A talk with Intel’s ‘blog­fa­ther’ from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Here’s a 6-minute con­ver­sa­tion I had with Bryan Rhoads, dig­i­tal strate­gist with Intel’s Social Media Cen­ter of Excel­lence, about how Intel approaches social media. Bryan’s influ­ence extends up and down the hall­ways of the 80,000-employee com­pany, so much so that one of his col­leagues calls him “the blogfather.”

Watch, down­load or embed the video on Vimeo

Intel is widely seen as a leader in tech inno­va­tion, but in recent years that cul­ture of inno­va­tion has per­me­ated social media as well, and it was on full dis­play at the recent Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show, where Intel’s social media team set up an Upload Lounge where blog­gers inter­viewed thought lead­ers like Chris Kelly, can­di­date for Cal­i­for­nia Attor­ney Gen­eral. (Dis­clo­sure: I’m a mem­ber of the Intel Insid­ers social media advi­sory group, and Intel paid for my trip to CES.)

Intel’s social media man­agers achieved buy-in across the enter­prise three to four years ago because of the rela­tion­ships forged with Legal, PR and Mar­ket­ing and management’s embrace of “the idea of get­ting as many voices as pos­si­ble involved in the company’s social media efforts,” Bryan says.

The com­pany formed a Social Media Cen­ter of Excel­lence, charged with being the cen­tral hub where employ­ees could learn and become fam­liar with social media. The team devel­oped a widely admired set of social media guide­lines, and the com­pany took the dar­ing step of actu­ally trust­ing its employees.

If some­one wants to blog on behalf of Intel, they can do so sim­ply by watch­ing a 30-minute train­ing video devel­oped by the social media team. More than 1,000 Intel employ­ees have taken the train­ing class. Employ­ees can start a pres­ence on Twit­ter, Face­book, YouTube Flickr and other social media sites. “They can do it and know that they won’t get canned,” Bryan says.

Intel under­stands that, as cen­tral as Intel’s cor­po­rate blogs, like the Inside Scoop blog, are to the company’s social media efforts, its cus­tomers are talk­ing about the com­pany and its efforts else­where, too. “So it’s not just about the for­mal Intel blogs but also ‘off-domain’ as well, he says. For exam­ple, Intel employ­ees and man­agers now tweet on more than 250 Twit­ter accounts.

“The data is com­ing in that all buy­ers in all mar­kets are using social media in their pur­chase process,” Bryan says, sug­gest­ing that com­pa­nies that haven’t begun incor­po­rat­ing social media into their busi­ness processes will be miss­ing an enor­mous oppor­tu­nity. “Our cus­tomers are there, our future cus­tomers are there, and their cus­tomers are there as well.” Twit­ter, he says, is the per­fect con­ver­sa­tion plat­form for com­pa­nies. “When the brand is not there, it’s a blemish.”

Kodak’s Zi8

I con­ducted the inter­view with a Zi8 palm-size cam­corder that Kodak loaned me. It records in high def­i­n­i­tion (up to 1080px) and out­puts videos as .mov files. Oddly, I wasn’t able to import the file into Final Cut Express, which I typ­i­cally use to edit my videos, so I fell back to using iMovie for this edit.

I’m still exper­i­ment­ing with the Zi8 — here, Bryan is a tad out of focus (the hall in the back­ground is sharper), even though I had facial recog­ni­tion on and it locked onto his face. (I messed up my ear­li­est inter­views with the Zi8 because it was in macro mode for shoot­ing close-ups of flow­ers and the like.) Despite such small hic­cups, I’m very impressed with the Zi8, espe­cially for shoot­ing out­doors, and now pre­fer it over the Flip cam. I often slip the Zi8 into my pocket in case I want to do a spur-of-the-moment inter­view, some­thing I can’t do with my larger Canon HV20 camcorder.

Related

• How Ford does social media

• Inter­view with Ford CEO Alan Mulally

• At CES: Pri­vacy, open­ness & broadband’s future

• Pho­tos of CES 2010

• Intel social media guide­lines

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