ShipCrunch

More on online advertising in shipping

A few tips to build your shipping business's visability on the Internet, by trusting your audience's instincts

By Ryan Skinner (email)

With a nod to ShipServ's excellent recent publication "the 10 essentials of online advertising in shipping", I humbly add a few more points.

I start with a broadside at advertising, in general. I feel like advertisements are, by nature, disruptive. That is, an ad gets between a user/viewer/customer and what they're actually after. When you want to read a TradeWinds article about Maersk's efforts to get back to profitability, that advertisement flickering on the right-side of the screen for bilge pumps is simply fuzz, an irritant. Much advertising is, for this reason, inefficient, for the advertiser, the reader and the carrier.

Fortunately, there are ways to reap the benefits of advertising without disrupting, and that's what I'm after in many of these new points. It's what I call trusting your audience. The audience knows what it wants, and it knows where to find it. When we spend money on efforts to increase our business online, we need to help that audience find us, understand us and interact with us, all in the right context. Don't just jump in front of them with jazz hands.

Who's got the most visited web-site in shipping? Answers!

Maritimerankings.com has all the answers. Oddly, one web-site appears near the top in every search.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

To marketers desperate to get the most bang out of their online advertising buck, a simple ranking of the most visited web-sites in the shipping industry would be golden. Well, not surprisingly in the age of Internet entrepreneurship, someone's thought the same thing, and made a site to answer that need.

It's maritimerankings.com, and it proposes to be the compete.com of shipping sites. That is, you can pump in any 5 url's (that is, web addresses) of shipping sites, and it will run an objective algorithm to give you a ranking, both relative to the other four and over an absolute list.

Cool, huh?! According to maritimerankings.com, this blog is the 244th most authoritative web-site in all of shipping. Hot damn! Time to retire!

Strangely, no matter which five sites you enter, you will automatically be given the results of a sixth site: www.marinelink.com. This sixth entry is a US-based shipping news site, owned and run by New Wave Media. Now that alarm bells are ringing in your head, you do a WHOIS search to see who is behind this maritimerankings.com site. Surprise, the owner is hidden behind a proxy site.

Big Blue Audit: www.americanshipper.com

A new series of videos explore the ups and downs of maritime web-sites. First off: American Shipper!

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Maritime publications on the web are a diverse breed, ranging from the app-ness of Coracle to the flatness of...well, many others. In the spirit of improving things, I start a series of "audits" of these sites, delving into the users' experience, the advertisers' experience and opportunities lost (and won). This will hopefully be a weekly clip that goes site-by-site through the highs and lows of user interaction, content management and other good things web.

A proviso: I am not a web developer. I am a PR guy who sees a fair number of shipping sites and news sites and has opinions. The Big Blue Audit shares those opinions.

Americanshipper.com gets the honor of kicking this off because they're at the top of the alphabet. This is a site that exudes a sense of rich content, but unfortunately gives the impression that that depth is poorly shared and managed. Most of all, the site gives the impression that the publishers think very magazine, and very little Internet.

Here's the point-by-point analysis:

Finally, here are the grades:

User experience (subscribers): 5/10

User experience (non-subscribers): 3/10

Advertisers experience: 4/10 (bump up to 5 or 6, depending on the SEO nature of outbound links)

Envisioning shipping - Alternative PR thoughts

Shipping's too often linked in the popular imagination with...ships. Think about a new image.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Shipping's Siamese relationship with world trade means that, at least from a PR perspective, shipping's reputation rises and falls with public perceptions of world trade. And to those who despise world trade for various reasons, shipping's an easy target. Floating steel monoliths lack a certain warm fuzziness.

That the vehicles of shipping, the ships themselves, represent the entire industry in the public imagination is an anachronism, and a damaging one. Both shipping and world trade would benefit from a less materialistic image, and a more humanized one.

What about the entrepreneurs, small businesses, workers and families who see an unparalleled level of opportunity thanks to the fluid movement of goods around the globe? What about the consumers who can tap a world of goods, resources and commodities?

I've written before about the PR value of source. Now, there's a tool for it. A new site called WikiChains is mayhaps humble, but it has tremendous potential for a shipping industry that put its thinking cap on. While the site's founders arguably lean away from the miraculous effects of world trade, this could very well be the upshot of such a site.

What wouldn't shipping gain from a new image and paradigm wrapped up in the stories and relationships of suppliers from across the globe? This is a wiki-based project, so the path is free for anyone to get involved. If I were shipping, I would embrace this thinking - either through this WikiChains platform, or one similar to it.

Let's herald a new, more sophisticated image of the shipping industry! 

New Containership Design a Quantum of Solace

A small step for ship design may not equal a great leap for shipping

By Ryan Skinner (email)

I'm a fan of concepts, and the PR drives that accompany them. So I approach new concepts with one part ardor and another scepticism. DNV's new containership concept inspires me to an extent true to its name: Quantum, or "the smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently".

Imagine that the curve below represents the innovations of a particular activity, with the X-axis representing time and the Y-axis performance.

It's called the business S-curve. After a certain amount of time (near the top of the curve), it takes a tremendous amount of time, money and effort to achieve increasingly marginal improvements. At some point, you've got a Saturn V budget to achieve a miniscule improvement to something that, in fact, may be on the way out altogether. I would argue that Quantum is flirting with this kind of irrelevance.

