Inside Intel (or Behind the Bunny Suit)

Understandably enough, IT com­panies are rep­res­ented heavily in the short list of 40 Fortune 500 com­panies that blog. Joining them, Intel launched its own official blog last week, IT@Intel.

Like Dell and EDS, it has gone for a group blog with a number of authors. Other com­panies like Sun and Boeing have a senior exec­utive in charge of the official blog, while the third approach, taken by com­panies like Microsoft and HP, is to have larger numbers of blogs from many product teams. My under­standing is that Intel plans to intro­duce or make public other blogs over time.

As a reader, which is my only expertise in this matter, I tend to prefer single-​​author blogs. You get a sense of the per­son­ality behind the posts, their interests, enthu­si­asms and tics. There’s a sense in which you feel that you’ve got a rela­tion­ship with the blogger. Team blogs can give the impres­sion that you’re dealing with an insti­tu­tion rather than with people. From what I under­stand of blog writing, that’s true from the other side too. If it’s a solo affair, you start to develop a unique voice; you get to know your regulars; you start to work out what people are inter­ested in that you can write about; and you start to really care about catering for your readership.

But Intel is doing a very good job so far, and know what they’re doing. Marty Menard, director for high per­form­ance com­puting, explains that their thinking was to create a con­voc­a­tion, “a group of people formally assembled for a special purpose”. If a single-​​author blog is ana­logous to going to dinner at their house, then the Intel blog is more like a seminar.

That’s not to say it’s delivered like a series of lectures. While they’re (rightly) trying to share what they do know, there’s an encour­aging degree of humility, fra­gility and an avowed desire to learn. Marty Menard writes:

The intent of this blog and our writers is to create dis­cus­sion; we intend to share what we know; and finally learn from others.

Jeff Moriarty, a Program Manager in the Enterprise Collaboration & Engineer group, says:

I’ll be honest, I’m worried about these blogs being able to succeed. I’ve worked on many official IT@Intel briefs and white papers, and the process of authoring these things and taking them through legal, and polit­ical review is not for the faint of heart. Everything must be squeaky clean and very pre­cisely aligned. These blogs are a much more open avenue of com­mu­nic­a­tion, and do not quite agree with some of the more con­ser­vative aspects of Intel’s nature. Some people inside Intel flat out don’t “get blogs”, and like the idea at all. That’s where I smelled a chal­lenge, and I was hooked.

In spite of this, or perhaps in defiance of it, the Intel blog welcomes comments and responds to them, also pub­lishing excerpts from them in the sidebar. They also have a blogroll, and though I’m not on it yet, there are con­tro­ver­sial­ists who are, not just cor­porate sites.

The big advantage of a group blog is that the quality level of con­tri­bu­tions can be higher, as can their volume. Instead of one person racking their brains to come up with some­thing worth saying, you’ve (hope­fully) got a queue of people lined up to give their best thoughts. Intel cer­tainly seem to be deliv­ering this with posts on Measuring the Business Value of Information Technology and a series of posts about inform­a­tion overload, together with free downloads.

There are other advant­ages to a group blog, to do with costs and risks. People can do it as well as their normal work. So far as I can tell, all the con­trib­utors to the Intel blog also have day jobs. It also changes the way the company is rep­res­ented. CEO blogs can be abso­lutely fas­cin­ating and develop a great fol­lowing, but what happens when the CEO moves on or gets canned? A cult of per­son­ality around a cha­ris­matic leader is very powerful, but also a tad risky. You can see, for example, the wisdom of HP not using its board members as its blogging face.

Compared to the multiple blogs idea, too, there’s also less risk on legal and polit­ical levels. Everything pub­lished can be quite care­fully mon­itored. That’s some­thing that will be pretty high on Intel’s agenda, unless it has changed a great deal over the last couple of years — perhaps Jeff Moriarty was testing the limits of that with his words.

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