ShipCrunch

What would Google do - if it was in shipping: Part 2

Easy access to rich information can change an industry; seek and ye shall find

By Ryan Skinner (email)  

Four months ago, I first asked the question "What would Google do - if it was in shipping?" based on the book by Jeff Jarvis. I explored the first precept - customers are now in charge - and how this could apply to shipping; now for the next precept:

• People can find each other anywhere

I'll close read two essential bits of that idea, and apply them to shipping. First: "Find each other".

New energy means tilting at jurisdictional windmills, in America

"The United States is the most regulated environment in the world," said a project manager for an   LNG upstream company

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Port Dolphin off of Tampa finally got the green light, this time from federal authorities. The floating offshore LNG regasification project will be able to bring as much as 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas to a fuel-hungry Florida, starting in 2013.

I'd interviewed the guy responsible for getting all of the necessary permits (and there are a lot), and felt satisfied that he had, at last, succeeded. Here are extracts from the interview last year:

How long is the schedule for Port Dolphin's deepwater port license?

"Port Dolphin filed the deepwater port license application with the US Coast Guard in April 2007, and we are aiming to get it approved in summer 2009, after just over two years."

So who at the federal level approves this, and why?

"The federal government has exclusive jurisdiction offshore, where the buoy and pipeline begin. Here the US Coast Guard, the US Maritime Administration, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Mineral Management Service, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanographic Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service all need to review the application and study the project's impact on their area of jurisdiction."

Environmental award spill threatens mental coastlines

It seems everyone and their mother offers a marine environment award. Why not a prize instead?

By Ryan Skinner (email)  

A small handful of company directors may lose sleep this weekend wondering whether they win next week's WorkBoat Environmental Award. In fact, many people may be losing sleep every year considering the overrun of environmental awards for shipping out there. The industry's practically awarded itself into some kind of environmental Valhalla. Consider a quick list:

• The Thor Heyerdahl Award
• Sustainable Shipping Awards
• WorkBoat Environmental Award
• The IMarEST Queen's Golden Jubilee Marine Environmental Award
• The EU Clean Marine Award
• The William M. Benkert Award
• AUSMEPA Environmental Award
• BP Shipping CEO's Outstanding Environment Award
• The Seatrade Award for protection of the marine environment

This is probably only a fraction of the true tally of different marine environment awards out there. Now, I'm no scrooge. I see the value of lauding good performance, and setting a bar for others to follow. But how many beauty pageants can one industry support? And are these award juries not sometimes a bit baffled by the kind of fuzzy guidelines they get to choose a winner?

Instead of yet another set of green laurels, why can't someone establish a prize for reaching a clear, far-sighted goal, a la the X Prize?

This could be given to the first company to make a viable design for a merchant vessel that didn't need to use ballast water. Or the first company to haul some X number of containers across an ocean with zero emissions. There are surely better people than I to ruminate on the exact criteria, but the idea stands. Why don't we prize an objective achievement, and take a break on launching new green awards? 

Break your news into China

Marintec's here and many companies want to win some PR in China - here's a couple ways to do it

By Ryan Skinner (email)  

Marintec kicks off in Shanghai next week with, according to its own site, its biggest show ever - more companies, more visitors, more space, more everything. It seems that the industry is manning this fort like a last bastion in the onslaught of recession.

Winning business in China will be a matter of cementing relationships and earning credibility. Good PR can boost both. But how do you get the word out in a Chinese media market that, frankly, many probably have little contact with, and little understanding?

Biggest enterprise social media brands in shipping

We've seen the entrepreneurs; here are the social media heavyweights among shipping co.'s

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Two months ago I had the temerity to crown the biggest social media entrepreneurs in shipping. Now I repeat the task for companies (note: not media companies or recruiters). Without further ado, here are the ten shipping companies who have dived deepest into social media to drive new business, in no particular order.

AMVER - The folks in the US Coast Guard who run this are clearly devoted to their social media presence. Along with the frequent blog postings and tweets, AMVER is easy to find on LinkedIn and in Facebook.

What is Fairplay doing?!

From straight shipping mag to trade/commerce/logistics/shipping mag...why? And will it work?

