Bram Koster

Manager of Digital Communications at AkzoNobel

My name is Bram Koster. I’m the manager of Digital Communications at AkzoNobel. For those of you who don’t know AkzoNobel it’s the largest coatings and paints company in the world and it’s a major speciality chemicals company based in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam.

In the last month or so, at the end of April 2008, we launched a new corporate brand and I’m responsible for the rollout of this brand online so there are all the business and sub-business unit websites and country websites. All in all we’re talking about maybe 40-70 websites; the numbers vary because we might actually be putting some of those together and diminishing the number of websites.

The biggest challenge in this whole project, obviously, is the scale and bringing everybody together – all their responsibilities, all their interests and all their goals.

It is a corporate project we have to deal with business interests so there’s always some kind of tension there. We need to make sure that we do that in a good way and still enable all the businesses to do their job.

One of the other challenges was that the whole brand was a secret to almost the entire company up until the launch so there was a lot that we couldn’t share with all the people in the businesses, and only ever since the launch we’ve had a program started where we’re involving all those people as we need to do for rollout.

At this very moment as well we are setting up the intranet site; a basic Sharepoint site that we’re extending with a blog and also hopefully with a wiki.

Especially once the first rollouts will happen we’ll be able to make people share experiences, share tips on how to make good content but also how to use the system. Hopefully we can get something out of that and make the platform even better than it already is, obviously.

So basically we’re using the tools that we want to evangelise externally also internally to make this project happen. And another thing, still even though oil prices are going up, also face to face because that’s where you really get the commitment from the people. So we’re also looking at having regional sessions, getting people together and actually explaining the whole concept. Provide the training on the whole platform, and in how to write for the web, how to write in the corporate lingo (if that’s English? I don’t know) and also to write for search engines.

So very much maybe a Web 1.0 project actually because what we’re doing for the first time in AkzoNobel history is bringing all websites for all businesses and all countries into one design and also into one platform to better control the content, which is also part of the branding.

But we’re also looking at extending functionality over time, so we’re also endeavouring to Web 2.0 kind of functionality. We’re looking to more interactivity and more animated kind of content. More video etc.

But first this is the hygiene factor almost – we get the basics right. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past couple of months and I feel that we’re pretty far along with that and in the next couple of months we can start thinking about making things even better.

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