A magnetic pull of scrap metal, not unlike what sales reps should strive to achieve via social selling. Painting by Michael Kareken. “Magnet” (2010), Conte, 24″x18″.

Moving on from our findings regarding Social Customer Service, it’s now time to look at what we learned in Maersk Line’s social media study regarding Sales and not least the concept of social selling.

What is social selling?
Briefly put, social selling is about leveraging sales reps’ use of social media to perform better by getting in at an earlier stage in the sales funnel. It’s not about these employees spamming their networks/customers on e.g. LinkedIn and Twitter.

Quite the contrary: It’s about sharing knowledge and “teach where customers learn”. The goal is to build trust and pull customers towards you. And to sell better and more relevant products to the customers.

Also, social selling is mostly a sales tactics within the B2B arena.

A perfect fit
As such, social selling is a perfect fit for Maersk Line. We’re currently in the process of restructuring the methodology in our sales organisation, moving from so-called reactive to proactive sales, from price-oriented to value-oriented sales.

In other words, we do not want to sell the cheapest product, we want to sell the product that provides the best possible value to our customers. This approach demands that we understand our customers’ requirements better than ever before.

As mentioned above, social selling is not about bombarding the masses with generic marketing messages in order to generate thousands of arbitrary leads. Such an approach would directly contradict our understanding of how social media work.

The EloQueen: Talking to Jill Rowley
In order to learn more about how social selling works, we got in touch with the lady who’s known as the very top salesperson using social media like this, i.e. to “teach where customers learn”: Jill Rowley from Eloqua. Also known as “The EloQueen”.

For the past three years, Jill Rowley has been the top performing sales person in Eloqua. But what is she doing differently? What’s her secret?

First of all, she lives and breathes social media, she told us. The first thing she does when she gets up in the morning is to check Twitter etc. to see what’s going on and if there’s something that would be interesting to share.

Jill Rowley on Twitter where she’s “teaching where customers learn” and “getting in early”.

But why does it make sense in the first place to use social media for a Sales person like her?

“The buying process has considerably transformed the past few years,” she told us.

“Today, buyers are now out on the web and the social channels to self-educate and to learn solutions to their problems. Most buyers now are almost 57% through the buying process before they engage with Sales. So it’s important for Sales to make this shift towards social media and the web.”

One of the ways to go about this is through content marketing shared through selected employees. Essentially, this makes use of the employees’ professional connections on the social networks to place the company’s content where the users are.

Guidelines, training and quality content
From the Social Media Team’s perspective it’s first about developing guidelines and training for the sales reps. Although the sales reps need to be empowered and trusted to act on their own, it is also critical to ensure that they understand the difference between old entrenched channels (mail, phone, meetings etc.) and the social channels.

Secondly, the task is to continuously generate quality content that the sales reps can share.

“A key aspect,” Jill Rowley told us, “if you want your sales organization to do social selling is to have Marketing generate quality content. Sales should feel good about the content generated, so that they are ok with sharing it across their network.”

So what is ‘quality content’? First of all, quality content is about quality, not quantity. As a rule of thumb it’s better to do one good piece of content than three mediocre ones.

But of course, as TopRank CEO and content marketing consultant Lee Odden puts it in an article, “there’s nothing like a quantity of quality to win the week, month and year.”

Forget that you’re a sales person
Apart from ensuring a quantity of quality, it’s important to maintain credibility by avoiding the content being only about how good our products are.

“I sometimes forget that I’m a sales person,” explains Jill Rowley. “I only think about what would be valuable to the customers, and Eloqua is really good at generating content that I can share. The content is not just about an Eloqua solution. It’s content about the world in which our buyers live.”

In short, it’s about getting in early – and starting to teach where our customers learn.

Next up: Internal usage of social media & inspiring the best behavior.

Citibank’s Customer Service handle on Twitter – @AskCiti – is a good example of how you can humanize your brand and (most likely) improve customer satisfaction by getting some of your named customer service employees plugged in.

Moving on from my previous post about the value of social media and future directions for Maersk Line, it’s now time to zoom in on one of the new areas: Social Customer Service.

There are many good reasons why we in Maersk Line (and other companies for that matter) should care about social customer service, i.e. servicing customers via various social media outlets – in a structured way, involving colleagues from customer service.

