How Molson Coors Communicates with their Employees

Meg Walsh    October 8, 2015

Organization Name: Molson Coors

Industry: Leading Global Brewer

Molson Coors logo

In todays day and age it is becoming increasingly more difficult for companies to communicate messages to their consumers, due to all marketing ‘noise’, but they’re also struggling with communicating with their employees. Many organizations depend on email communications to their employees and assume that they are being read. This can be a time consuming process and doesn’t allow for the employee to participate in the message (comment, share, etc.) it’s simply a one-way dialogue.

Employees of socially engaged companies are… (Source: Altimeter & LinkedIn Relationship Economics 2014)

  • 57% more likely to align social media engagement to more sales leads
  • 20% more likely to stay at their company
  • 27% more likely to feel optimistic about their company’s future
  • 40% more likely to believe their company is more competitive

And yet, disengaged employees make up 74% of the average company’s workforce (Source: Tower Watson)

Molson Coors Brewing Company acknowledged that their communications with their 18,000 employees, spread out in 51 countries, needed to be addressed. The problem Molson Coors was facing was that enthusiastic employees from around the globe were often inquiring about the latest product offerings and campaigns, wanting to share branded content with friends and family, but didn’t have the resources to do so. This is when the idea to change their communications method happened. While the employees were eager to learn about and share Molson Coors content, the marketing team had other obstacles with how internal messages were being communicated. With 150 brands and multiple marketing channels in an array of regional markets, creating and sharing content with their employees became time consuming and ineffective.

The Solution:

In order to satisfy the employee’s requests and address the Legal and PR departments concerns, Molson Coors decided to implement a social business software, PostBeyond, that enables employees and partners to post approved brand content to their personal networks in an efficient, consistent, and measurable way. This program, internally named ‘Beer Post’, was customized to fit the needs of the business and its employees by allowing articles, videos and events to be shared on the portal. With the majority of social media being consumed via mobile device or tablet, Molson Coors adapted to their employees behaviors by developing Beer Post as an app.

“Our employee advocacy program started from making things more socially accessible, but it’s merged into a holistic way of thinking about how we communicate and engage with our employees in general”

The Results:

Educating thousands of employees on a new social platform all over the globe almost sounds impossible, however, because many of the Molson Coors employees were already in the social space, the sign up rate for Beer Post exceeded the organizations expectations. With implementing this new social platform, Molson Coors received analytics from the platform and started to gain better insight into their employees and their content consumption.

One of the biggest benefits from the program was the decrease in the cost per acquisition for new employees. What Molson Coors noticed was that recruiters would post new job opportunities to Beer Post, which resulted in employees externally promoting the opportunities with friends and colleagues.

It’s important for organizations to listen and adapt to their employees needs and behaviours. It’s vital for organizations to have a two-way dialogue with their employees in order to communicate their messages in an effective way. Consumers have migrated to social media to consume information and to receive customer care, so it seems natural that employees are behaving the same way.

To learn about how employee advocacy can benefit your organization, listen to this audio webinar “Integrating Your Content Markting Strategy with Employee Advocacy.”

 

Web references –Molson Coors, PostBeyond, SocialMedia.org

To contact the author of this entry please email: meghantwalsh@gmail.com

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Programme Director, Social Media for Business Performance