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Fairplay surprised me last week by announcing that it was changing its focus. In a leader that seemed to meander around the point, Fairplay revealed that it's going to be covering more than its usual true-blue shipping beat. It is expanding scope to go into more depth on legislation, logistics, technology and "commerce".

 What's driving the change? A good guess is necessity. The timing of the change seems a bit odd: too hasty to seem planned, and too late for many making 2010 advertising calendars. And the editorial said little about how this impacts advertisers, readership or distribution.

So now Fairplay's trying to metamorphose into a hybrid between Journal of Commerce and the Economist. The new mag's initial editorial certainly aimed high, arcing from the Oracle of Omaha, to Obama, taking a right turn at APEC and quoting both the PRC's Hu and COSCO's Wei, before landing like a plop with DHL's CEO (who offered this revelation: Asia is rich in natural resources, has a large, youthful and increasingly well-educated workforce and a growing middle class. Wow. Stop the presses.)  

What does this mean? To advertisers, it means you're less likely to nail readers whose interests begin and end within sight of a shipyard. But you're perhaps more likely to get the eye of charterers, logistics firms, forwarders and the like. It's a broader audience - take it or leave it.

Even if I sound critical, I think the move's an exciting one. After all, I already love reading the Economist. Now I get an Economist with a greater shipping bent, kind-of, if you squint a little.

Future of shipping news not what you thought

Subscribe to MarineBizTV's twitter feed today, and see the future of shipping news

By Ryan Skinner (email)

The future of (shipping) news is misspelled, grammatically incorrect and ripped off. Why do I say that? Because it's right and good. Because, to be frank, the real world has poor syntax and the real world proceeds without regards to copyrights. It's evolution's guiding principle: Whatever works.

MarineBizTV's twitter feed gives the perfect illustration of this future. Even twitterati accustomed to  seeing words and grammar rules sacrificed to the 140-character limit commandment would gag on some of MarineBizTV's 4th grade errors. Some examples:

"Japan to grow more stronger: "Hamburg Sud container vessel..."

"Skate, the first marine fish to face extinction: France:" (how many fish aren't marine?)

"French yacht ceased at Kochi Port: The CISF ceased a French yacht..." (seizure means trouble; getting ceased must be fatal)

When you consider that it's a news service, the errors seem even more egregious. But, to most readers around the world, the response is this: Who cares? Even those who notice the errors are more likely to say "just give me the news. Quick. Dirty. I don't care. I just want to know."

And you know what? They're right. "But it may lead to misunderstandings!" whine the crowd who worry through books like Eats, Shoots and Leaves (panda or hit-man?). H*ll, no, I say. Anyone who can't tell the difference between a panda and a hit-man through context is an idiot. In the examples cited above, the errors are no hindrance to get the meaning. And grade-school teachers can stuff it. The future is mispeled.

The second futuristic aspect of this feed is its absolute disregard for source. These stories come from all over the place, and the twitter feed gives no indication of source. Click-through and you'll be linked on to the source or led to MarineBizTV's own page (with source accreditation).

"But," shouts the editor of a big, musty flagship publication, "they won't know whether to believe what they're reading if there's no accreditation. How do they know the source is reliable?" That's dead wrong, and backwards-thinking. People are pretty savvy readers. Savvier than most publishers would like to think.

Readers want information and news, and they want it all, from every direction. Then they digest it all themselves. This is one future of (shipping) news: Rich, loud and scratchy.

Human error = Management #FAIL

Shipowners citing human error for casualties would be better to say "management failure"

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Yesterday, INTERTANKO (the umbrella organization for the world's independent tanker companies - or "non-oil company" tanker companies) declared that the greatest risk to tankers today is the human element. One might quip back, "isn't it rather the watery element?" Alas, companies citing the human element for accidents (human error) should rather point out the real deficiency: Management failure.

It has always seemed petty and injust when managers, seeking someone to blame for a loss, point their fingers at the personnel at sea. "He should have done such and such," or "he was suffering from fatigue; he should have alerted us," a manager might say knowingly, after himself working decades on a bridge.