The main reasons are:

• Call-deflection. Customers find the answer to their (repetitive) questions online and don’t need to call the company.
• Faster response time. If you have a global setup you can easily achieve a response time of less than 1 hour.
• It’s easier for our customers. It’s basically about following the customers so it’s easy for them – and they are spending more and more time on social media networks.
• It can work miracles when major incidents occur. A few tweets, a handful of replies and most customers will be well informed.
• The human touch. Allowing customers to get to know some of your employees who are allowed to bring their own personality (within the boundaries of the brand, of course).

Overall, the story is that the companies – if they get it right – can serve their customers better and in a more efficient way without losing the personal touch.

I should probably explain a bit further.

Open channels means call-deflection
The increased efficiency alluded to stems from accessibility and learning: by bringing customer interactions out into the open (for example via a dedicated customer service profile on Twitter) companies experience genuine call-deflection, because customers are able to find answers to their questions among previous responses.

In other words, the information is no longer hidden in closed 1-to-1 channels such as telephone or email. From time to time customers will even answer each others questions without the company having to reply.

Humanizing the digital interaction points
However, making the system more efficient is not the whole story. It is also about humanizing the interaction points.

Ten years ago, if you asked people what technology would do to our ways of interacting and more specifically how it would influence an area like Customer Service, most people would have predicted a more automated, AI-like landscape where ‘machines’ could do most of the work (and we could relax and stop caring).

What is interesting – and surprising – about social media is that they have shown us a different way, that is to say that we can become more efficient while at the same time continuing to interact with our customers in a personal and relevant way.

One of the best examples of how valuable it can be to respond in a human and personal way is that of mobile company O2 who calmed a twitstorm last Summer – and did so in the most awe-inspiring way.

Or are we becoming machine-like?
A question some would want to ask is whether it also works the other way around: That by getting people plugged in and digitalizing the interaction points we end up being machine-like. I think not. There are many reasons why people become machine-like, but I don’t see social media as being one of them.

Quite the contrary: Social media are effectively challenging the formal and even rigid ways some people and companies tend to interact.

The modern customer service agent? Some sceptics will claim that technologies are making us machine-like, and not the other way around. That’s an old fear as this illustration from 1924 of “The Man in the Machine” can testify to.

A two-fold objective for Maersk Line
So to summarize, Maersk Line has a two-fold objective in terms of what we want to achieve through customer service via social media: we want to optimise our procedures and increase customer satisfaction at the same time.

Having a person in the machine has proven to be imperative. Our customers want to have a relationship with us, and they want to be heard. Some of them even want to do all of this via social media.

PS: I should add that we are planning to launch a number of social costumer service solutions in Maersk Line.

Next up: Social selling and teaching where our customers learn. 

Four of @MaerskLine’s own Instagram photos. From left to right: A bird’s-eye view of Edith Maersk; the stern of Emma Maersk; a bus being discharged from Olga Maersk in Bangkok the 1950s; and the “Wall of #maersk” in our CEO’s office.

In my previous posts about Maersk Line’s social media study I wrote about first that social media has to somehow add value to the bottom line, secondly I summarized what we’ve done in the first year and a bit. Now, it’s time (finally) to look at the actual study.

In light of our current (and future, I should add) minimal use of resources, we decided to complete the study by internal means, i.e. we wrote it ourselves. But we also decided to try involving leading international experts through a number of so-called Hangouts on Google+. This was a success.

From singular to complex value creation
The very first question we were able to answer concerned the value of our past and present value creation via the social media. This exercise was almost absurd. First of all, it is impossible to quantify added value of this kind conclusively, since it originates both directly and indirectly, both in the short and long term.

Value creation is no longer (and probably never has been) singular. It is quite all right to measure singular outcomes, but if one wants to document the total business value, simply looking at a few quantitative parameters is pointless.

Nevertheless, we were able to determine that the Return on Investment (ROI) from our Facebook page is approximately 1500%. And the results are even better on Twitter, where we have barely used any resources but have a base of followers which has a 15x greater pull.

