Today, roughly one in three shipping professionals see social media as a valuable new tool.
By Ryan Skinner (email)
This is the ninth part of the ten-part FoIS series that I introduced last week, presenting the results of a unique survey about Internet use in the shipping industry. The survey was created by this blog, together with ShipServ for its Connect10 conference earlier this year.
For those interested in receiving the full responses in a .pdf report after the full series has been published, send me an email requesting it.
The eighth and final question of the survey was:
What's your view of social media and its role in the shipping business?
The responses:
Analysis:
Despite what might seem like an overwhelmingly negative response (with 2 of 3 expressing either total ignorance or dislike), this is arguably a very optimistic result for social media in the context of the shipping business. Given that more than 1 in 3 professionals feel like blogs, facebook, LinkedIn, twitter and sites like them are valuable, this could reasonably challenge traditional media.
The value of social media channels is very closely linked to the presence of your contacts and relationships in these channels. Once they are present, the value increases exponentially. With traffic by shipping professionals increasing at these forums, there is every reason to believe that the value of social media will increase rapidly in coming years.
Key points
- 1 in 3 shipping professionals see social media as a valuable new business tool
- Only 1 in 20 respondents are completely ignorant of the social media phenomenon
Do you have comments to the question, the results or the analysis? Share them below in the comments field!
Tomorrow what I call FoIS (the Future of the Internet in Shipping) wraps up with part ten, in which we draw conclusions to the survey.
Wonder whether social media is an effective tool to reach my targeted market and other stakeholders. How can I monitor this?
Posted by: Wanja Ndirangu | May 28, 2011 at 02:00 PM