 I'm not arguing that container shipping is on the way out. Craig Eason's take on Quantum in Lloyd's List said: "DNV itself recognises that this concept is in some ways designed to stir debate about shipping innovation, to help create a stepping stone to some of the more distant concepts being promoted."

Consider this a piece of that debate. My argument is that new hull shapes, new hull materials, new ways to package a container and these shipping 1.0 ideas are no longer the domain of concepts. These are the domain of stepwise shipping innovation. They're not the stuff of hopes and dreams. They're not turning anything on its head.

My concern with this concept is that it falls into the water trap - not far-sighted enough to be on the green, too far-sighted to line up a good approach to the green. In other words, it isn't wild enough to generate inspirational juice, and yet too wild to open the cash sluices of shipowners.

Someone in shipping would probably say I'm wrong. That this hull shape is the circle squared, or something like that. But, as far as concepts go, I'm eager to see one that deals with something more plastic than steel, metaphorically speaking.

CONTEST: Who is shipping's biggest mover and shaker?

Travel much? Demonstrate that you are the most fleet of foot in the entire industry (just in time for CMA Shipping!)

By Ryan Skinner (email)

So you travel all over the world, either on a ship, or to conferences, or to customers, or to fix equipment that's busted, or to open affiliates, or meet partners. But do you travel more than your peers? Do you travel the most?

Now's your chance to compare yourself to your peers. Now's your chance to get something more than a gold frequent flyer card and intimate knowledge of hotel policy. Now's your chance to get your peers to say: "Dang. That guy (or girl) really lays down the miles. Wow!"

Here's how this contest works: You need to be in LinkedIn. Then you need to use TripIt. Then join the LinkedIn group called "Shipping Miles". The group's only real purpose is as registration for the contest. The contest runs from March 1 to November 1 - eight months. There'll be monthly winners, a leader board and an overall winner.

Remember to fill out your TripIt stats religiously. Some may feel tempted to fudge their travel records to get an edge, but keep in mind your colleagues will likely call your bluff. In November, a winner will be announced.

You think you're a big mover and shaker of shipping? Prove it!

More warm-up to Connect10: Wärtsilä and DESMI on e-commerce!

In less than two months, the shipping industry's leading e-commerce practitioners will gather in Copenhagen for ShipServ's Connect10 conference.

As part of this blog's ongoing Connect10 e-commerce shipping summit coverage, I interviewed executives at Wärtsilä and DESMI to hear their thoughts and opinions on e-commerce and Connect10. Read all about it in the Connect10 blog: http://5956n.typepad.com/connect10.

A great piece of marine marketing

A lively reception and numerous calls to action lift Martek Marine to top of the class

By Ryan Skinner (email)

It is a seldom but joyful occasion when I feel compelled to shout the praises of a company in shipping for excelling in marketing. I've done it before for both ShipServ and DSME. This time, it's Martek Marine.

If you want to see the kind of things I associate with a slick and professional presentation, go to www.martek-marine.com. Here are strong and clear messages, unambiguous calls to action, several pieces of rich media and a deep desire to engage the visitor.

I love the simple video about their defibrilator. By adopting the perspective of a child, they use a design language that can't be misunderstood. So many companies in this industry think that they need to be tough and macho. These people surely outsell those arguments every day of the week.

So many companies think that a web-site's all about stuffing as much information as possible about themselves. They never think - or not deeply enough - about the experience of those who arrive at the page.

Martek Marine reaches out to visitors. Simply publishing profiles of many of their employees is a social media-friendly act. Now I know who to praise, for example: Simon Coulson, Vanessa Muff and Nick Purcell in Martek Marine's marketing department. If I have questions about customer service or quality, I also know who to reach out to.

Last but not least, Martek Marine's CEO not only twitters, he twitters actively (a rare enough thing). And this two months after starting.

If there's anything I would criticize in this otherwise sterling online marketing effort, it would be that they require registration to see the demonstrations and videos. I know their thinking: Let's get those contact details! But the latest thinking on this says: No, give 'em the content. When the audience is ready, they will come to you.

Anyway, way to go, Martek Marine!

Yo dude, pimp my ship! - Fit out the phattest sea-ride...

 Make your suggestions to the best, wildest fantasy ship, and see your ideas come to life

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Somewhere, at some time, someone probably said: "Yeah, this ship's OK, but it'd be better if it had...." And anyone who's ever seen MTV's Pimp My Ride knows that all your dreams can be realized, as long as you have some cash, a welding torch and some know-how.

Now, anyone can propose any thing for the wildest ship imaginable! Pimp a ship! Whatever's your thing - swimming pools, 3-D cinemas, mud wrestling, laser weaponry, whatever! - just propose it in a comment below or take part in the discussions at LinkedIn groups.

It can be a cruise ship, a tanker, an offshore ship, any commercial vessel, and any wild thing you'd like to put on board. Use your imagination! The results will be put into a series of illustrations by a colleague of mine, a designer who can make any thought into gorgeous visuals. And anyone who takes part will get co-credit for the design.

(and if you happen to be, or to know, a television producer, then this just may be the next great hit since Ice Road Truckers!) 

Talking about shipping's biggest social media campaign

Learn from RCCL, whose Oasis of the Seas social media campaign was an industry benchmark

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Last month I spoke to Royal Caribbean's director of brand communications Tracy Quan about the enormous social media campaign that RCCL launched to accompany the launching of the world's largest cruise ship. Read what lessons she learned and how they put the campaign together, published in the latest newsletter from Say PR & Communications.

Here's the article!