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Social Media Thought Leaders: Intel's Ekaterina Walter

This article is more than 10 years old.

[NOTE. This is part of my ongoing series on Social Media Thought Leaders. This post is the first of two parts.]

In my 2009 book, Twitterville, I argued that social media influence was built on a cult of generosity—those who give the most, actually get the most.  Those who share the most useful and interesting stuff, end up having the most influence. From that perspective, Intel's social

media strategist Ekaterina Walter, the leader of large, growing and influential cult. And for that reason, she is my third selection for my list of Social Media Thought Leaders.

By being relentlessly generous, with her time, thought, wisdom and encouragement, she has helped modernize the Intel brand from an aggressive and competitive engineering-driven semiconductor company into something of a bridge builder whose goal is to connect all people and by so doing empower them. To a great many people, she has become the personification of a new Intel, whose new brand components include leadership in diversity, governance, ethics and corporate social responsibility.

Kelly Olexa, is a case in point. Unsatisfied  in a midlevel position at a Chicago-based social media agency, she felt stuck. But she felt some inspiration when she saw Walter speak at a Las Vegas conference in 2010. They met later in the day and was surprised her is how personally engaging she was.  “Ekaterina was genuinely interested in me and she took the time to sit privately and get to know me,” Olexa told me. "I was so humbled by her interest in me and so motivated and excited, it was as if she lit a fire within me."

The flames apparently grew. Olexa would return to Chicago, quit her job and start  Fitfluential, a nationwide social network for fitness enthusiasts. The company is reportedly flourishing with Olexa. Walter serves in an advisory capacity.

There are countless stories about Walter such as this.  Jacqui Chew, founder of iFusion Marketing LLC, a startup marketing consulting firm, also met Walter at a conference. The two shared notes on being immigrant women professionals in the tech sector.

It turned out that Chew was part of the selection committee for an Atlanta production of the TEDx Conference, whose theme was Breakthough, where Walter delivered the 11-minute video above. She talked about her own upbring, which in her view, has everything to do with why she is succeeding so well for Intel, the $54 billion global leader in semiconductors.

Years ago, Walter would have just been another nice lady working in a very big company. You and I would never have heard of her and she certainly would not be deserving of a two-part column in Forbes magazine.

But that was before social media came in to play and before her relentless penchant for helping others became scalable, as it is today. And the lion's share of all that Conversational Age scaling is being created and shared on devices powered by Intel.

Walter was raised in Krasnodar, a South Russian city of over 700,000, located 100 miles inland from the Black Sea. In the Stalinist Era, her great grandfather was dragged off bu the Stalinist government and imprisoned. Although the family was not informed until much later, he died on a Siberian Gulag. Times had improved somewhat as Walter grew up in the final years of Communism, but they were far from pleasant. Choices were limited in many things. There was only one flavor of gum—strawberry - and girls wore identical uniforms to class. If she had stayed in Russia, the best she could have expected professionally would have been in the un-dynamic life of  a corporate accountant—which was far from her top choice.

When they were in their 20s, her younger sister Natalia and she emigrated to Anchorage, Alaska where, they reveled in the freedoms she saw as she earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Alaska.  The two sisters never considered moving back to Russia. After college, Walter joined Accenture’s Anchorage office where she worked mostly on the BP account and discovered that she had a passion for global enterprises. “I love working with people from all over the world and learning about multiple cultures. That was the reason I got an MBA in international management from Thunderbird [School of Global Management].”

The story may have ended there, except that while attending a friend’s wedding she met and fell in love with Brian Walter.  Two years later she was married, living in Portland, Oregon and looking for a new job that would allow her to work with multiple geographies. That landed her in the marketing group at Intel Portland, where coincidentally, Brian was as an engineer.

Intel was earlier than most companies to social media. It started with a few grassroots developers such as Josh Bancroft who became prominent by the end of 2003.  CEO Paul S. Otellini started the first internal CEO blog in 2004 and was soon followed by other Intel executives. Intel bloggers started talking about their work in a prolific, but in an ad hoc way. The company was early to posting in multiple languages and was the second American-headquartered enterprise to use social media in China.

It all started ad hoc. As individuals at Intel joined in and became increasingly active, it got a little chaotic. As social media evolved, it started to organize. In 2006, the Intel Software Network Communities site created an omnibus umbrella and was followed by blogs@Intel in 2007.

When you are a $54 billion global powerhouse with 100,000 employees living in diverse cultures and speaking myriad of languages ad hoc is not necessarily such a good thing and organization and structure are required to stave off corporate chaos.

That brings us to the task force that evolved into the Intel Center for Social Media Excellence, which is where Ekaterina’s personal thumbprint on the helm helped steer the company’s social strategies and current course.

I’ll tell you more about that in Part 2 tomorrow.That's where the story picks up in Part 2.

[ [Know someone who deserves to be recognized as a social media thought leader? Please email me.]