Aug 01 07
Going Inside of Intel
Last week we were joined by two gentlemen from chip maker, Intel Co. Ken Kaplan and Bryan Rhoads have played a huge role in the company’s use of social media in recent years. Using what we refer to as a communication system, they’re forging new paths for enterprise communications and helping Intel to continue its history of innovation and leadership. (Total Running Time 14:30)
Full transcript after the jump
Renn Vara: On this edition of More Than Talk, we are joined by two gentlemen from chip giant Intel. Ken Kaplan is the Broadcast and New Media Manager for Global Communications and Bryan Rhoads is a member of Intel’s Web Strategy Team. Bryan, let us start with you on this. What are you currently doing in Intel? What’s unique going on regarding social media?
Bryan Rhoads: Right now I am primarily focused on our external blog at blogs.intel.com, but essentially a lot of my role is to get out of the way. We built this platform solely to provide a stage to our subject matter experts. So we have several multi-author blogs talking about various aspects of technology. And whether they are senior engineers or C-level executives, they now have a stage to communicate.
Renn Vara: How many bloggers do you have?
Bryan Rhoads: Right now we have got seven or eight blogs on the site and each blog has five to six bloggers from around the world, different walks of Intel. So it is pretty interesting.
Renn Vara: Was it difficult to get all those people to agree to do this? Or did they do some self-selection?
Bryan Rhoads: I think initially it was a little bit difficult to find the right voices. We started with IT and we have a fairly sophisticated internal IT group that specializes in walking the walk and talking the talk of IT. It is called “IT at Intel.” And those guys have been natural. They were kind of our pilot blogs that launched last October and we’ve simply just built off their success and now we roll out various flavors of blogs today.
Renn Vara: Interesting. Hey Ken, let me have you jump in this too. From the standpoint of Global Communications at Intel, what is your role in this? How do you support these blogs?
Ken Kaplan: I come from the broadcast side. What we used to do is we would go and look around for product announcements or something new that was happening inside the company. And we think, how can we provide some video or some content to the broadcasters who might be interested in doing a story?
And I think with podcasting, it started to change where we would go in and talk to the people who actually are working on this stuff and tell a story, as opposed to just getting snippet v-roll or trying to do a video news release. We started capturing stories from the people who are working on this stuff.
You would get their passion. You would get their quirks or the challenges that they overcame. So things started to change then. And what we would do is release those podcasts through our website on our press room and also through a couple of the podcast networks to people who are interested in finding stuff out about Intel.
Renn Vara: And the content experts in your case were Intel people that had expertise in certain areas that the media might be interested in. Is that what I am hearing?
Ken Kaplan: Yes, exactly.
Renn Vara: Now how did you take that and work then with Bryan? Is it one and the same in the blogs or is it different characters, different bloggers for different purposes?
Ken Kaplan: I think how we started hooking up was, “Wow, it just makes sense.” Now we have a platform with the blogs to go out and tell our story with our people. I mean we were doing that through podcasts. We do that whenever we set up a press interview with our key spokesperson or somebody who is sanctioned, working on their project to go out and talk to the press. And we do that in that capacity. Now we have these great things called blogs. So that is where Bryan and I get to team up.
Renn Vara: That is great. Bryan, let me get some sense from you on the audience. What is your audience at this point?
Bryan Rhoads: It’s a fairly technical lot. I mentioned IT, so I think we have a lot of kind of IT manager-types out there that are reading the IT Blog. But it is bigger than IT, I think. We have a technology offering, we have got views blogs for analysts. Probably our newest blog is the Corporate Social Responsibility Blog. Primarily their focus is the industry and other CSR counterparts at other companies.
It is a very wide audience and we are listening very closely to responses to those blogs to see if there are other gaps in our technology story that folks want to tune into.
Renn Vara: Can you give us some sense of size? Is it in hundreds? Thousands?
Bryan Rhoads: Thousands definitely. Measuring blogs, I think is the old Web 1.0 way of looking at hits and visits. I think we are probably around 75,000 a month.
Renn Vara: That is pretty good.
Bryan Rhoads: It is pretty good. What the goal is and I steal this line from Ken is to really influence the influencers.
When we were in Beijing blogging with the technology blog, we had some compelling video that we shot that was picked up by Engadget and Gizmodo. And once it is reblogged, once it is syndicated out there, that is when you really hit critical mass and there is a lot of impact out there. It is not just the hits on your blog, it is who else is looking and reading and using your content.
Ken Kaplan: That’s what is changing really rapidly right now too is when we started podcasting, it was, “How many downloads are we going to get?” And that was back in the end of 2005 and I would say 100 to 1,000, maybe. And we have seen over the years that jumped up to about 40,000 downloads per month in some of the stuff that we do.
And is that great? Yes it is great compared to when we started. But the whole intention of what we wanted to do was actually put our story out there and see if people would grab it and listen and do something with it. It is the do something with it that we are trying to learn more about
Renn Vara: What are you learning about Ken?
Ken Kaplan: Well, I think what I learned are people grabbing that story and embedding it in their blog and writing about it a little bit more, adding some context. And I think as far as with the blog, reading those comments is great. You really learn that there is some passionate people out there that know a lot about Intel. A lot more than I know about Intel.
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Renn Vara: A quick reminder. You are listening to More Than Talk. We are talking with Ken Kaplan and Bryan Rhoads of Intel Corporation.
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Renn Vara: Now from a PR standpoint when you read those kind of passionate blogs, how is that humanizing your work?
Ken Kaplan: For me it’s, “Wow, there’s a real audience out there that are hungry and you better give them the real stuff.” Give them stuff that is interesting, no pandering. I feel like I have some access inside here and I want to make sure that the stuff that I grab, package and share is something that is going to be of interest to them.
