How Social Media has outsourced the ‘Image of Shipping’ debate

My recent monthly article for BIMCO garnered more interest than usual – perhaps because it mentioned the mighty Maersk Line and its adventures in Social Media. Either way the subsequent Marine Money conference saw the closing panellists (the Dynasties of the Sea) make a detour away from finance and into the image of shipping.

A reflection on that piece follows, but it could be summarised as ‘if you wore a uniform in your first job, you care about the image of shipping and if you wore a suit then you probably don’t’.

Meantime, something strange has happened in shipping – the success of Maersk has created a situation where the image of shipping is achieving its first positive public engagement in a long time.

What can the other sectors learn from this and how does the rest of the industry need to know about the potential and the pitfalls of Social Media? Read on…

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How Social Media has outsourced the ‘Image of Shipping’ debate

In Italy, until comparatively recently, if your company went bust owing its creditors, the implications were more than just financial. Under the terms of the Royal Decree, a delinquent debtor would lose social rights, be prevented from voting and would be shunned in both public and private society.

These days of course, little of that rigmarole would be necessary. Even before your business went bust, there would be speculation on the internet, and Social Media in particular. Even before the deed was done, there would be a Twitter hashtag and providing the impact was significant enough, everyone with a SmartPhone and a stake in the story would be having their say.

Social Media is not all bad news of course – in many cases it can be the bearer of very good news. And 2013 looks like being the year when it breaks through in shipping, following years in which the pioneers stuck to their belief that it represents the next stage of not just media and reporting but also Customer Relationship Management.

I would go further and say Social Media is the opportunity that many in the industry have been waiting for to engage the public on “the image of shipping”. The example held up as the one to follow is Maersk Line, the container shipping arm of AP Moller-Maersk. And rightly so. Maersk has succeeded in extending its already very strong brand into a new channel and in doing so engaged with a new generation of stakeholders.

And let’s not forget how far it has come. As recently as the early 2000s, Lloyd’s List would receive the AP Moller (as was) financial results as one page of curly fax bearing perhaps 10 benchmark figures and a confirmation that the company had continued to operate in the reporting period.

There was no conference call, no interview, no PR-driven two-bottle lunch, but the finance editor still had to spin a front page lead and perhaps an analysis piece too. How this was achieved – and with such a degree of quality – is a testament to some long-vanished journalistic skills, but that’s another story.

Maersk Line is a Social Media success for a number of reasons. As its own Jonathan Wichmann points out, it’s a process that worked because it came from inside the organisation. It has completely embraced a culture of open information in the social media sense, across different platforms for images, news updates, social and professional interaction and more than that, it has engaged. Thus, when bad news strikes, as it must occasionally, your stakeholders already have some buy-in to your company and are more likely to see your point of view.

In my view, what Maersk Line is doing is something that only a handful of maritime companies could do successfully. In addition to ferry and cruise operators, container shipping is the most visible shipping sector, right on the nexus of B2B and B2C markets, so it makes perfect sense to engage in social media there. A portion of the general public already has some perception of the company and what it does, especially in its home territory.

There are other success stories, notably the IMO, which also brought in a specialist to run its programme. Moving a monolith like the IMO into the Social Media age will not have been without its issues – one of which is to illustrate how constrained was the traditional newsfeed out of the organisation.

But what Maersk has done is to become not just the proxy for container shipping in Social Media but for the wider shipping industry and many will be grateful for that. With Maersk Line making the running, the shipping industry finally has a positive, engaged and socially responsible role model to be proud of. With a similar programme in place at a major bulk carrier and tanker owner, we could perhaps begin to move on from bemoaning that nobody understands shipping.

The Maersk Social site is a great resource on what Jonathan Wichmann has done and this piece on his blog http://jonathanwichmann.com/2012/12/30/maersk-media-miracle/ is a useful primer on the early results.

I would add just a couple of words of caution to anyone attempting to emulate its success. As a PR consultant to the maritime industry, it is obvious to me that some players still don’t always get mainstream communications right.

There is a temptation to see Social Media as a way to go around those pesky journalists who won’t print your press releases and while this is literally true, it can’t make a dull story interesting. Social Media is not just another channel, it has different characteristics but it is easy to repeat the mistakes made in traditional communications.

There is a temptation, presumably among senior managers, to see Social Media as a distraction. They are right. Twitter in particular, is a gateway drug, sucking up as much time as you have available as you attempt to monitor a development or despair of the inability of others to spell or form sentences correctly. Much of the debate on LinkedIn groups is little more than sales pitches, and where you do find genuine conversations, the lack of active moderation can make threads difficult to follow.

It is easier than ever to be your own publisher and while in some ways this is a good thing, there are reasons why magazines and newspapers have a publisher, an editor, a team of reporters, sub-editors and production staff. Take these away and you are dealing with a very different beast, against which you have very little of the redress you enjoyed when you paid to read something.

Finally, is Social Media the second dotcom bubble? No. It’s one of the applications that the internet has been waiting for. The fact that the shipping industry hasn’t completely figured it out yet doesn’t make that less true. And to paraphrase Johnny Kulukundis, who saw very early on that the shipping community on the East Coast of the US needed a social forum that would irreverently entertain, inform and challenge it; “even if you don’t know what to do, do something”.