Aaron Strout : Citizen Marketer

Transcript: Josh Hilliker - Intel

Aaron Strout:     

Hi, my name is Aaron Strout. Welcome to the We Show.

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Aaron Strout:    

Thank you for joining us on the We Show today. My name is Aaron Strout, and I’m the VP of marketing for Mzinga, a leading provider of workplace and customer community solutions.  This podcast is one in a series and can be found on the WeAreSmarter.org site, Mzinga.com, and iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

I am here today [with] – actually Josh Hilliker, who is a community manager at Intel. I was lucky enough to see Josh. He just spoke on the community panel with WebEx and SAP, and Leverage Software. Welcome today. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your job at Intel, and some of the things that you’ve learned about community and the importance of community to Intel as a company.

Josh Hilliker:  
All right. Good deal. Thank you. I’m Josh Hilliker with Intel. My role as a community manager, as you alluded to. Over the past probably two years, the value of the community has been kind of a sketchy place. It’s been an interesting – you know, is it a value, is it not? Over the last I want to say six to nine months, there’s been a huge uptick in realizing that communities are not just real, but it’s a powerful thing for an enterprise business to have. My focus is external community around vProv – Intel vPro processor technology, but the focus is getting the community to start pulling themselves together and talking about BKMs, tricks, knowledge-sharing, basically establishing an expertise as a community and then advocating that outside – outside meaning outside of the normal manageability circles that happen in the industry.

Value from an Intel standpoint – two values. One is short term; it’s accelerating adoption of vPro, increasing the integration times. It’s all about here and now. We’ve got our new platform. Wavelaunch was launched and came out a week ago. We talked all about that online. Everybody can find that online. Santa Rosa launched a couple weeks back – our laptop platform. Very important. What we’ve found is we need the audience and the community to get together and start collaborating on how to make it better for the platform. From an Intel standpoint, one, there’s short term.

The second part is the long-term value, which is my goal at the end of this, when I’m done – if there is a “done,” which I doubt – is to have the end users talk about the features that they want, that they don’t see, and that we don’t have, that I can take that and translate it up to usage models and put it back into the silicon and firmware. So that when the next platform comes out, it’s truly an end-user-designed platform, versus today.

Today we focus heavily on end users. We’ve made some major modifications on our platform based on user feedback, but we’re still missing all the hearts and minds of all those IT enthusiasts. That’s kind of the cool part with this, is I’m talking to the IT guys and gals that really know what’s going on, and they really want to see changes. They’re willing to advocate, verbalize, and talk to us.

Aaron Strout: 
Cool. We’re doing a little experiment today, by the way. We are podcasting with the iPhone, which was given out as one of the chachkeys at this Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. That’s fascinating. I guess one of the things that I’d love to know that didn’t come up in the panel is … communities can get messy, and communities can present problems for companies, I think especially big problems. Dell is one of them, and they’ve done similar things to you. They have an idea management tool.

One of the biggest things that confronted them early on was we want Linux on the Dell platform, and they weren’t initially prepared to deal with it. Well, they ultimately did, and they ultimately launched Linux on the Dell. Can you talk about some of the instances of maybe issues that have come up that were unexpected that you said, “Oh, my gosh, how am I going to resolve this?” Maybe made you feel like it was going to create issues with senior management?

Josh Hilliker:  
Absolutely. It’s a good question. We’ve been running it a couple weeks now, and prior to that we were out on Slashdot a couple months ago. I actually hosted an article thread around vPro manageability: “What do you want to see?” We got a lot of good, bad and ugly, and some of the ugly was was feedback that … “What does XYZ OEM going to do?” Sometimes the OEM is the OEM. We have to go talk to them or we’ve got to let them weigh in on what their roadmap strategy is going to be. So that was our first bit of kind of awkwardness in the community.

The second part most recently last week is someone asked that same very question, on, “AMT is great, and there’s all these Windows tools: What about Linux? What am I going to do about Linux tools leveraging Active Management Technology?” which by the way is our manageability backbone on the platform. What was awesome is – I thought it was going to be a problem, and a lot of my peers and even the execs were like – I thought it was gonna be a problem, bottom line. Went to one of the Linux guys at Intel, one of the Linux heads that really knows what’s going on, and he was quick to say, “Hey, the first software open-source was just announced. It’s been released. Here’s where it’s at on the Internet, and you can fully plug it into AMT.”

So, it kind of became a – I thought it was going to be messy. I kind of was like, “Oh, it’s going to be bad. I have to make sure we have the right answers.” And it ended up being a lot better solution. I didn’t know that we were that far along with Linux. I didn’t know there’d be an open-source, AMT-based standard that was already out there ready to go. It was kind of like pain, but with the light at the end of that tunnel.

Aaron Strout: 
That’s great. Along those lines, one of the things I think you mentioned on the panel is you’re not a marketing guy. I am a marketing guy. In a lot of ways, the non-marketing people are really the best people to be in communities managing it on a regular basis. I think product people and developers, people that really know the product, really can add some value and understand where people are coming from. One of the things that I think can be a problem is when you’re running a community, the first thing that your bosses want to do is, “Tell me how I monetize this,” or, “Make this so we can get these people selling.” I think you, as a community manager, realize there’s a very fine line and a delicacy – and you may have been the one on the panel that mentioned community runs community. You facilitate, and the sooner you realize that, I think the better off you are. Have you run into any instances like that, and if so, any advice on how you sort of manage up and say, “Look, there will be an ROI, and we can work with these guys to help market and sell. But at the end of the day, we have to be careful and there is that fine line.”

Josh Hilliker:  
Yeah, absolutely. A great question. What I got asked before we launched was, “What does success smell and look like? What does it mean to be successful? What’s the measurement?” So years back, I ran an external website for Intel in more of an engineering caliber, and I had one indicator called [inaudible] in the ‘90s. That was satisfactory to every executive in the corporation, was [inaudible]. That reality is way gone. I mean, now it’s a matter of, “What are the nine measurements to know what success looks like?”

So in the first week, we realized that our downloads were the best ever across the corporate website. Part of what Bob Duffy, the open port manager that’s above my community – he did an analysis that said, “Hey, look. Our corporate [inaudible] that launched for this platform on a certain week got 700. We got 7,000 of downloads on our document the same exact week.” That’s the message, right? But it’s not his only message. So what I’ve been asked is, “Give me the measurement,” and [then I] build the indicator package, per se, and that becomes my upwards management package to make sure management knows what do I look for? What does success mean? And then am I being successful.

Just prior, just a little while ago, I was talking to Jeremiah Owyang, and we were talking about what are the key north-point indicators? So what do you look to, right? North-point is something you look to as a point of relevance. What are those? I think he’s got a winning solution there, and he shared that with me. It’s on his site, Web Strategy. But he goes after, “Are you being picked up in Technorati? What’s your Facebook replies? What’s your actual discussion threads look like? How many people have joined and stayed versus joined and left?” So my goal, actually, this weekend and going into next week, is I’m writing that indicator package now. It’s going to become like the community indicator package for Intel.

Aaron Strout:  Well that’s great, and that’s serendipitous because I’m actually going to do a podcast, hopefully, with Jeremiah next week. And so I’m going to grill him on that, and I will sync these two up together. Thank you, Josh, for joining us today. It’s Josh Hilliker of Intel, the community manager. This is Aaron Strout, broadcasting from the Office 2.0 conference. Thanks for joining us today.

Josh Hilliker:   Thank you.

Aaron Strout: 

We appreciate you listening in to this series of the We Show podcasts. To find other podcasts like this, you can check out WeAreSmarter.org, Mzinga.com, and also iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Thanks so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next week.

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