in 2007, when Rand McNally released the 25th anniversary edition of the "Places Rated Almanac"; recently noted by several business magazines as one of the best places to ride out the recession; one of Forbes' top 10 places for job growth in 2009; and ranked this month by Moody's Investors Service as having the top commercial real estate market in a major metropolitan area.

Oded Koenigsberg, a marketing professor at Columbia University in New York, said he is not sure the e-mail campaign will be effective, simply because many will get deleted before being read. But if a game broadcaster rattles off during the game that Pittsburgh has job openings, it could be a push for the city — especially during the recession.