Webcasting takes hold; Fortune 500 company Rohm & Haas is taking interactive Web communication and training to new heights

Communications News,  Dec, 2006  

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INTERACTIVE WEBCASTS

When watching a webcast, participants can submit questions, and when the Rohm and Hass presenter is finished with the presentation, she can then answer questions submitted by the audience in detail after the event.

Since the beginning of the year, Rohm and Haas has successfully created and distributed more than 35 webcasts, and projects to conduct a total of 75 webcasts for 2006, double what its webcast activity was in 2005. Of those, two thirds were to external customers, the remainder to internal audiences.

"The template-driven publishing process helps make the expanded webcasting schedule possible," Friedlander says. "As we move forward, I'm really starting to see a 50/50 split-50% customers, 50% internal. The ability to interactively talk to employees in Shanghai, for example, is just fantastic. We do a webcast from Philadelphia at 8 p.m. and then we're live in Shanghai the next morning with live polling and Q&A. From what we are hearing, they feel a little bit closer to the company using this technology."

Friedlander has difficulty putting an exact value on the benefits that the company has realized from its adoption of corporate webcasting. The company has had a conscious focus on highlighting the intangible benefits achieved from the development of improved communications methods with its customer base, rather than thinking of its outbound webcasts as just a primary vehicle for pumping up sales.

"One of the values of the IVT solution is the ability to collect usage data from the webcast," says Friedlander. "Rohm and Haas does not use webcasting to ask for a sale. We use it to inform and educate customers about our technologies, and the data that we collect allows us to service and inform our customers about concerns they might have about certain products. It allows us to capture that information and respond in a timely manner."

The webcasts are meant to be an information-sharing exercise between Rohm and Haas' chemists, marketing managers and product developers, and the company's customers. While webcasts help disseminate product information that may contribute to sales later on down the line, the company recognizes that the dynamic of the online sessions would change noticeably if prospects would come to view the presentations as selling sessions rather than learning opportunities. To that effect, webcasting has changed the corporate culture of the company, transforming the way online multimedia communication is perceived.

Some Rohm and Haas executives have begun to use webcasting as an essential communications tool, Friedlander says. "With locations around the world, it's impossible to visit them. They're beginning to use webcasts on a quarterly basis to regularly update their teams. We do this for offices in North America, Europe and Latin America, as well as the Asian Pacific region. In the future, more executives will be doing quarterly briefs this way and our CEO will begin delivering his internal communications via webcasting."