In other words, our average Twitter follower is 15 times more influential than the average Twitter user, and when we share something on Twitter, we therefore tend to find that it ripples out into the networks of most relevance to us.

What’s next is what’s interesting
Jay Baer, the President of Convince & Convert and a leading social media strategist, played a major part in the study. He said:

“It is of little value to look at the value of what you have achieved, or of what you are achieving right now for that matter. The important thing is what you intend to do going forward.  Only then you will find out what it is worth, and that will depend on what you do now.”

“Through your explorative approach to social media, you have managed to bring the company culture with you. You have generated momentum, and that is the most valuable of all that you have achieved, because that is what you need to build on.”

Jay Baer, one of the world’s leading social media consultants according to
both Forbes and Mashable, talks about what we’ve done in social media in ‘year one’.

Jay Baer continued: “Bringing the culture with you is by far the most difficult task. Even large companies, which are one-tenth of your size, cannot get it right. They are afraid to let go, as a result of which their social media programme dies before it has even begun.”

Detrimental not to adapt
Michael Chui, who was the driving force behind the social media study published by McKinsey last summer, made it clear that social media can no longer be ignored. It is imperative for all large companies to adopt social media as an integral part of the organisation, or, as he said to us in one of the first Hangouts:

“It will be detrimental for companies that are unable to adapt and exploit the social technologies and the associated optimisation opportunities. This may not happen this year or next year, but it will not be long. If you do not do it, your competitors will, and then, sooner or later, you will be outperformed.”

Michael Chui of McKinsey in a Hangout with us. In the Hangout, Michael Chui went through all the major findings in McKinsey’s social media study – and helped translate the findings into the world of Maersk Line.

Next step: to get it out into the business
That was the evaluation part. We then shifted our focus to what we should do in the future. The McKinsey study outlined 10 ways in which social media or technologies can create value for large companies. Of those 10, we identified the four we considered to be the most prudent for us to focus on in the coming years.

Besides our current area, in which we communicate via the official Maersk Line channels, which is an approach rooted in our communications department, we will focus on our customer service, sales and internal use of social technologies for collaboration purposes.

Next post: How we plan to use social media in customer service.

Two of our early IGs, featuring Estelle Maersk on the left and my son Wilfred on the right, in front of the giant Emma Maersk scale model in Copenhagen.

So, moving on from my previous post, let’s have a look at how we got started and what we’ve done to date in Maersk Line with regards to social media.

First of all, our approach has been one of insourcing. I was basically recruited to do the job, starting 1 October 2011,  and I have been running with it ever since. This approach was chosen by management because they realized that it was the only way forward if it was to be credible as well as cost-efficient.

What has worked really well for us, and what the management fully understood, is the big amount of trust and empowerment that came my way. If you want to humanize the brand and ensure speed of posting you need to work with minimal oversight.

Where are we today?
So what’s the status after a year and a half? We currently have a presence on 12 social media sites, two of which are Chinese. We use these platforms in very different ways, with respect for the different users out there. However, a common trend spans the entire spectrum, namely that we regard it as a communication tool as opposed to a marketing exercise.

If you ask me, this approach does not make it boring, quite the contrary. Our presence is characterised as being very visual, narrative, trustworthy, based on that which is current and close to the business. Our aim is to engage and enter into dialogues. And we endeavour to humanise our somewhat hardware-driven business.

The top line (social) numbers
We have over 830,000 fans on Facebook, on which our engagement rate consistently falls between 5-10%. Also, we have 45,000 followers on Twitter, and 30,000 followers on LinkedIn.

In addition to all of this, we have 22,000 followers on Instagram. We have received considerable praise for our use of Instagram (and photos in general), even from Instagram themselves. Recently, we became one of their “suggested users”.

Here’s a short case video that summarizes what we’ve done the past year and a half (I know, I know, it’s a bit to the dramatic side):

 
From mass media to corporate journalism
But what is it worth? Perhaps nothing? We don’t know for certain. But we believe we know that there is much more to social media than… social media alone.

Social media is merely a concept. It is a measure of where the media landscape and technology have brought us, specifically to the point where technology has become so sophisticated that it is capable of mirroring our behaviour and the actual structure of society right down to the individual level.

