Toluu : Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog

Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog

New media and marketing insights from Greg Verdino. Greg is crayon's chief strategy officer.

Today is the first day of CES, but yesterday was a solid twenty four hours of travel, check-in, prep work and Panasonic. I've captured it all with my Lumix G1 (courtesy of Panasonic) and the photos are on Flickr.

For our first official task, Jaffe and I joined two of our guest content creators -- Chris Brogan and Steve Garfield -- at the Panasonic press conference, where our client talked about their latest initiatives and products.

I'll blog about some of their shinier objects over the next couple of days, as I get a chance to take a closer look at them in the booth. But if the press conference presentations are any indicator, the folks at Panasonic have a lot of really cool stuff hitting the market in the next year or two. (Yeah yeah yeah - I know Panasonic's a crayon client so what else would I say? But really, this stuff looks very cool.)

Here's a taste... Steve G. captured the unveiling of Panasonic's thinnest Viera HDTV flat screen. How thin is it? One third of an inch. That's about as thin as iPhone or (as you'll see in the video) Jaffe's index finger.

Wanna party at CES?January 6

If you plan to be at CES this week, I hope you'll join me at a Panasonic sponsored get together on Thursday night. It all goes down from 6:30pm to 8:00pm in the Panasonic booth (Las Vegas Convention Center Central Hall Booth #9405.) We're talking free drinks and the chance to rub elbows with more social media geeks than you can shake an HD camcorder at.

We're looking to pack the booth so jump on in and spread the word.

You can find the details, see who is planning to attend and RSVP at Upcoming.

See you there.

CES, here I come...January 6

I'm eyeballs deep in last minute prep for my trip to CES, courtesy of crayon client Panasonic. As I wrote a couple of weeks back, we're bringing a handful of social media content creators to Vegas, where they'll participate in a variety of Panasonic activities, play with some nice new gear and document it all for their audiences.

For my part, I'll be blogging, tweeting, snapping pictures and shooting video -- and sharing it all with you. If you're interested in keeping tabs on me, hearing my perspectives and seeing what I see in Las Vegas, here's all you need to do:

Read this blog. I will publish at least a few posts while I am at CES.

Follow me on Twitter. I plan to tweet from the show floor. You can also track my CES-related tweets through Twitter Search.

Keep an eye on my Flickr CES set.

Watch my

O tidings of comfort and... wait... what?December 24 2008

The holidays are upon us once again. (How's that for a big ol' honkin' statement of the obvious?)

Considering that the next couple of weeks will be a blur of holidays, time with my daughter and a bit of travel -- not to mention the fact that I have a crushing amount of work to complete between now and my trip to CES -- I figure my blogging schedule will be a bit sporadic between now and the end of the year.

I hope that everyone has the opportunity to reflect on the year that was, plan for the year ahead and spend a bit of time with the important people in your lives.

For the rest of you, I offer up a smorgasbord of holiday weirdness post-YouTube style. Please feel free to while away your holiday time off watching a few weird animated shorts. This ain't your daddy's "A Year Without a Santa Clause."

[Feed and email readers: you know the drill. Be sure to click through to the blog to watch the embedded clips.]

The first two have been highlighted by a brand spankin' new site called eGuiders that went into public beta yesterday and aims to curate the best-of-the-best web video content so you don't have to slog through millions of pieces of web junk to find the few worth watching. (Disclosure: I've been serving as an unofficial advisor to eGuiders. Check 'em out.)

Snowy the Frostman puts a twisted spin on the animated holiday classic.

Next up: thanks to the Firehouse agency in Texas we have a new holiday classic based on an old world tradition - the Christmas Pickle. (Tip o' the Santa hat to Chris Wilson.)

And finally -- how can a guy who throws the devil horns every chance he gets resist a mash-up that combines A Charlie Brown Christmas with some killer metal. Have a head banging Christmas and a rocking New Year.

HubSpot's state of the twittersphere: just ducky!December 23 2008

Because just understanding what's going on in the blogosphere doesn't tell the whole social media story anymore, HubSpot released its first State of the Twittersphere report today.

Geeks rejoiced...

Based on data gathered through the Twitter Grader service, HubSpot looked at the behaviors and habits of roughly 600,000 users to draw some baseline conclusions about how Twitter is evolving as a social platform and (more importantly) community of people.

HubSpot's State of the Twittersphere portrays a growing platform that is attaining some scale -- HubSpot reports that the Twitter community numbers between 4 million and 5 million members (based on public estimates) and grows by as many as 10,000 new accounts each day. Yet, HubSpot also found that -- perhaps because of this rapid growth