Intel’s Community Marketing: Fishing Where The Fish Are

Intel is known for trying out a variety of social media efforts, for better or for worse. They experiment, and continue to learn and iterate, I give them continual credit and reference them in presentations. One particular activity of note is what I learned from David Veneski, he tackled the join vs build question and made the call to join.

Earlier this year, I visited Intel up in Seattle (correction: Portland) and spoke to David Veneski, a marketing manager, and spoke to his group about social computing strategies. He had deployed some successful marketing efforts, and reached communities where they existed, he had efforts to reach early tech adopters in Digg, as well as Slashdot. Both of these communities are rabid passionate tech communities that are self-thriving and require little attention from outside sources to be successful.

[Savvy brands join communities where the exist, rather than solely trying to coax customers to the corporate website through disruptive tactics]

In the case of Digg, Intel funded development of new features, and became a sponsor of the creation of “Digg Arc” a visualization feature. This associative play tied the Intel name with early tech adopters, as well as got dugg. Next they brought forth some of Intel’s top engineers to have a conversation with the Slashdot community, and apparently it was so successful that the amount of questions became unwieldy to respond to.

The moment of brilliance was when David said that one of the requirements of his marketing efforts was to not link to Intel.com. Rather than try to join a community then pull them away, the marketing efforts joined the community and stayed there –likely where the trust is highest (see data).

As a result, David fished where the fish were, and avoided trying to suck the members off the community they were part of. Marketers are often measured on the amount of traffic they generate to their corporate website, but in this case, Intel will have to measure using different attributes such as interaction, viral spread, and maybe even a survey.

Rather than coax users to your irrelevant corporate website, savvy brands will fish where the fish are.

41 Replies to “Intel’s Community Marketing: Fishing Where The Fish Are”

  1. Did David share any actual results? did top of mind scores move? were purchases impacted? “asking lots of questions” is not a metric that can be handed back to the CEO.

    But I do agree that going where the customers are is something I’ve been pushing since the mid 90s.

  2. Thanks for the reply Jeremiah – awareness is not something I would be measuring with a product base like Intel’s. Also, these campaigns are marketing campaigns and thus need to be tracked well – otherwise they face the axe as times get tough. Awareness items are typically the first to go.

    In addition, when you compare intel’s chips to most consumer goods, there’s a huge difference.

    I’d also suggest that early adopters already know about Intel’s products and therefore the needle may move but it will be tiny.

    We’ve got to get to real measurement or risk a huge downturn in funds being allocated to these types of campaigns.

  3. And believe me, I could go on for days… Intel is getting some seriously poor advice. They paid for the Digg arc to get some traffic.

    Then you have this “social media experts” campaign (?) they are running now. Give some bloggers a mac laptop (which has no Intel stickers) and get them to write some posts about how great Intel is – more paid posts.

    So I guess I would say yes, I’d love to see a case study with real numbers, etc. Thanks for proposing this idea.

  4. David was also a letter winner on the University of Oregon Track & Field and Cross Country teams.

  5. Jeremiah (and some info for Allen) –

    I would be happy to work with you on a Case Study that brings in numbers other than ‘awareness’. While awareness is definitely part of the media mix for Intel, it is actual ‘interaction’ and participation in the conversation that I am aiming for. In addition, I am very keen on building an environment that promotes loyalty to the space we’ve created. We’ve done that with several efforts – increasing repeat and loyal visitors exponentially during the life of the programs and tailoring those programs based on what the community is looking for. I can bring several examples to the table in a Case Study.

    Being an ingredient brand, it is difficult to get a direct association of our efforts to sales, as getting sales out data from OEMs and Retailers (other than boxed product) has proven to be, let’s say, a challenge at the very least. However, that’s not to say we haven’t had some key interactions in our social efforts that can be directly related to actual sales on the enterprise front and some new alliances due to connections made through a specific expert symposium we held.

    I won’t plug the programs here as I don’t want to take away from Jeremiah’s intention on this post – let’s start that Case Study and bring forth some stellar results.

    David

  6. Great post and best said as:

    It is better to market through the community than AT the community.

  7. Did David share any actual results? did top of mind scores move? were purchases impacted? “asking lots of questions” is not a metric that can be handed back to the CEO.

    But I do agree that going where the customers are is something I've been pushing since the mid 90s.

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