I had the pleasure of meeting Douglas Pollei at Intel headquarters the second week in November, just days before taking my sabbatical. We had a great talk about the state of corporate social media (can you say that?) that ended when we looked around and saw the once-buzzing cafetteria empty.

Douglas keeps a cool blog by night and for his day job he’s the VP of Internet Strategy and Corporate Development for IKANO Communications Inc., a portfolio company of Insight Venture Partners in New York. In other words, he’s a social media brother of another mother singing that same song about opening up, connecting and creating new opportunities.

We met through Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang, who personally invited Douglas to check out the September Social Media: Friend or Foe of IT panel at the Intel Developer Forum. We exchanged emails — he even politely kept in contact after a very late response I sent after IDF — then during a business trip to Silicon Valley he saved some time for us to meet. If he were a vendor, I’d have respectfully declined, but the chance to explore accomplishments and conflicts about social media? No way would I miss a chance! Here are some highlights from our talk, as Douglas posted on his blog:

We agreed to keep our conversation moving ahead. In fact, one thing we talked about was how I believe Intel has some wonderful stories to tell. Stories that are still coming together but will help directly connect Intel technology and innovation with social computing — from personal to commercial to developers and beyond. Intel’s new processor technologies can help people and businesses really get the most from Web 2.0, which seems to be growing and becoming more meaningful to everyone. Well, on the day Intel introduced it’s new Penryn chips — those featuring re-engineered, smaller, energy efficient, faster 45nm transistors — Intel CEO did it! Speaking at Oracle Open World, Intel CEO Paul Otellini (from ZDNet blog by Dan Faber):

This is something many other companies are doing, or can be doing to help show how they’re relevant in making Web 2.0 and social computing more amazing and useful everyday.

Until we meet again, here is another topic we explored: Corporation being more human and actively finding their way in places like Facebook. This weekend I came across the Harvard Business Review’s “Why your company needs to be on Facebook.” Its was posted on November 9, 2007 by Charlene Li is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Cluetrain Manifesto? There’s no turning back. There’s moving ahead, integrating, being smart, providing reason and value every step of the way…never without passion and zeal for helping and connecting with others.