Intel Insiders: Social media, bunny suits and the global enterprise

Spent the day Tuesday at Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., for the debut of a new social media advisory group called — a bit too self-importantly — the Intel Insiders. We’re not really insiders, just a bunch of bloggers who somehow got past the front guard.

Those taking part: Cathy Brooks, Frank Gruber, Brian Solis, Justine Ezarik, Sarah Austin, Tom Foremski, Christian Perry, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Pete Cashmore, Irina Slutsky, Justin Kan (the lineup may change a bit). Chris Heuer of the Conversation Group helped steer the conversation, and Adriana Gascoigne organized the gathering.

I’ll be writing more about this in the weeks and months ahead. Quick synopsis: We were invited to talk with top managers of Intel about social media and the interaction between global corporations and their customers. We got a chance to shoot the breeze about social media strategies that worked and didn’t work for large businesses. And many or all of us will post disclosure statements on our blogs about what the relationship is when we write about Intel.

I also got a chance to interview two other participants, whom I hadn’t met in person before, and will be posting those videos in the coming days.

One of the more interesting exchanges took place when I asked Sean Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president and general manager, sales and marketing (and self-described Flip Fanatic), what he considered Intel’s core identity to be. Now that Intel processors are in a staggering array of consumer electronics devices — cell phones, digital cameras, DVRs, digital TVs, refrigerators, automobiles — in addition to computers, would Intel join Apple (which dropped "Computer" from its name last year) in broadening the scope of its identity beyond computing? Surely this was inevitable, yes?

To my surprise, Maloney said no. "You have to be one thing," he said. "It’s difficult to be more than one thing. it’s dangerous to change your soul as a company. … We’re a microprocessor company."

Stick to your knitting. Interesting.

Here are some other posts about the Intel Insiders gathering:

Tom Foremski captured 10 minutes of Maloney’s talk on his cell phone and uploaded it to YouTube.

Sarah posted some fun shots, like this one:

Brian Solis posted two dozen coolio photos to Flickr, including the shot at top.

Justine posted here, including this shot:

And here is Frank Gruber’s Flickr set.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.