Social Media at Intel: Humor Included

Thanks to some Gia Lyons matchmaking, I spoke with Jeff Moriarty, Social Media Community Manager at at Intel. We discussed their social media program, along with a variety of other things, including social media job titles and Intel’s new Intel Insider Program. Jeff has created some new titles for us (e.g., “Social Media Ninja” and “Social Media Sherpa.”) He’s posting on that soon.

The culture at Intel is open to social media, and the higher ups have a sense of humor (Jeff’s well-received parody “Lord of the Re-Org” featured the CEO and other execs in starring roles.) There is a robust internal community, and internal bloggers who discuss all kinds of topics, not necessarily work related. They even have “internal blog ambassadors” to monitor them and keep an eye out for posts around politics and religion — flame wars have already been waged over those topics. Jeff teaches his co-workers by helping them start an internal blog so they can play with it first hand. Or he’ll brainstorm with a group that might want to experiment with social media, but may be better served by a forum or wiki.

But, similar to Cisco, social media at Intel didn’t just blossom overnight. Jeff told me how “Intelpedia” was started on an employee’s desktop, and it grew organically until IT had to support it.

And apparently, I am not the only soul to suffer from marketing folks who salivate at the idea of creating viral videos. Jeff keenly observed:

Saying “let’s make a viral video” is like saying “Hey guys, let’s plan to be spontaneous next Tuesday at 2 pm.

Finally, we decided it would be awesome to have a community of all the Social Media types from Enterprise Companies where they can share best practices. Jeremiah Owyang’s List of Social Media folks at Large Corporations is a good place to get started. In the meantime, I’ll keep sharing my conversations with the Enterprise Social Media peeps I meet. So far I have also chatted with friends from Cisco and SAP, and I try to organize a little “Social Media Roundtable” with friends from the New York Times, AAA, Logitech and Disney.

Conversations with Steve Mann from SAP (social media strategist extraordinaire) merit their own post. Stay tuned…