Charterers understand who to blame, and they punish tanker companies accordingly. If an officer made a poor decision, it is because management failed to train him properly. If he was overly fatigued, it is because management has cut expenses to the bone. If he did not warn managers of his problems, it is because management led him to believe he would suffer for it. An army officer who miscalculates and leads his platoon into an ambush does not count up the dead and wounded as "soldier errors".

To err is human. Sometimes shipboard control systems are poorly designed. Sometimes any amount of training can not forestall a bad judgement call under duress. Sometimes unforeseen trouble outside the workplace for an employee leads to substance abuse.

Ultimate responsibility, however, will always lie with management. If it's not their task to prevent "human errors", whose task is it? Many managers surely understand this; my old man, a safety director for a Fortune 500 company in the US, surely did.

So why doesn't Intertanko stop blaming the "human element" and call it what it is, so that it might get better: Management failure.

The Great Green Frontier of PR

The only thing heating up faster than the planet is the debate over what really helps it, and what really doesn't

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Use the right deodorant and you'll be a chick magnet. Eat the right breakfast cereal and you'll never have a heart attack. Drive the right car and you'll never have to feel guilty about global warming.

Yes, advertisers have an answer for everything. Where do we draw the line for an appropriate claim and an innappropriate one? No one's likely to care how absurdly a deodorant maker exaggerates. But the FDA protests at false health claims. And we all stand to lose when erroneous environmental claims gain traction.

Neither buyers nor regulators can immediately assess the verity of a product's nutritional properties, or a technology's environmental excellence. These values are hidden. And even when they seem obvious, the truth is that we may jump to conclusions too quickly.

Obviously, science offers us a ready answer. We can measure, experiment, study and document findings. And we are discovering that, just like with the nutritional data, we need to take findings related to environmental benefit with a grain of salt.

Today companies in every industry, including the shipping industry, are racing to share the environmental credentials of their technology and solutions. Sometimes, overly simple claims are being made on complex interactions. Some are making claims well; some are doing it poorly.

The shipping industry and the regulators who will be making rules and quotas that impact it will need to relate to how environmental performance is documented and marketed. For better or worse, the battle for the planet is the most recent bastion of rhetoric.

I hope to explore how the shipping industry and regulators address environmental claims. Firstly, I will write about it in this blog (first up: an interview with a leading classification company about measuring green performance). Secondly, I will occasionally publish interesting environmental claims on a parallel site called "Greenwash", which invites readers to comment on specific claims, who makes them and how they're made.

Welcome to the great green frontier of PR! 

The PR Power of Source - Where do things come from?

Global trade will hurt if the absolute good of local supply gains widespread acceptance. A strategy...

By Ryan Skinner (email)

No one knows where anything comes from anymore. The best bet is China, of course. Looking for a new microwave oven recently, I asked the sales attendant where three models were manufactured. He couldn't find out in the chain's ERP system, or on the packaging. It wasn't until I bought one and got it home that I saw it, sure enough: Made in PRC.

People want to know where things come from. Two examples:

1) A Norwegian power supplier recently aired a new, funky commercial that gives a metaphysical, soft interpretation to where its power comes from.

2) Newspapers worldwide recently carried a popular story describing how Sweden has introduced carbon labelling on consumer products. Now buyers can see how much carbon goes into making things.

People want to know where things come from. It's a lesson for anyone in shipping, or global trade.

Working for a major telecommunications company some years back, I covered a story on how RFID tags were being used to track inventories in complex logistics systems. In other words, I understood that things, down to all their essential components, can in fact be tracked.

It wouldn't take a genius ERP company to develop an "open source manufacturing" solution, which allows consumers to track down not only the precise source of their product, but all of its constituent parts down to where the raw materials were mined, extracted and refined.

And this is no pie-in-the-sky idealism. Another client of ours is conducting HSE surveys of all of its suppliers worldwide. It's not only a sound working practice; it's protecting yourself from liability. Just ask Nike and Mattel - two companies noticeably burned by bad practices in their supply chain.

This information should be turned over to consumers. Yes, you'll expose that carefully developed supply chain to competitors' scrutiny. But, is that so bad? I mean, if your competitive edge is using a supplier no one else knows about, don't you have bigger problems?

Give people the ability to track products back to the source. People want to know where things come from.

Anybody who knows of a company that offers this kind of thing, please share, or leave a comment.