In other words: a society consists of individuals who are interconnected. The same can be said about the role of social media. Away with mass media; today, that space belongs to the users. And in that space we all become editors of our own lives. How do I wish to present myself? Who am I? How do I want to spend my time? With whom? Where? Etc.

What is interesting for companies is that they are also, or have the opportunity to be, publishers of their own stories. Companies have become news media agencies in their own right. But they will not get very far unless they are trustworthy. This is where the concept of corporate journalism comes in: the most digitally-advanced companies have started to employ people who report on what goes on in the company with journalistic integrity.

After all, if you fail to divulge your mistakes, no one can learn from them, in which case the company stagnates.

Next up in this short series: What is the value of social media for a B2B company like ours?

The short answer is: because it adds value to the bottom line. Had this not been the case, we would (almost) not have any reason to be there.

Until now, social media have primarily been the domain of our communication department, but we are currently moving into the second phase of our strategy which will involve incorporating them into the actual business.

In order to determine what role social media should play in our business in the long term, we recently completed a study. In addition to evaluating our current value creation, this study also outlines our next step.

The cover of Maersk Line’s Social Media Study 2012 entitled “The Next Step: How to unlock the full potential of social media”.

Over the next few weeks, I will attempt to extract the key aspects of the study in a number of blog posts.

But before we get to the study itself, it makes sense to outline what we have done to date, during the first phase of the programme.

So that’s what my next post will be about.

In short: When companies are not being truthful about who they are, and are instead trying to paint a skewed or even false picture, they basically ask for it.

To boil it down to a few points, the following is our recipe for handling potential crises that may erupt within social media:

1. Be good. If the company has all the best intentions, all the time, there should be no problem. If our intentions are good or just understandable, then we will always be able to explain why we did what we did – and we shouldn’t be ashamed of it.
2. Be honest. We must never cover up things. If we did something wrong we should speak openly about it. We’re not perfect. And showing imperfection is actually the best way to build trust. From a communication perspective this is about not shying away from self-criticism and sharing the negative news.
3. Listen and respond – when relevant. We of course monitor what’s being said about us online, both when it’s addressing us directly and when people are just writing about us. Sometimes, when a response is necessary or deserved, we’ll respond. But not always. We don’t want to spend all our time responding to random comments.
4. Be human. Be good-humoured. Be friendly. And be respectful. If people are addressing an important issue, then track it down internally, find the person who really knows about it and get back with the answer ASAP.
5. Provide a pressure relief valve. Give aggrieved customers a dedicated place to complain, e.g. a forum, a blog post or even a Facebook post. Direct them to an “official” place to sound off. It keeps the complaining more organized, and makes sure that most of it happens in a venue we control.
6. Take it one at the time. A handbook is not the way to go, as you can tell from e.g. the famous O2 example. When there’s an issue that needs extra attention, we discuss it internally and respond accordingly. We learn from that, but it should never become automated. If it does, then that’s the next social media crisis right there.

And that’s it. It’s probably not a bullet-proof approach. But then, what is?

§1 It’s communication, not marketing
It sounds simple, but it’s not. This is where most people get it wrong. Most companies – and their agencies – simply don’t understand the premise itself, namely that social media are the users’ domain. It’s akin to a dinner party. Marketing therefore doesn’t work, unless one would like to avoid being invited back the next time around. Be honest and engaging and ensure that you are on an equal level. Don’t create designed, marketing-oriented stories. It has to be simple and authentic.

§2 Do it yourself
At Maersk Line I have pretty much done it all myself. I was given the mandate to do it and then took ownership of the project as anyone else would. My boss was completely confident about my strategy once it had been approved, and the fact that social media platforms are so easy to use means that you don’t need outside help. Besides, it comes across as untrustworthy when an agency posts messages on behalf of a company. You have to be in the thick of what happens at the company and be able to pick up stories and trends from there. This enables you to react immediately and to avoid having to wait for the agency to conclude a meeting with another client first. Finally, you have to be passionate about it and ‘live it’ every day.

§3 Keep costs down
I would imagine that the amount we spent had a lot to do with why we won “Social Media Campaign of the Year”. Since everything has been created internally, we haven’t spent more than just under USD 80,000 in a year and three months. This has been spent on advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, on a so-called publishing tool and on some tabs on Facebook. We have done the rest ourselves.

