Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist at Intel, has had the rare opportunity to be part of the early social media/conversational marketing efforts at some of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies. Brito's passion for social media dates back to his days at Packet8, the voip telephone company, when he launched that company's first corporate blog and online community in early 2004.

Brito moved on to Hewlett-Packard, where as Social Media Marketing Manager, he managed a multi-million dollar search marketing budget; and was responsible for paid search, SEO and social media marketing. He was a Senior Manager of Community Marketing at Yahoo! Inc. for more than a year and a half when he was laid off in one of that company's consolidation purges.

"I was fortunate to land on my feet and was hired at Intel managing their consumer social media," he says. "I love what I am doing. I'm one of those people who refuse not to have a good time at work."

Working for big companies has given Brito a chance to participate on the groundfloor of social media in large companies and to see up close the internal struggle between traditional marketing and conversational marketing.

"In my experience, many traditional marketers are afraid of social media because they don't want to lose control of the message," Brito says. "Their idea of a true 'conversation' scares them to death. They would rather continue with their multi-million dollar banner campaigns, white papers and press releases and bombard the Internet with one-way marketing messages. One of the first tactical approaches I took at HP was to launch a product-related blog. Many of the internal "traditional" marketers were literally freaking out at the idea that a blog would be actually open for users to leave comments."

Brito, who says he is a recovering direct marketer, launched his personal blog--Britopian--in August 2006 because he had come to believe that Cluetrain thesis #53 is dead on: There are two conversations going on. One inside the company, one with the market. He wanted to find out what the market was saying.

A few months ago, Brito launched Conversations Matter, a collaborative blog authored by in-house marketers who touch social media in some capacity. The contributors include Fortune 500 social media marketing mavens like LaSandra Brill from Cisco, Tac Anderson from HP, Kelly Feller from Intel, Tom Diederich from Candince Design Systems, and Marc Levin, formerly at Yahoo!

"The internal part of the conversation these days is whether social media is about conversions, traffic, click though rates and sales; or something more along the lines of conversations, authenticity, transparency and building a sense of community," he says. "My main interest, really, is the holistic approach to social media and how huge companies can see value in joining the conversations."