Small Beer social platform reaches big audience
As a company that consists of a mix of employees requiring different communication tools, Kompania Piwowarska a Polish subsidiary of global brewer SABMiller, faced a huge communication challenge. It needed to find a way to help its employees access news and information. The answer: a new social network called Small Beer.
by Wojtek Mrugalski, communications manager, Kompania Piwowarska 
Kompania Piwowarska (KP), part of multinational brewery company SABMiller, employs 3,300 people, the majority of which work as production staff or sales representatives. Their access to electronic media is limited, so often they need to rely on face-to-face communication (usually most effective and expected by employees, but not always possible) and printed materials.
Magazine matters
Printed materials include a corporate magazine The World of Beer. In 2008, when we decided to readdress our internal communication at KP, the magazine was a highly recognizable and appreciated source of information among many employees. It also received external recognition – numerous awards from professional forums. However, more and more often employees would complain the magazine was too “glossy” and that it didn’t represent their point of view. Our awareness of employee opinions was the result of both formal and informal feedback. The formal feedback came from a communication survey we held and the informal from numerous conversations with colleagues.
For many, it seemed to be a magazine for management; employees couldn’t find the topics they considered important and relevant for them. They would also often mention that one of the drawbacks of a printed magazine was that it only communicated one-way and didn’t encourage dialogue i.e. it simply providing information and was not strategic enough. This area – we thought – was addressed by other forms of communication such as town halls, road shows, online intranet chats or other forms of face-to-face interaction. However, this wasn’t the case.
We have seen examples of collaboration across the board with employees establishing their own sub-groups within the network.
The print cost of producing the magazine was also high; over time it had developed into an 80-page book released on a monthly basis – a true chronicle of everything happening in the company. Employees would often indicate that this form of communication was not very environmentally-friendly. Finally, despite all our efforts to make the magazine people-friendly, many of our employees would repeat this mantra – “it’s the Board’s own trumpet they love to blow”. We found this out from informal feedback – we would talk to people about the magazine and continuously hear from them that the magazine was nice, but it was the official voice of the Board, and that’s why they didn’t trust it.
It was at this time that we became aware that our people were active in the area of social networking – we saw their profiles on Facebook and its various counterparts. In employee surveys they told us they wanted change, preferably through implementation of modern communication tools. That is when we decided to develop an internal social network.
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