§4 Don’t be afraid
You don’t know yourself and your audience until you get started. So you will need to feel your way. And you have to keep testing. Outline a sound strategy and some ideas in advance, but be prepared to learn and make adjustments constantly. An interesting aspect of social media is that you get feedback immediately, which means that the learning curve can be very steep. What works where and how for us? Which stories are relevant to both us and our target groups? I have set up profiles on various networks pretty much to suit my own preference. I have just thrown myself into it.

§5 Improvise
People tend to think that this aspect of what I do is far-fetched. But I haven’t planned a single post throughout the entire year that we have been doing this. You just sit down at the keyboard or use your mobile phone when there is something to say and then you do it as well as you can. Conversely, if you plan to send out a certain story next Wednesday at 12:00, it then turns into a marketing exercise. Then you lose the moment. And then you (or the agency) also spend too much time on it.

§6 It has to be simple and visual
There is a reason why Twitter has limited tweets to 140 characters each. It’s because there is practically no one who wants to read much more than that. Don’t convince yourself that everything you have to say – or your company has to say – is exciting. The users decide whether to spend time reading your post, or not, in a split second, based on a combination of what is said in the first few words and whether they usually find the company’s information relevant. And then there is the visual aspect: a good photo can change everything (fortunately, Maersk Line has a lot of fantastic photos).

§7 Tell stories
One of the growing trends at the moment is that companies have started to hire corporate journalists. It’s about ditching the marketing plans and taking on people who can unearth and tell stories in a lively and credible way. And this includes both good and bad news. Or rather, it’s not about being positive versus negative. It’s just about telling a good story that reflects reality. It is therefore also imperative that the company really is ‘good’ and has nothing to hide. Otherwise this wouldn’t be the smartest approach.

§8 Ensure the organisation is behind it
The most important element of being responsible for the social media is to ensure buy-in from the rest of the organisation. Having a few people engaged in it in isolation doesn’t work. Social media and technologies have a lot to offer any company – and they could even be seen as introducing a paradigm shift. In the ‘old’ days, people in business were convinced that it was important to keep one’s knowledge close to one’s chest in order to avoid losing power or status. Today, people have increasingly come to realise that the better you are at sharing your knowledge, the more influence and status you have. And that way of thinking and working should preferably spread throughout the entire organisation, and thus enable social technologies to optimise the way people think and work. Another reason why it is important to ensure the organisation’s buy-in is that its users (the company’s fans, followers, etc.) would like to meet its employees. People need to see a face behind the company. By making the company more human, you start to build credibility and trust with your customers. In addition to this, one’s colleagues can help answer questions posed to the company on Twitter, for example.

§9 No mass distribution
When a company such as Maersk Line has a presence on ten platforms, people might be led to believe that this must result in ‘mass distribution’, i.e. that we share the same content everywhere and, in reality, just push impersonal messages out to the public. In fact, the opposite is true. We have a presence on all of those platforms because it makes sense for us. We are there because we want to communicate and because we are curious. If this had been all about campaigns, we would actually not have been on so many platforms. If that was the case, we would rather have targeted a certain target group on a specific platform. When I see a company that participates in a relatively small number of platforms, I take it as a sign that they are there with a campaign approach in mind: “Let’s do a Facebook campaign, that would be cool.” My advice in that regard is: be where your presence feels natural. But you should only participate on as many platforms as you can cope with and you need to allow for the vastly different forms of expression and target groups on various sites.

§10 Build on what you have done
My final suggestion is: keep pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what social media and technologies can do for the company, but make sure to also test the water. We just finalised a larger scale study on social media and where we are going with it. And there is much evidence to suggest that social media will, on this basis, soon spread to departments such as Customer Service, Sales, HR, etc. And yet we still adhere to a ‘lean’ set-up. It is not about building something big, but about building it correctly. In this case that means across the organisation. There will be no NASA-type command centre, although that could look pretty awesome.

This last point is probably the principal doctrine of ours, namely that “Lean is Fun”.

