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ArcelorMittal’s WebTV Wins Another Award

Posted on October 12, 2007
Troy Bankhead

It started as a heated battle of wills, between Luxembourg-based Arcelor and London-based Mittal, and culminated in the largest merger ever seen in the steel industry. The newly-formed giant was now facing the daunting task of ensuring a smooth integration of the two cultures across the globe. The need for communication, for a voice, for information, had never been greater.

Enter WebTV: Creating History. Through 7 months and 15 episodes, this revolutionary initiative treated the sensitive issues and addressed the raw questions that its 320 000 employees were asking, and included every level of employee from the floor workers to Mr. Mittal in a down-to-earth style and transparent approach, putting into action the boldness and paradigm-breaking forward thinking embodied by the new ArcelorMittal brand.

Inviting visitors to comment, react, and interact with ArcelorMittal and other visitors to the site through a decidedly web 2.0 approach, WebTV was immediately accepted by its employees worldwide, and was quickly noticed by the international press, including Les Echos, the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and many others. Having earned several awards including the First prize in the Intrablog Enterprise 2007, WebTV has won yet another: first place at the European Festival of Responsible Communication, in the Web and Innovative Media category.

WebTV was conceived in a blog style, with non-censured commenting, feedback, alerts, user rating of content, RSS feeds of content, seeding of each episode to all major video sharing portals, and active participation from ArcelorMittal’s Internal Communications. This initiative reflects the shift in expectations of corporate communications, and stands as a good example of the benefits that corporations can gain by channeling the voices of their employees rather than trying to control and suppress them.