Maersk Line: B2B Social Media

1. Why do you think Maersk Line was so successful in social media? What do you think are
Maersk Line’s key drivers of success?

Maersk Line was so successful in social media because it saw social media as a strategic marketing
activity. To get started, Jonathan Wichmann studied Dell’s and GE’s social media approaches to learn
the best B2B social media practices. Then, Maersk Line developed its own unique approach to social
media, focusing on customers. As Wichmann noted, “Social media is about communication, not
marketing. It’s about engaging, not pushing.” Wichmann’s goal was to “engage authentically with his
audience.” Social media expert Thomas Bigum described other factors contributing toward Maersk
Line’s success, including its courage, storytelling, and being first mover on social media.

Some of the key drivers of Maersk Line’s success are:

 Their visual storytelling

They used photos of ships, seascapes, and ports to tell stories and share their history. For example, they
used a photo of a giraffe on a containership to tell the story of a giraffe’s journey from Melbourne to
Auckland. In addition to posting categories of photos such as “Vessels,” “Containers,” and “History,”
Maersk added categories like “Management,” which included photos of their management team in
various settings. Maersk employees posted photos of their everyday work. They were proud of their
work and excited to share with family and friends at home what Maersk does. Such photos and posts
created personal, authentic connections between Maersk and its followers (including customers,
employees, experts, and fans). Social media posts and photos then spread naturally through friends of
employees, customers, and enthusiasts, becoming a powerful marketing channel.

 Their transparency

They didn’t just tell the positive stories. They told the negative stories too. For example, in 2012, one of
their ships accidently struck a whale. Maersk posted the incident on Facebook and explained how it was
handled and what they do to avoid whale strikes. By getting out ahead of the news, Maersk was able to
control the story and the response was mostly positive. Again, Maersk’s approach was about authenticity.
As Wichmann explained, “It is about not making false pictures of who you are.”

 Using different strategies for different platforms

Another key driver of success was Maersk’s use of different strategies for different platforms. They
segmented their market into fans, customers, employees, and experts and used platforms that best suited
those segments. They understood that “[t]here are often very different people on different platforms.” As
Exhibit 7 depicts, they used LinkedIn and Google+ for experts; LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for
customers; Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr for fans; and Maersk Line Social,
Vimeo, Flickr, and Chatter for employees. They were successful because they understood where to
engage with each segment of their audience.

 Keeping costs down

Another key driver was Maersk’s efforts to keep costs down. In year one, Maersk Line “hardly spent any
money.” They spent $100,000 and had 600,000 Facebook fans and 20,000 Twitter fans. Their low
marketing costs resulted in higher ROI.

2. Evaluate how Maersk Line executed on its social media plan and platforms?

Maersk executed on their overarching goal to “get closer to customers” by engaging authentically with
them through photos and posts. They told moving stories to engage with their audience. These stories
built relationships between Maersk and its followers. They knew that the public loved to take photos of
their ships and upload them on the internet, so they thought, “why don’t we do it ourselves?” These
communications efforts created brand awareness. Additionally, they leveraged their employees who were
proud to be sailing on Maersk’s big blue ships and loved to publish photos and tell people about it. This
improved internal usage and also spread brand recognition.

They were successful because they did the research to understand their audience and how they should
engage each segment. They ranked their social media channels from least to most corporate. As
described in question 1 above, they focused their social media platforms (and the content on those
platforms) on different segments (fans, customers, experts, and employees). While they continued to use
Facebook, particularly for visual and conversational communication, they turned their focus to Twitter
and LinkedIn where the audiences were closer to their target market. Importantly, they learned that
LinkedIn is where customers wanted to interact with Maersk, so they used LinkedIn to share business-
related news and to interact with their customers. Similarly, they used Google + to interact with
customers and to share business news and Maersk’s leadership in the industry. They also used Twitter to
reach their customers by sharing a wide range of content, “from hardcore shipping news to photos of sea
lions resting on the bulbous bow.” They used Instagram to inspire fans to share their photos of Maersk
vessels and containers. While this may not have translated into more containers being booked, it did
create brand recognition and awareness. In sum, Maersk executed on its social media platforms by
focusing the content on each platform to the interests and needs of the users of those platforms.

3. How do you think Jonathan Wichmann calculated the 1,500 percent ROI in Facebook? Do you
agree with his calculation? Why or why not?

