One of the favorite parts of my job at Intel is to learn from other industry leaders who are doing this social media stuff. And it’s fascinating what you learn when you pull back the layers behind a company’s external efforts. For example, this week I had the pleasure of meeting with Sean McDonald, Director of Communities & Conversation at Dell, to learn how they have evolved their social media efforts over the last year and a half or so. What I learned was truly eye-opening, and something I aspire to emulate as I attempt to build a similar program at Intel.

Unlike Intel and many other companies, Dell didn’t embark on their social media efforts in an attempt to “reach new audiences” through social marketing practices. On the contrary, Dells’ program was built around their customers and the desire to provide them posivite experiences with their brand that they would evangelize. This move is apparent in the fact that their social media team is built from customer support and service representatives, as opposed to marketing professionals or agency staff.

With a customer centric strategy companies have nearly limitless opportunities to create brand acvocates and–as Rohit Bhargava calls them in his groundbreaking book Personality Not Included–accidental spokespeople. These are folks who have such brand affinity and loyalty to a brand that they socialize this affinity and attempt to at least communicate their positive sentiment toward your brand, if not evangelize to create other brand loyalists out of folks in their social networks. Whew! What a mouthful! What I basically mean is that these customers tell their peeps how much they love your brand/product/service in hopes that their friends will like it too. Neato, right?

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The event was Digital IQ training (mandatory training for all marketers at Intel). The topic was web analytics.  The speaker was Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, which I just ordered from Amazon. Rohit Bhargava also presented at the training session.

Despite his harsh, yet fair criticism of Intel.com, the material presented by Kaushik was inspiring; and his passion about the subject rubbed off on most of us in attendance. Sometimes, it’s good to hear others’ points of view; especially when they are from the outside looking on. I am curious if our web team will address some of his concerns.

I am no analytics guru and quite honestly, hate numbers and percentages; but the way he presented his perspectives was very easy to follow.  One thing that Kaushik didn’t cover was web analytics is it relates to social media.  The questions that usually come up here at Intel are: Keep reading »

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The Core i7 is launching tomorrow; and I will be at the launch event blogging and Twittering for most of the late afternoon. The Core i7 is the first Intel family to be released using the Intel Nehalem micro architecture and is the successor to the Intel Core 2 processors. Here are a couple of honest reviews here and here if you are geek.

Both projects were in support of the Core i7 launch, from a pure social media perspective. My role, why mimimal in comparison to others, was to ensure that each project considered the behaviors outlined in Social Technographic Ladder of Participation (earlier this year, Forrester conducted a study that mapped Intel segments to each profile); and also to identify integration points on what we were doing on the intel.com domain in support of the launch.

Mass Animation

A Facebook application that brings together animators from around the world to work collaboratively in the creation of a professional 3-D quality animated film, titled “Live Music”.

Basically, the way it works is that animators can choose to download different scenes “or shots” that are categorized as being easy, medium or hard. Then, they have to download Maya software, animate their shots, upload back to the application where the community can vote.

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