The following is information is Intel's submission for Forrester's Groundswell Awards for Intel's Open Port Community:

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Intel's Open Port Community

Early in 2007 Intel's web marketing organization recognized the trend of customer generated conversations and how they preferred to have conversations with others regarding information about Intel's products. With a flair for experimentation we decided to see what would happen if we hosted the conversations ourselves. And the results have amazed everyone.

Intel launched the Open Port site in 2007as a way to support our business customers and technical community. The community site now incorporates 7 different sub communities where community members post blogs, host forum discussions, and post resources including wiki documents to engage with each other.

Open Port Business Goals:

1. To establish a support a community around business products and help "self-activate" Intel vPro technology enabled computers

2. To increase reach on Intel content for business technology

3. To increase relevance and preference for Intel business technologies

Building A Support Community

Intel started with the goal of contributing to 90% the discussion, and to eventually supporting only 10% of the discussion in 2 years. As of April of 2008 we have seen that Intel is only supporting 25% of the dialogue, with the community supporting 75%.

In July 2008, a very active technical expert began answering technical questions in our Ask An Expert section of the site. Since July he alone has responded to over 60 community questions.

We have confirmed 8 self activations of Intel vPro technology from businesses involved in Open Port, with 12 more in process. (Self activated means business customers enabled vPro technology systems to remotely manage an enterprise fleet of PC's & laptops)

Increased Reach

After the first week of launch Open Port pages ranked 3rd on Google for terms 'Intel Virtualization', 'Intel vPro' and 'Intel Xeon'.

Open Port continues to grow an audience, grow in registrations, and grow in participation.

• Traffic is a straight line increase up 400% from the beginning of the year.

• Participation continues to increase along a similar growth curve with blog posts, discussion posts, comments, and threads are up over 250% from 01/08.

• Users registrations grew over 600% from January

• Traffic has always been organic with 75% of traffic consistently coming from organic search or referring sites.

Increased Relevance & Preference

After its first month we found that Open Port received 3 times as many page views and downloads for similar content found on intel.com.

Stories of Preference:

In one instance, a community member participated in a discussion about vPro technology to help activate her systems. (Read Re: Remote Configuation and AMT release 3.0 ). The site community manager reached to learn about her experience. She explained she went on to buy a large quantity of systems based on the help she received. She has since become a blogger on the site and recounts her experience using Intel technology for others in the community.

In another instance an IT professional received a shipment of PC's but did not know what he could do with the Intel vPro technology. He searched on Google and landed on the vPro Expert Center to learn more. With help from the community he learned how to self-activate and configure vPro systems. He then showed his managers which convinced them to standardize on vPro for their company. See post How do you BEGIN to use vPro??

Quote "... my organization will be purchasing only vPro hardware in the future."