How Molson Coors Globally Scales Its Social Brand With PostBeyond

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When we were looking for a solution, it needed to be scalable but sustainable. PostBeyond was willing to be flexible, and more so, partner with us to grow together and change as the program grew.

Melisa Chung Molson Coors PostBeyond

– Melisa Chung, Corporate Social Media and Digital Manager, Molson Coors.

 

 

According to Altimeter Group, only 41% of organizations have a strategic plan for employee engagement and advocacy. Learn how Molson Coors is using PostBeyond to roll out its global employee advocacy program and strategically support its marketing, recruitment, and sales teams.

Challenge

So how exactly do you help Molson Coors, a leading global brewery with over 10,000 employees in over 50 countries, transform the way it communicates its social brand?

Molson Coors Scale Social Brand

Let’s say they wanted to empower and engage their enthusiastic employees to share authentic brand stories to their own personal networks. How do you ensure brand integrity? How do you do it efficiently?

The answer is simple: provide them with an easy, intuitive way of managing social content sharing and provide them with the infrastructure and custom support they need to scale it globally.

“The beer business itself is very social,” says Melisa Chung, Corporate Social Media and Digital Manager at Molson Coors. “We’ve always looked at various ways of building social brand equity, and typically we rallied our employees when there was a new campaign.”

One day, Melisa, who is also the global lead for corporate social media at Molson Coors, realized her company was hitting a roadblock.

Enthusiastic employees from around the world often asked about the latest product offerings and campaigns, wanting to share branded content with friends and family outside of the company. After all, who doesn’t want to send a friend an invite to a beer party?

Molson Coors How To Scale Social BrandBut with over 150 different brands and a wide array of marketing channels in diverse regional markets, Melisa says Molson Coors was “not efficiently sharing content with its employees.”

It was becoming a bit of headache, really. Marketing teams were creating great content, but sharing it internally was a slow and scattershot process. Although regular emails to tell staff about some of the great stuff that was happening were being sent, the process to provide messaging guidelines for sharing content was ad-hoc and time-consuming.

Melisa also recognized that Molson Coors had little control, let alone in-depth insight, into what employees shared and how. “Our social listening was limited to what was available on public profiles. It kept visibility into employee sharing low,” she says.

Molson Coors needed to stay current with the digital lifestyles of its employees and customers. The company needed to transform the way its employees globally communicate its social brand—and do it in a scalable, sustainable and secure way.

“We were digging around for a way to make the process easier—sharing content, monitoring and sending out customized emails in a more automated way,” she says.

It was plain to see that better ‘social brand infrastructure’ was needed. “At first, we thought of developing an internal content sharing solution ourselves,” says Melisa. “But we soon saw there were many solution providers out there already that had great platforms we could build off of.”

Solution

In October 2014, Melisa launched the company’s first global employee advocacy program and chose the PostBeyond EnterpriseTM platform to implement it after evaluating several solution providers.

Employee Advocacy Solution Molson Coors PostBeyond

PostBeyond provides social business software that enables employees and partners to post approved brand content to their personal networks in an efficient, consistent, and measurable way.

The content portal for the program, called ‘Beer Post’, features updates, articles and videos, including how to register for ‘Ice Bar’ launch events, how to make a BBQ sauce with dark ale, and snapshots of historic breweries around the world. Employees love it.

What did Melisa like about PostBeyond? “What I love is its simplicity—it’s very user-friendly,” she says. It doesn’t take long for an employee who is a social newbie to begin posting comfortably. In fact, it often takes less than 15 minutes.

And with 10,000 employees and a global roll-out, Melisa had to be sure it could scale efficiently and securely. She didn’t want any user-unfriendliness.

What clinched the deal for her, she says, was the platform’s scalability and PostBeyond’s ability to adapt to the unique needs of Molson Coors, such as tailoring administrative access to the platform and developing some additional features.

If the company was going to go global with the new way it communicated its social brand, it needed to make sure the social sharing infrastructure was easy to implement and easy to use in different regional markets.

Melisa was looking less for a vendor and more for a partner. “PostBeyond was willing to be flexible, and more so, partner with us to grow together and change as the program grew,” she says. “When we were looking for a solution, it needed to be scalable but sustainable.”

PostBeyond Employee Advocacy Social Business Enterprise Scale Software

Results

At first, Melisa aimed to sign up 500 employees in Canada within six months. But employees quickly embraced the customized content portal. “Within two weeks we got 500 employees signing up to be Beer Champion Advocates.” she says.

By March of the following year, she rolled out the program to include the U.S., U.K. and Ireland. Now nearly 1,000 employees have signed up. Customized content is currently available in English and French.

Social Business Results Molson Coors PostBeyond

Her next goal is to sign up 2,000 employees by the end of the year and eventually 30% of global salaried staff. Currently she is looking to “unlock social” in Central Europe, localizing the content in different languages as the next phase of the global roll-out.

“We are tracking well against that target,” says Melisa. “In fact, we have already exceeded that target in two of the three regions.” With PostBeyond’s hit-the-ground-running platform, which was way faster to implement than Melisa anticipated, she is meeting and exceeding her goals.

Now she can see across the regions internally, using PostBeyond’s custom analytics to gain better insight into employees and their content consumption. Now you can see how employees are engaging with your content and the type of content they enjoy most.

“We are looking on a quarterly basis to better tailor content creation, seeing what works and what doesn’t—it’s an evolving process as it scales,” she says. “PostBeyond has made my job a lot easier in terms of scalability as I used to do a lot of processes manually.”

So far, one of the most positive results from the program has been its help in decreasing the cost per acquisition for new employees, “which is a huge benefit in the long run,” says Melisa. “We got a lot of our recruiters onboard early on.”

Recruiters can post the latest job openings to ‘Beer Post,’ resulting in employees externally promoting the opportunities with friends and colleagues. Shout outs for talent is a great thing when you have thousands of enthusiastic employees.

The company is already seeing an increase in quality referrals. “Before we would just post to our career site and external job sites and hope the word got out,” she says.

Content Amplification Molson Coors PostBeyond

PostBeyond is also helping Melisa prepare Molson Coors’ sales teams for social selling in the digital global economy. “We have a huge refocusing and shifting of how our sales teams go to market right now,” she says.

Employee social networks have a greater reach to new contacts who would engage with employees, but not necessarily directly through branded channels.

“We are currently working to get in front of our sales teams with this, looking to turn the PostBeyond app into a formidable sales tool,” says Melisa.

“It’s not about what employees can do for your advocacy program,” she says, “but what the program can do for them.”

 

We are looking on a quarterly basis to better tailor content creation, seeing what works and what doesn’t —it’s an evolving process as it scales. PostBeyond has made my job a lot easier in terms of scalability as I used to do a lot of processes manually.

Melisa Chung Molson Coors PostBeyond

– Melisa Chung, Corporate Social Media and Digital Manager, Molson Coors.

 

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