Renn Vara: Now it sounds like, what you are describing is pretty radically different that maybe what PR was doing three, five years ago.
Ken Kaplan: Yes, this conversation I find is happening a lot now is, “How do you see yourself in a year or five years as somebody in PR?” It is changing and I think what it is, is we are all now storytellers. We are all capturing video or audio interviews and sharing them, putting some context and it is humanizing them beyond the press release.
I think the press release has become what it can become. I know it is going through some other changes where you can embed links and video and all that. That is fascinating but I think the idea of a PR person going in and taking notes and actually sharing stuff on a regular basis as opposed to just at the announcement is what is going to happen.
Renn Vara: The definition is that this is now moving into a relationship versus event.
Ken Kaplan: Yeah, and it’s a back and forth. So this story, the nuggets that you can share, then become an opportunity to have a discussion or a conversation online and swap ideas back and forth. I don’t think that there are guys are going to just go and put stuff out there then walk away. They are going to hopefully be able to engage with people who react to it.
Renn Vara: So Bryan, outside of the PR impact of this where do you see this all going? Is somebody managing social media there at Intel? What is the future?
Bryan Rhoads: One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about lately is moving away from the talk about content management and more about communication management. It seems that the Web 1.0 world was always focused on that mythical CMS System that is out there that is supposed to solve all your problems.
But I see the new trend really focusing on communication. Users, I don’t think, are all that interested in your content or at least the ‘old’ definition of content. And I think the blogs offer new content, new communication and can elude it to interesting compelling stories that we have never given access to before.
Renn Vara: So maybe then to both of you, let’s assume that is going to happen. That we have focused now much more on communication management or communication facilitation or whatever you want to call it. How is that going to change business then?
Ken Kaplan: I think it has an opportunity to get some feedback from folks pretty quickly. I think that is the common talk. If we are talking about multi-core technology, chips that are going to have more than two or four brains and they are operating at the same time and how the software community is going to have to fight to keep up with that and bring great value to consumers.
Well, that developer community is very active online and they are very opinionated. You might glean some stuff from that. That can actually go into the software aspects of the next generation of multi-core chips. I think that is probably one of the fascinating areas.
Bryan Rhoads: One aspect is democratization. I think that you are providing access and you are also allowing for feedback mechanisms and dialogues. I see that aspect of it and I also see you are essentially tapping into new sources of capital, previously disconnected pools of capital bridging those together with social media and really producing aggregate knowledge in some cases.
Renn Vara: Now when you call it knowledge capital, are you talking about the capital that exists even in our customer base?
Bryan Rhoads: Correct
Renn Vara: So then guys, to close this out, a lot of communication experts listen to this podcast. What advice based on what you guys are doing and you are doing innovative things, what advice do you give other communicators?
Ken Kaplan: I think the blogs are so much we have learned in a short time there. And it was a real… you hear the ‘naked’ word thrown out there a lot. I think the blogs are one of those times, is one of the stepping out period and we are learning from it everyday.
Bryan Rhoads: The biggest learning for me is make sure you got great buy-in from your management. That air cover means everything. And I think that once you are empowered to go out, you can be just that much more successful in consensus building, I guess.
Ken Kaplan: Yeah. And finding the right people, which means people with passion and people who love to get involved. They will tell you right away if something stinks or not, or they will tell you a better way and then you can try doing it. And that helps the whole company.
I think we have been able to team up, Bryan and I, more recently, we started realizing, “Oh, you have these tools? Oh, you have those capabilities? Oh, I know this guy.” And next thing you know, the machine is running pretty quickly everyday, a little bit faster, a little more vibrant.
I would say that networking inside is probably one of the best things and knowing your audience outside. What are they hungry for and what can you give them?
Renn Vara: Interesting. Now from the standpoint of the two of you, you said that on something here that for a lot of people they would question the wisdom of stepping out and creating something that has never been done before within their own company. What would you say to them?
Ken Kaplan: The good argument I always here is, again back to the audience. Your audience, if you are going to be around for five or ten years, where are your new customers or your new audience is coming from and what are they doing? I think that is one of the best arguments of why you would want to explore social media a little bit more if you haven’t.
The other thing is, if you like connecting your company with people or with trends, you want to be a part of what is happening in a daily basis. I can’t think of a better way than to do it through social media tools.
Renn Vara: That is great. Bryan and Ken, we really appreciate your time on this broadcast today. Any final thoughts? Any closing thoughts for our audience?
Ken Kaplan: Actually I would steal one from Bryan here. There are pioneers and there are settlers. I think that there are people who just have a natural instinct to go out and break new ground. It is good to let them do that and watch them and call them back once in a while to the fire and have them tell a story of what they have learned. And if its stuff that you think is valuable then grow on it. And that is when the settlers go out and start expanding
If you have some people that you know of inside your company or a vendor or somebody that you could be working with, if you like the spirit and you think there is some possibility there, it is worth trying it out and learning from those folks. You do not have to dive in all the way.
Renn Vara: That is great. Bryan anything from you?
Bryan Rhoads: Yes, I think it has come to a point where this technology and this technique, it is being settled. The pioneers are out there for the last five, six years. But now, it has come to the point where they are really effective business tools.
Renn Vara: That is great. Ken, Bryan, I really do appreciate your time.
Ken Kaplan: Great, thanks for having us.
Bryan Rhoads: Okay, thank you.
Renn Vara: See you guys! That was Ken Kaplan and Bryan Rhoads of Intel Corporation.
Bryan and I really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks SNP for taking your time having us spend a few minutes sharing and learning how our social media efforts are moving ahead at Intel. Cheers!