The other day, a colleague referred me to the media center of ArcelorMittal – a communications platform made up of a variety of corporate blogs, podcast sites, public relations blogs and internal TV documentary ‘episodes’ that have all been integrated into a highly effective ‘media center platform’.
If I were to develop a tag cloud for ArcelorMittal, it would probably look similar to this: communication, acceptance, honesty, openness, sharing, respect, difference, marriage, corporate culture, challenge, human resources, learning from others, integrating cultures, consolidation challenges.
Corporate media centers have been serving the purposes of effectively supporting branding strategies, public relations activities, mitigation of perceived risks, customer service, employee training and research and development efforts.
ArcelorMittal writes a new story of corporate blogging that may well be of use for businesses pondering the usefulness of maintaining a corporate blog or media center to support selected business-, communication- and research and development strategies or activities related to human resources (recruitment, management, training).
The story
In May 2007, Arcelor and Mittal announced their merger – a move that would make the newly constituted group the largest global steel manufacturer, combining more than 320 000 people under one global roof spanning over more than 60 countries.
ArcelorMittal is facing huge challenges: Rethinking strategic planning, shifting production and refocusing sales, integrating different corporate cultures are just a few of the challenges that the group has vowed to tackle within a five-month period.
How do you ensure people of different corporate backgrounds, living in different geographical areas around the globe will be able to work with each other while ensuring long-term goals of increased competitiveness, efficiency and productivity?
When two different corporate cultures unify, changes are inevitable. Reviewing production cycles, delivery procedures, changing the manufacturing focus of geographically distinct production sites, reviewing supply-chain management, determining new responsibilities – all these bring uncertainty and trigger fears in people that have to be addressed early on in the process to avoid a collapse in corporate culture and business perspectives.
Businesses are defined by people and how they work together – something ArcelorMittal President Lakshmi Mittal understands perfectly well. It is not surprising that Mr. Mittal defined communication and discussion as the center piece of his integration strategy. For this charismatic leader, the success in integrating people into the merger process has been as important as the integration of business processes and he uses Web 2.0 technologies to achieve this objective.
ArcelorMittal stands as a compelling example of how corporations may use corporate blog and Web 2.0 capacities to achieve business objectives that would have been difficult to achieve only 5 years ago. In analyzing some of the ways the new steel group uses corporate blog, podcast and videocast capacities to achieve its integration objectives one can learn a great deal about the effective usage of the new Web 2.0 tools – allowing to do ‘business almost as usual’ but with a far greater potential for outreach and based on functionalities that provide readers with a greater array of choices in terms of preferred communication channels.
Stay tuned for more on ArcelorMittal – in the meantime, I invite you to access the groups Communication Platform entitled “Creating History - Documenting the Creation of one Of The Greatest Companies In The World” at the following address:
http://www.arcelormittal.tv/season1/episodes/