650,000 fans on Facebook and a record-high engagement score – that’s what Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company, has achieved in its first year on social media. Comments, photo sharing and ‘likes’ are flooding in to Maersk Line via Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Miraculous? Maybe not quite. In this article, Jonathan Wichmann, the company’s head of social media, shares the recipe for Maersk Line’s success on social media.

In Maersk Line, we got involved in social media a little more than a year ago, and in this space of time we have managed to achieve a quantum leap forward in our communication with our surroundings.

Today, we are active on 10 different social media networks with 10 different aims. We have more than 650,000 fans on Facebook. And we have created a home for our social media presence, namely our website: Maersk Line Social.

However, those are not the reasons why we won the ‘Social Media Campaign of the Year’ and ‘Community Presence’ awards at the European Digital Awards in Berlin a few months ago. We won those awards because of our approach to social media.

The home page of Maersk Line Social, a website dedicated to telling stories about and for the social media. (http://maersklinesocial.com)

It only takes one person – on the inside
Firstly, we did it all from within. What happened was that I was ‘in-sourced’ to manage the project, as it would not have been credible and vibrant otherwise. I have pretty much done everything myself, which of course is one of the ideas behind social media, where everything seems to have become accessible to everyone.

What’s interesting about this, however, is the cost aspect. Our external costs for the year have only amounted to just under USD 60,000. This amount can only be regarded as peanuts when you consider the size and turnover of the company – and when you look at what other global companies pump into it.

Communication, not marketing
The second thing we were awarded for was the way we think about social media and the record-high engagement we have achieved – on Facebook and other sites – as a result of our approach.

From the outset, we have been conscious of the widespread (and misunderstood) tendency to regard social media as nothing more than the sum of a series of digital platforms on which companies can disseminate their news and campaigns directly to users of the various networks.

Social media are about communication, not marketing. It is about engaging, not disseminating. It has to be vibrant and credible.

A rare B2B case in the social media environment
The third thing we were awarded for in Berlin was the fact that Maersk Line is a classic B2B company, and there is a shortage of examples of such companies using social media networks well.

In other words, we are not talking about your typical FMCG company, such as Coca-Cola or Red Bull, but rather about something as dry as container transport.

It was therefore even more satisfying to win ahead of 500 participants, including all of the well-known brands on the social media scene.

Goal: to get closer to our customers
In our original strategy, we accounted for what we could achieve via social media, including brand awareness, insight into the market and increased employee satisfaction. But our primary goal has always been “to get closer to our customers”.

In terms of our tactics, we decided to begin with Facebook, creating volume there, and then to build on that on other platforms which enable us to achieve different objectives for other target groups.

From volume to engagement
A year on, our fan graph looks like this:

The growth in the number of fans of Maersk Line’s Facebook page.

This is not a particularly interesting fact in its own right, however. Yes, a critical mass is necessary to kick-start efforts. But it has much more to do with engagement – in other words, how well you can engage your fan base every time you post a new story?

We therefore conducted a mini-study in order to measure our performance against leading social media brands on Facebook (based on metrics that measure the number of likes, shares and comments linked to the last 10 posts against the number of fans), and the results were in our favour.

Engagement-score comparison between Maersk Line and the leading social media brands.

The Maersk Norwich whale
How did we achieve such a good score? We did it partly by attracting attention visually, such as by including users’ own Instagram photos of Maersk containers and ships. And we also did it by not being afraid to share both positive and negative stories, reflecting our efforts to be vibrant as well as credible.

An example of the latter was when we told the story about how one of our ships had called into port in Rotterdam with a dead whale on the bow. The ship had unwittingly sailed into the whale on the open sea.

We would probably not have been proactive about sharing such a story in the past. But in today’s world it is better to just come out and talk about what has happened instead of trying to suppress the issue. And this was obviously an unintentional event on our part.

So we prepared a short Q&A in which we asked ourselves where, how and why. We then created a Facebook post.

The post on Facebook describing Maersk Norwich’s encounter with a whale. Note the so-called ‘like-to-share’ ratio which is almost 1 to 1.

That particular post was shared more than any other, and all of the comments were actually positive.

We have since been praised for the way we handled the situation, and we even created an album on Pinterest featuring beautiful photographs of whales under the heading “In memory of the Maersk Norwich Whale”.

