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 works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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