The state of social media in shipping

 When will social media cross the "can no longer be ignored" barrier in maritime? Has it already?

By Ryan Skinner (email)

I've talked to many communications professionals in shipping about social media, and it's clear that social media is now definitely hitting their desks. Either it's an executive who's read about it in The Economist (special insert a couple of weeks ago) or one or more employees who've already taken the plunge (and are quickly touching upon communications policy issues).

So far, many have been able to say, in both directions: "Sure, it's happening. But it's happening independent of us. We don't need to get into this." Why the hesitation? I think most communications directors file social media in the digital box. And the whole digital thing gives many of these people hives. So they ask whoever handles their website to keep an eye on the thing, and exhale.

That's a mistake. 

First and foremost, social media isn't a web thing; it's a PR thing. I'll get back to that. Secondly, this thing is growing, and the more it grows the faster it will grow. Social media doesn't follow a technology adoption curve, which is slowed by infrastructure, process change and the rest; rather, it follows an individual media adoption curve. Looking back, it seemed like email popped up overnight, didn't it? Same with social media. Just ask your friendly, neighborhood American.

The point is this: Social media is pointless in a vacuum. The more people in, the more interesting it gets. After all, the only reason American companies dove into this was that it saw everybody going there; they just followed the people. 

So where is social media in shipping today? Here I try to map the terrain. First of all, a quick definition of social media. I will limit social media to discussion forums, blogs, twitter, networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. There's more to it, but this is a start.

1) LinkedIn

Perhaps the lowest-hanging social media fruit for business types around the world, LinkedIn has a strong shipping following. A search for "shipping" among LinkedIn people gives almost 180,000 results; maritime, 55,000+. The latter is probably the more accurate figure. As for groups dedicated to discussing shipping, here's the top 20, as of today.

That totals over 37,000 people involved in shipping-related discussions. If you add "the long tail" of smaller groups related to shipping, you can probably double this figure. TradeWinds weekly newspaper, by comparison, reaches 48,000 shipping professionals.

2) Discussion forums

The flora of discussion forums outside of LinkedIn is diverse, and highly disorganized. It would be hard to provide an exhaustive guide to these fora, but I can at least cite gCaptain's excellent forum for mariners and shipping professionals (5,500 members, 900+ active members), the hardy Maritime Professionals forum (no data), Digital Ship's forum for maritime technology (1,000+) and Bunkerworld's forum for all things shipping (no data).

3) Blogs

This is one of social media's more powerful entities, and - so far - one of the weakest areas for shipping. There are many excellent mariner blogs, but good blogs dealing with the business of shipping are few on the ground. A handful of companies, primarily in the US and UK, have set up blogs with varying success. Clay Maitland and Dennis Bryant have done an excellent job establishing a reputation as thought leaders through blogs. But adoption of blogs across the industry lags. This blog has a short blogroll (I need to update it), Maitland has a decent blogroll and many ship media titles have a blog presence (though few even deserve the name).

4) Twitter

This is a lively branch of the shipping social media tree. James Tweed's Who's Who in Shipping (the top 40 influential shipping tweeps) has somehow materialized a best-of group in this channel. But a more democratic way to guage shipping on Twitter might be a simple search for terms like maritime and shipping. My "maritime" search shows anywhere from 10-100 tweets an hour containing the word maritime. These are of varying quality. Some are excellent tips; others are twaddle. A rough estimate of shipping tweeps? Maybe a couple hundred active tweeters, and double that inactive (just reading).

5) Facebook

Truly, my weakest field. I know anecdotally that many of the bigger names in shipping social media have large presences in this channel (with fan numbers in the hundreds), but follow it seldom. Anyone with better data here is invited to offer it.

Along with these core channels, there are countless others with smaller followings, and some companies have semi-social proprietary networks. The latter practically defeat the purpose of social media, but perhaps it's a necessary half-step. If the number of channels and the number of users seem confusing, the best tactic might be a simple survey of marketers' key contacts. For the thousands of companies that have already done this and responded to Forrester, however, "created social media" tops the list of areas for increasing investment from 2009-14.

Finally, I argued that social media is not a digital issue; it is a PR issue. The reason social media has taken off is, quite simply, ease of use. You don't need to know CSS, HTML5 or any such nonsense to gain a heavyweight share of social media attention. Your digital people/person should probably be at the table, as a resource, but the core social media questions revolve around the PR discipline.

There are generally two starting points to social media involvement: Listening/monitoring and identifying business goals with social media. I'll get back to both in future posts.

Comments

[James Tweed]

Another excellent article Ryan.

With regards Twitter, one problem with simply searching 'maritime' is the issue of filter failure... IE, not actually getting what you want... For example, there are lots of tweets about 'Maritime' that actually refer to the goings on at The Maritime Hotel, or to Maritime Models (careful on this one, it's porn), etc...

The aim of the 'Maritime Top 40' is to try and tackle this filter failure so that anyone (whether you use twitter or not) can follow what's being said, without having to fight their way through the crud.

The list is algorithm driven so it can't be 'gamed', however, we may well be missing people to feed into our filter, and therefore invite anyone to contact us if they suspect we're missing someone who talks about the industry on twitter.

[julochka]

very interesting resumé of where it's at, but why is shipping ignoring it (aside from linked in?)? my theory is that it's because shipping is generally old-fashioned and slow to adapt and many of the people who would have to open up and "give permission" are old men in suits. i've had plenty of bosses who could barely operate their blackberries, let alone log in and tweet something (which they could while away hours doing in airport lounges if they were savvy enough). they are also generally afraid of such things, because they spiral quickly beyond a company's control and that scares them.

the groups i've seen on FB are largely people who have worked for various shipping companies - alumni, so to speak. i tried to use it in APM for a specific project and that was successful, but it died after the project ended. Safmarine Marine HR successfully uses FB to communicate with their seafarers and announce events. but that shows that each social media has its purpose.

the other problem i see with many of the forums and maritime blogs is that they tend to look really homemade and not particularly professional and i'm actually talking about layout here. for people who are used to what's out there in the rest of the blogosphere, they think, "ahh, they're not serious." and it's not hard to look professional with the tools (many for free) that are available today.

it'll be interesting to see if what you and james are doing (and what i tried to do before leaving a certain classification society in frustration with the speed/will to change) will spread. i certainly hope so, for shipping's own sake.

[Ryan]

For businesses, I'd say it's a change management process, and not necessarily a painless one.
For users, it's simply a matter of time. Given this survey, I'd say the time is soon.
I'd like to try to empower the former with some simple guidelines and concepts; the latter will take care of itself.