Podcasting at Altana Pharma Inc.

Welcome to the Melcrum Social Media Newsletter.

How do you connect with a geographically dispersed audience? iStudio, an interactive agency in Canada, introduced podcasts for one of its pharmaceutical clients as a personal and portable way to communicate with field employees.

In September 2005, Ron Clark assumed the role of vice president, sales of ALTANA Pharma Inc., a Nycomed company. The organization needed a cost-efficient way to introduce the new VP, build rapport between management and their sales team, and provide insights on key business initiatives. Of course, despite the ease with which podcasts can be produced, careful content planning was essential in order for them to be effective.

Introducing "Ron's Blog"
The sales team at ALTANA is predominantly a remote workforce, spread across Canada. In pharmaceutical sales, representatives are primarily on the road for most of the work day. Accessing e-mail or the company intranet is often a challenge due to the constraints of traveling. iStudio investigated new online techniques that would be helpful in reaching a remote workforce and suggested a corporate blog/podcast as the solution. They created “Ron’s Blog,” which allows employees to have an open online dialogue with Ron.

Ron’s monthly podcast is available via the blog. The podcast is a 10-15 minute audio file, which has a radio show feel. In each episode, Ron provides sales updates, shares insights and anecdotes and interviews special guests. The podcast can be listened to a computer or can be downloaded onto a portable MP3 player.

Early adoption success
The response to the podcasts suggests this medium has been a success: 76% of sales staff accessed the first episode and 88% accessed the second episode. The feedback was also positive, with comments like: “It feels a little more personal than an e-mail, and has much more emotion attached to it than even a voicemail,” and “I like it because it’s innovative and user-friendly...plus I think it brings you closer to the sales force.”

Clearly, employees find the podcasts much more personal than a voicemail or e-mail. In addition, employees like the opportunity to provide input into the content of future podcasts via Ron’s Blog. Even though the podcasts are primarily intended for sales staff, over 80% of all employees access each episode. The podcasting program has been so successful that the company gave iPods to all employees in 2006.

Best regards,

P.S. To support the process of planning podcasts, iStudio has produced a customizable template that lets you plan podcast content down to the very minute.

You can find the template on the Internal Comms Hub, or in Melcrum's special report on How to get started with Podcasting.

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