Among the other aspects of our social media efforts in general, it is worth mentioning the following:

Maersk employees on Twitter
We use Twitter in a very distinct way. Under the @MaerskLine profile, we share our more serious news with the shipping press and quite a few other people in our industry.

It is equally important for us to have a panel of Maersk Line tweeters. This panel includes a captain, an individual from our Graduate Programme and a number of Maersk directors, among others.

It is a simple and effective way to create transparency, to bring our employees’ expertise and diversity into play, and to ensure that the social media way of thinking takes hold within the organisation.

Instagram: #maersk spotting
Our use of Instagram has been praised and emphasised by many experts. It is basically a way of exploiting the fact that our brand is so visually accessible all over the world. Most people are familiar with the Maersk star, even if they have never booked a container.

By sharing our pictures on Instagram, we have also managed to start a #maersk spotting trend: When people around the world see a Maersk container in the street or spot one of our ships at sea, they take a photo with their mobile phone and share it on Instagram – and from there it is shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

One of the outcomes of this effort is evident today: we have created a mosaic (in which it’s possible to spot the star in the middle, at a distance) featuring users’ #maersk photos. There are two versions of this picture: One of the versions is hanging in Maersk Line CEO Søren Skou’s office. The other version is hanging in the canteen at the Maersk HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Top: Maersk containers spotted at Stockholm Central (shared by @mgnfq). Bottom left: Edith Maersk in Hong Kong (shared by @MaerskLine). Bottom right: #maersk mosaic in the CEO’s office.

LinkedIn: Outside intelligence
It is one thing to have photos and get attention. It is quite another to exploit social media in order to gain knowledge alongside experts whom one would not otherwise encounter.

Our group on LinkedIn, which is called “The Shipping Circle”, is an example of the latter. We have used this forum to invite a number of shipping experts from around the world to have debates with us about the challenges facing our industry, opportunities for innovation, etc.

And this has paid off. This forum enables you – and us – to read extensive contributions from people who really know what they are talking about. One should not reject the possibility of ideas and thoughts emerging from this group ultimately influencing strategic decisions about the company’s future activity.

Global and local
Another challenge for a global company such as ours is that we have over 100 people working in communication posted at various offices around the world, where they work on local customer communication campaigns, particularly via email campaigns for now.

At one point during the past year they started to create their own Facebook pages, an initiative that was not really managed centrally. We solved this issue by giving them access to post local news on our global Facebook page instead of having their own local pages. We have set this up so that their posts are only visible to their own region.

This simplifies our global efforts, and it also ensures that we actually do get closer to our customers.

What is the value? And where are we going?
Finally, we should mention that we are currently working on a study which is investigating the value of social media for a company such as ours. It will also indicate how we can make the most of it in the future.

The study has already garnered attention, both from the press and from international B2B companies, since we are entering uncharted territory and challenging the status quo, one could say.

The study has been developed around a total of eight Google Hangouts (online video interviews) with a number of leading American social media experts who are willing to share their knowledge with us. Jay Baer, Michael Chui and Jeremiah Owyang are among the participants.

In this way, the study shows the way forward in two ways: It will not only give us a benchmark, but it will also demonstrate the value of social media, namely that we can become wiser more quickly and inexpensively today – and hopefully achieve a better result in the end.

Maersk on Facebook: A balance between openness and trust

Since Maersk Line joined Facebook, shared trust and greater transparency has been needed, and more so than the employees of the old company have been used to in the past. So says Jonathan Wichmann, the man behind Maersk’s active use of social media.

BY JAKOB VESTERAGER

Maersk Line’s solid position within the social media has at times been a balance between opening up to the public and keeping with the management’s reliance on Maersk Line’s name not becoming tainted, explains Jonathan Wichmann, Head of Social Media for Maersk Line.

“Social media is about sharing and thinking a little differently than how the employees of Maersk Line have been used to. Back then, if you had knowledge of something or a question about something, you would probably not share that with others. But now people are starting to realize that just because you explain how to do something, that does not mean everybody will start copy you. Only you grow smarter together,” says Jonathan Wichmann.

