Cielo Lutino

Cielo Lutino is a writer and producer for Econsultancy and other organizations. Her writing has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Portland Monthly, Artcards, and the L and Brooklyn magazines, among other publications. She has literary nonfiction forthcoming from Cold Mountain Review and was recently awarded writing residencies from Mustarinda and Signal Fire. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

How much longer will events be the most effective demand channel?

Almost half (47%) of trade-show visitors go with the express plan of buying within 12 months of an event, and fully 81% of attendees can make the final call or recommend on purchases.

So why aren’t marketers more aggressive in the lead up to events?

by Cielo Lutino 20 May 2013 16:58pm 0 comments

Why events are the last bastion of integrated marketing

We can tell the last ten items a consumer bought on our site and we can tell the open rate of our email marketing campaigns, but few of us can say how long any one visitor at our event booth spent there and what they picked up.

The swag, a brochure, your business card, your hot intern’s telephone number, which was it?

This not-knowing is weird, says Liz Miller, overseer of daily operations at the CMO Council (CMOC), a global affinity network of top brand marketers. “Since when did a marketer get shy?” she asked recently.

by Cielo Lutino 15 May 2013 13:51pm 2 comments

How the other half markets: three lessons for luxury retailers in 2013

The posh set may still lord their smart handbags, pricey silks, and Ibiza getaways over the masses in the offline world, but in digital it’s a different story.

Online, luxury retailers struggle to keep up with the Kmarts and J.Crews of the world. In fact, according to a recent study by L2, one in five luxury brands still lack ecommerce capability, and 30 percent of them have yet to incorporate basic site search.

by Cielo Lutino 08 February 2013 15:20pm 0 comments

Five tips for decoding the retail riddle

Representatives from Abercrombie & Fitch, Saks, and Maxymizer, a multivariate testing, personalization, and optimization firm, gathered last week at Econsultancy’s JUMP event in New York to discuss how retail can solve the riddles posed by today’s technological advances and changing consumer habits.

As retailers try to connect the shopping experience over multiple channels, this was a perfect discussion for all those looking to create a better retail journey for their customers.

by Cielo Lutino 06 February 2013 15:20pm 0 comments

How to build a social brand: The Nokia case study

How quickly fortunes change. Just eight years ago Nokia was the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer. Today it’s so far behind the competition that it trails beleaguered Blackberry in shipments to retailers.

A “challenger brand” is what Tejal Patel, global head of social commerce and performance for Nokia, now calls the company.

by Cielo Lutino 04 February 2013 16:35pm 3 comments

Meet Andy Hobsbawm, the man making coffee mugs smarter than you

Son of the late and venerable historian Eric Hobsbawm, Andy Hobsbawm may make history, not write it. That’s because he, along with technologist and serial entrepreneur Niall Murphy, as well as computer scientists Dom Guinard and Vlad Trifa, are making great strides with EVRYTHNG, a software company bent on connecting objects to the Internet — making them “smart,” as it were.

Powered by the EVRYTHNG Engine, the technology makes real the “Internet of Things,” a concept first named in 1999. In that schema, objects are given virtual identities (perhaps through RFID tags, maybe through a barcode or QR code) and connected in a Web-like structure.

by Cielo Lutino 28 January 2013 17:43pm 0 comments

Sandwiches, soda, and sports climb the Social Business Index

As if anticipating items we'll find on coffee tables in living rooms across the country this Super Bowl Sunday, last week's Social Business Index featured climbs from sandwich, soda, and sports brands: Subway, Dr. Pepper, and the NHL.

The index, produced by The Dachis Group, offers a real-time performance ranking of 30,000+ multinationals in social. Each week we take a look at the top twenty listings and call out those that made moves worth noting.

by Cielo Lutino 28 January 2013 16:04pm 0 comments

How community managers can leverage what they've built: free report for #CMAD

By now you've probably heard that it's Community Manager Appreciation Day, but did you forget to get them something? We understand. You're probably still in the sugar trough from Chocolate Cake Day on January 27.

So now that you're thinking about it, doesn’t it make sense to reward that patient colleague who responds to the company’s Twitter devotees, comes up with sweetly snarky posts that attract thousand of “Likes,” and gently mollifies cranky YouTube commenters...and does the hard work of analytics around social?

We honor the social media mavens among us by offering Leveraging the Community, the last in a four-part series we call Online Communities. It’s free, it’s short, and it’s good — the perfect gift for your favorite social media expert.

by Cielo Lutino 28 January 2013 16:53pm 3 comments

The Littles vs. The Bigs: the “more level” playing field of mobile apps

“The field isn’t level, but it’s more level than other playing fields,” said Erin Rackelman, CMO and cofounder of Portland-based Night & Day Studios, last week.

She was talking about the app marketplace, which offers more than 700,000 products in the Apple store alone and where previously unheard-of companies like Zynga and PopCap have bested more established brands with their sales volume.

Part of their success can be attributed to the newness of the mobile market, less than a decade old and forced to address constant technological change in that time.

by Cielo Lutino 24 January 2013 18:15pm 2 comments

Alcohol and autos drive to the top of the Social Business Index

Last week brands in the spirits and auto industries moved up in The Dachis Group's Social Business Index, a real-time ranking of 30,000+ multinationals' performance in social.

We take a look at the top twenty listings and focus on those brands that performed especially well: Chrysler, Carlsberg, and Diageo, fine purveyor of libations.

by Cielo Lutino 23 January 2013 17:16pm 2 comments