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In the spirit of risk-taking, we’re facing the fact that we need advice from people who are doing great things in the quickly advancing area of social media…so we’ve pulled together The Insiders. This social media advisory board will be giving their take on evolving the newly revamped Intel.com Web site — i.e. “What???s Inside You” — and Intel’s increased focus on consumers.

This group includes many new friends and some long time acquaintances. They gathered together on Tuesday to form and create the framework for the Intel Insider advisory board.

Our idea was to reach out to a diverse group of social media activists with three goals in mind:

• occasionally feature their work or opinions as part of our What???s Inside effort
• see whether any are interested in writing about Intel???s products or are following Intel’s social media efforts on their own (note: this is not a requirement)
• seek feedback on our social media efforts, upcoming product plans, roadmaps…

This last item is important, but not an end-all. We are trying to monitor and better listen to opinions on all the areas a company like Intel touches with its 80K+ employees in 300 countries.

Our first meeting yesterday was fascinating and encouraging. We agreed to follow WOMMA guidelines on disclosures. We hopefully went out of our way to encourage constructive criticism, and the exchanging of ideas and insights. The Insiders were engaging as they talked about what other companies are doing in social media, gave their take on APs recent blogger attribution brush up and shared thoughts on Facebook and Twitter.

One thing we didn???t discuss was length of service, and whether or not to expand the group. Should the board remain at its current size or grow by 1, 10, 100 or higher if there is interest? We???ll let The Insiders and our own resources determine next steps later this year. For now, we will keep this at about 10 and have The Insiders help has make changes when and if the time is right.

Here’s who came to the first meeting:

• Cathy Brooks, Other Than That blog and Seesmic
• Justine Ezarik, iJustine and her blog Tasty Blog Snack
• Tom Foremski, SiliconValleyWatcher (my team has sponsors the dynamic widget on his site for over two years)
• Frank Gruber, Somewhat Frank
• J.D. Lasica, Darknet
• Sarah Meyers, Pop17
• Christian Perry, Snap Summit
• Brian Solis, PR 2.0 and Bub.blicio.us

There are others who have accepted our invitation, like Irena Slutsky of GeekTV and Peter Cashmore of Mashable. (UPDATE: I failed to include Justin Kan from JustinTV).

We agreed to invite one another to events and to share information, including some undisclosed Intel information at times when they???d agree to a non-disclosure agreement. And my team, the Global Communication Group, offered to provide an occasional prototype device to test out if and when the opportunities arise.

The Intel team did ask that if they ever do talk about Intel or any special treatment that there be transparency and acknowledgment.

No compensation will be provided, but the group agreed that if any gifts or test product loans were exchanged, each Intel Insider would clearly and truthfully describe the situation. The first product each will receive is a MacBook Air, which reflects stunning design in part due to Intel???s engineers and designers. Taking a concept from our R&D team, our mobile group shrunk the processor, chipset and related ???board??? about 60 percent in order to get that laptop so thin, yet offer great performance and battery life. And they did it in about a year.

Cathy Brooks shared live video recording of a Q&A with Intel’s Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Sean Maloney, who came in and talked about Intel hard and fast move of advertising dollars away from broadcast and towards online.

Tom Foremski describes the impact of Intel move online and he outlines the direction for the Intel Insiders. Here are some signature style of photos by Brian Solis, a fun photo posted by iJustine and even some photos from the Intel Museum tour by Somewhat Frank Gruber.

We???ll continue introducing The Insiders to our social media posse, the growing group of Intel employees who are passionate and always sharing their knowledge generously. It was Intel Software Network’s Josh Bancroft who prompted me to write this post!

Do you think this type of program might help companies like Intel? What are the potential benefits or things to avoid? Please let me know your thoughts.

If you’re curious, please follow the Intel Insiders on Twitter. In the comments section below, we”ll add links to other items that came from the first meeting.

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