Maersk Line is trying to do just that by being present on a number of social media sites on which the company has set up forums for people in the industry as well as a Facebook page, on which the company has more than 300.000 followers. Jonathan Wichmann handles Maersk Line’s presence on the social media sites by himself, and about half of his working hours are spent on this task.

Credibility

Wichmann is not scared that the open strategy will lead to negative publicity. He believes that the openness gives a company like Maersk Line more credibility, especially if you also upload things that are not altogether positive. For instance, Wichmann insisted that Maersk Line upload a picture of the ship Maersk Norwich which ran into a whale in early June.

“I had to persuade some people that we should do it even though it was not a positive thing. It is not a picture attesting our greatness – after all we collided with a whale. But it is probably the post which has been shared the most. It is an important parameter to consider when you want to reach as many people as possible,” says Jonathan Wichmann, who explains that he and others often monitor what the followers on Facebook write about a given picture.

“I am not anxious at all, but then again, I am not a Maersk man. Yet, from the beginning, it has been a kind of exercise in trust on part of the management. They thought ‘now we will try and see how it goes and see if you can work with us.’ If I do something that backfires then the trust is broken a little, but slowly they start to become more at ease with the situation and they see that it actually is not so bad when we write about the negative stuff and provide a more realistic picture of our company. It only makes us more credible.”

When Wichmann joined Maersk Line a little more than half a year ago, he had not dared to hope he would get the opportunity to launch a strategy for the social media as extensive as it actually became.

“I was unsure of how much they would let me work with it because it is such a large organization. So I did a presentation the first week I was there, it was for then CCO Hanne B. Sørensen and she approved it immediately. I went to work on Twitter, Facebook etc. and after two weeks, it was already set in motion. The management was a little skeptical and watched the number of friends on Facebook, but we got 13.000 friends in a very short amount of time and I think that convinced them to support the project,” says Jonathan Wichmann. Today, Hanne B. Sørensen is CEO of Maersk Tankers.

Facebook – a fad?

So far there has not been a lot of competition amongst shipping companies within the social media, and not many companies have a Facebook page or any other social media site. But Jonathan Wichmann is sure that most are considering it.

“CMA CGM has created a Facebook page, but not a lot is happening on there. They do not use it actively. I think there are a lot of people looking at us. I can feel them here and there. I think they are sitting there going ‘is this just a fad or should we do the same?’”

“Right now, social media is a fad but that is the way it is with all new things. But I think the social media is spreading and on the way to becoming a standard for how you do things in real life. Being part of a company and understanding the mechanisms of social media before our competitors is an advantage and likely to stay that way,” says Jonathan Wichmann.

In doing so, I discovered a need from their end to better measure how good their posts are. Since they are only posting to a limited audience of e.g. 5,000 fans in their country it might be that 30 likes is extremely good – even though it doesn’t feel that way.

Therefore, I started looking into how you can calculate how good – or successful – a post is, and I ‘developed’ an engagement score and started calculating the score for 12 of what’s usually seen as the best brands in social media. Just to have something to benchmark our efforts against.

The Social Media Brand Engagement Score on Facebook

What I did was this: I took the average number of likes, shares and comments for the 10 most recent global posts for the different Facebook pages – and multiplied the comments and the shares with 4 and 2 respectively because they are worth more than a simple like.

I then divided that average post score with the total number of fans and multiplied it by 10,000 to get a more regular number… and that’s the score. Quite simple.

You might argue against the metrics behind this score in a number of ways, but I think it gives a good and clear overall picture of how good companies really are at social. And it’s very easy to use to calculate how well you (as a social media manager) are performing.

The result

The outcome of the survey is also quite interesting. Here it is, without any further comments:

Lego                  48.0*
Disney               34.2
GE                     32.9
Shell                  19.1
Ford                   17.2
McDonald’s       10.2
Oreo                   7.2
Dell                     7.0
Red Bull              6.0
Converse            5.1**
Starbucks           4.5
Coca-Cola          2.2

Oh, and did I forget to mention that Maersk Line’s score is quite, quite uplifting for us? We scored 37.0…

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* = two of the posts had suspiciously many more likes (not shares and comments) than the rest, suggesting they were ‘bought’, i.e. promoted through FB Adverts.

** = if not for a single, very popular post the score would only have been 1.3.