What happens in Rotterdam, Singapore, Athens, Houston…

The publication last week of ShipServ’s annual survey on the use of e-commerce and social media in shipping immediately put me in mind of one of my favourite pieces of internet video. Depending on your business area and age group it’s either old hat or an absolute jaw-dropper.

I use it as part of media training sessions for corporate clients and the reaction is normally the same. You can contest the numbers – and some of the factoids for that matter – but the direction of travel is clear.

As a Generation X-er I get social media even if I’m not very good at it. For the baby boomers in senior management, they know that their kids do it, but I suspect they spend most of their time ignoring it and hoping it will turn out to be another dotcom bubble.

It won’t of course – whatever happens to the Facebook share price. Communications, connectedness, sharing, collaboration. There are the things that the infrastructure of the internet and the lingua franca of the web were designed for. The ARPA scientists might not have realised just how many amusing animals were out there, but the business applications are just as important.

Shipping, perhaps predictably is chugging up to speed on e-commerce and social media. The leaders online tend to be, well, the leaders in the real world, though there are plenty of marketing managers who use LinkedIn – some more intelligently than others it must be said.

E-commerce and social media is being used, and probably more widely than ShipServ suggests, though the survey included both responses from its buyer and seller community as well as offline responses gathered at the SMM and IMPA shows.

It confirms a general upward trend in use of e-commerce (+10% from 2011), but with only a quarter of companies surveyed saying they completed all their purchasing activity online, there is room for improvement.

Some 70% of respondents reported that they had increasing their use of social media platforms in last 12 months, but a quarter said they currently didn’t use social media in a business context.

Most tellingly, more than 40% of respondents said that they currently didn’t measure the success or otherwise of their internet activity. Some 45% said senior management had little or no interest in social media.

As ShipServ Business Development Director Mark Warner suggests, this means that the education process needs to continue.

“In past surveys, social media has often been described as a ‘waste of time’ but the last year has seen a real shift in opinion and this has been helped by campaigns by leading shipping companies such as Maersk and Teekay. However there are still sceptics on the usefulness of social media in the industry and this is highlighted by a lack of support from senior management.”

In terms of the measurement of what businesses do online, Warner says simple web analytics can be the easiest way to track how successful a campaign or e-commerce project has been, making it pretty easy to capture some usable numbers of return on investment.

“I think the fact that 40% of users are not measuring activity is down to the fact that brand awareness has traditionally been seen as the primary goal of any specific campaign in the maritime industry,” Warner added. “Our sector is still getting to grips with lead generation campaigns and the metrics that are required to measure them.”

You can see the results of the survey via the link above or download a tasteful scattering of the data via this infographic.