According to the case, Wichmann calculated the quantitative metric of ROI, in the qualitative world of
social media by assigning monetary values based on supposedly non-arbitrary social media metrics. The
first thought is that Wichmann’s ROI calculation of 1500 percent is obviously inaccurate, but when
considering that his investment was only $100,000 USD, Maersk would only have to produce a return of
$1.5M USD. Wichmann also stated that all these efforts likely did not “translate into more containers
being booked…,” but there were also many intangible assets. Some of the non-monetary returns included
employee pride in the company, brand recognition, less expense in answering customer service concerns,
cultural benefits and improved efficiencies by empowering employees to become thought leaders. As
intangible assets are not typically recognized financially until the entity is sold, it is hard to technically
justify a 1500 percent ROI , but between the calculated social media metrics and the intangible benefits, a
return of $1.5M USD would have easily been attainable.
 4. How do you think Maersk Line’s competitors will react to the company’s success in social
media?

Maersk’s relatively quick social media success dispelled the argument held by Maersk and its competitors
that B2B companies, boring industries and unrecognizable brands were not fit for social media platforms. 
Nevertheless, Wichmann was able to bring brand awareness, discussion, insight, questions and other
valuable content to Maersk helping them understand not only their customers better, but also the content
sharing enthusiast that enjoyed the industry from afar.  Just as Maersk found this information to be
valuable and informative, Maersk’s competitors would find the content valuable as well.  Thus, we would
suspect Maersk’s competitors to try and duplicate the same success on their social media platforms;
however, since Maersk’s competitors are so far behind in terms of presence, we suspect the cost to scale
their platforms to be much higher than what Maersk could accomplish.  Ultimately, Maersk’s competitors
would have to respond to Maersk’s social media success to maintain market share and grow sales in the
future.

5. What are the challenges facing Maersk Line in social media going forward?

Management identified three, key competitive advantages of Maersk Line: reliability, simplicity, and
focus on the environment. Social media can be an effective tool to communicate and magnify these key
advantages. Future management must remain convinced of this fact. The CMO Survey cited in the case
study found that the biggest challenge to many companies is the view that social media is a “cute
promotional activity” rather than a strategic marketing activity.

Wichmann held that much of his success was owing to the autonomy he enjoyed, affording him a
spontaneous and flexible approach to engage authentically with his audience. This successful recipe and
his “lean is fun” mantra could be threatened by the proposal of a social media department growing to a
staff of five, with a $250,000 budget. Already a very conservative industry with many doubters filling the
ranks, the blossoming department could invite “interference from various skeptics” – a concern expressed
by Wichmann. Nina Skyum-Nielsen, Wichmann’s replacement, was in fact feeling pressure from the
start to integrate the social media operation into the company’s broader marketing efforts. The Maersk
social media keywords of “approachability” and “personality” could be seriously jeopardized, and the
critical nimble spontaneity of the past all but lost.

Wichmann’s engineering of the social platform was indeed noteworthy; but the new team must think
strategically and do more than just accumulate fans on Facebook and win awards which may not justify
the additional investment. Forrester Research estimates that 98% of users of social media are
“spectators.” Wichmann counseled: “I would rather just focus on keeping it real and creating bottom
value instead of this vanity game of numbers. You don’t want to count on the numbers because they
could be a lot of casual fans.” The team must continually find new and innovative ways to engage and
communicate with the decision makers in the shipping industry. Maersk must stay close to these decision
makers and commit to adding value to those relationships by helping them to become successful. With a
growing list of social media platforms, care needs to be taken to not become distracted with unproductive
peripheral noise that doesn’t genuinely promote the Maersk mission. The focus, as Wichmann held, must
continue to be on the end user, with the social media content relevant to both parties, Maersk and the end
user.
 6. What should Maersk Line do next? What areas should the company focus on and why?

Now that Maersk has achieved some level of ‘traction’ in social media, it needs to work on monetizing its
success as it scales further. Hard buckets of value are clearly traditional media savings, customer service
savings, and increased conversions due to improved customer engagement. Soft buckets are brand
awareness and improved customer sentiment.

Adobe has a suite of products designed to assist in precisely these kinds of analysis, including Adobe
Channel Manager and Adobe Social. Furthermore, Adobe has experts who are experienced at linking
online analytics with offline customer relationship management systems to provide and end-to-end view
of ROI for all marketing channels, including social. Unfortunately, Maersk is not yet an Adobe Analytics
client.

The first step for Maersk to take Social and in fact all its marketing channels to the ‘next level’ would be
for them to migrate from Google Analytics to Adobe analytics. They should then attend the Adobe
Digital Marketing Summit to learn how the world’s best practitioners measure the impact of online
marketing, including social. With these data in hand, it should be easy for Skyum-Nielsen to justify
additional budget in social and to feel more confident about her investments.