IntelWife, there are people in traditional PR positions for Intel, sure. But we need someone to facilitate Intel getting involved in the new media – blogs, podcasting, videoblogs, etc. In that realm, the old marketing and PR tactics just don’t work. They’re seen for what they are, and for Intel to make a real (genuine! authentic!) gesture here, it can’t be as a marketing campaign. At best, it won’t work, and at worst, people wlll be offended by it.

I don’t have any background in marketing at all, so it made me smile to hear you say I sound like a marketing guru. I guess in a way, I am, but only as marketing pertains to the new media, and people talking to each other in a Cluetrain kind of way. I’m fascinated by that, and I would really love to see the company that I love, Intel, get involved. I don’t pretend to be the most qualified, but I’ve been watching and listening for over a year now for someone else at Intel to get this started, and it hasn’t happened. So while I may not be the most qualified person to do it, someone has to, and it might as well be me.

Thanks for the comments – keep them coming!

Just thinking out loud.

Seriously though, I think there is a serious issue involved in creating corporate weblogs, one which may or may not have played a role in Scoble’s situation, and I’d like to hear some thoughts from you about it. The problem is simply this: you would like to set up a relationship with your customers through the creation of a weblog. This enables your customers to see into the decisionmaking process, to have access to information about upcoming products, and to potentially have more influence on the future direction of the company.

And that’s the problem: companies as a whole don’t want customers (or even their own employees) to see their decision making process. They don’t want to telegraph information about upcoming products to their customer (and therefore, their competitors), and they always think that they are a better judge of the future markets than their customers are (and, often, they are right).

Ultimately, that means that the corporate blogger tries to serve two masters: the people who sign his paycheck, and his readers who are contacting him for unbiased, consumer oriented information. I think that having two masters with diametrically opposed expectation and goals means that the corporate blogger is frequently insincere, and that insincerity breaks to favor the people who more directly pay his salary. It’s hard not to find this conflict in virtually everything the corporate blogger has to say.

If your blog only says things which positively affect Intel’s stock price, are you really serving your users? Maybe AMD chips really _are_ better for the consumer. Are you going to tell them that? If not, why should they trust you? If so, why should Intel continue to pay your salary?

Ultimately, Channel 9, useful and interesting as it can be, is just another way of advertising. Robert Scoble tried to be more, but I think it’s arguable if he really succeeded. Ultimately he argued that the delays in Vista were really good, that Microsoft engineers were talented and dedicated to the consumer, while the rest of us see a project laden with DRM which serves no useful purpose to the consumer, delay after delay, one complete restart of the coding effort, and we still don’t have a media player that knows about podcasting. Maybe Robert really does believe what he says, but if so, he simply isn’t seeing what many of us outside Microsoft are able to see.

All this aside, I wish you luck in your endeavors, and frankly I think Intel would be crazy not to clone the Channel9 idea. It’s a cheap, effective way to advertise your corporate strengths to a segment of the population for which tecnology actually matters, and who often make decisions for the organizations in which they are employed. I think you’d do a fine job.

Saludos!