Intel & Johnny Bloggerseed

I spent a pleasant day yesterday in Las Vegas at the surrealistic Venetian Hotel as the guest of Intel's Sales & Marketing Group (SMG). I think it is the first time I ever had lunch with 5400 people in one room.

I was on what was called, "The external panel." There were three of us asked to address the subject of marketing and social media. We presented twice, both times to a filled room of about 200 fairly engaged audience members from all aspects of marketing and from all over the world.

While Intel has a good number of blogs going on, some of them quite good, the Intel folk who are either immersed or engaged in social media come from other sectors of this vast global enterprise. These were the people who wanted to get message out. They were not exactly champions of social media. Extremely few of them had ever heard of Naked Conversations or even my co-author. I could see on their faces that many had never heard of Twitter, when I used the word as if it were as generic as say "Kleenex."

But what was interesting to me is that audience was entirely engaged. They understood that the tide of social media was rising and they had little choice but to get their feet wet, and would soon need to at least dog paddle or face being swept away by sea change.

They hung on a great many words from the panel.  They asked questions. They asked for good old-fashioned business cards. Social Media was not in the center of their world, but it was acknowledged and respected by an audience that perhaps one brief year earlier would have been totally disdained.

For nearly three years I've been bopping around North America & Europe, in sort of a virtual Johnny Bloggerseed role. It is encouraging to see little sprout rising from the dirt. Things are starting to grow wherever I look and it feels good.

Comments

[Scott Monty]

Very encouraging news, Shel. Of course, Intel has been embracing social media fairly openly toward the latter half of 2007. Nancy Bhagat and her group are doing a phenomenal job of keeping up with and even leading the pack in some areas.

I'm glad the wider group is gladly going along for the ride!