At one point during a meeting last year with a couple of Facebook representatives they told us that they had to admit that there’s something about Maersk Line and LinkedIn.
“You guys fit so well together,” one of the Facebook people said. “Just look at the logos. It’s like Maersk Line developed LinkedIn. Or the other way around.”
Our Facebook contacts could be on to something. Or actually, they were on to something. According to a social media survey we did a few months after the meeting with Facebook, our customers confirmed that, of all the social networks, they would prefer to connect with us on LinkedIn.
Shipping news and high-end discussions
Our customers also told us how they would like to connect with us via social media. It’s basically about two things:
1. They want shipping industry news that’s relevant to them;
2. They want to be able to discuss our products and services – and even co-create new products with us.
These are things that we are more than eager to provide them with. In order to survive as a business you of course need to listen to your customers, and we’re no strangers to co-creation as evidenced by e.g. Daily Maersk and Quest II.
LinkedIn as the solution
Luckily, LinkedIn gives us – and our customers – both options. From our company profile we now share industry news with our followers, and we already have a couple of LinkedIn groups up and running, i.e. ‘The Reefer Circle’ and ‘The Shipping Circle’, for reefer experts and shipping experts respectively.
Furthermore, we are also planning to launch a customer specific group, and we might even create groups for various categories of customers, e.g. ‘The Daily Maersk Circle’.
What’s the big deal?
But what is it that we get from this? Well, first of all we get the chance to strengthen our relationship with our customers. But we also give them a chance to network with each other (and us) so true knowledge sharing can take place.
Knowledge sharing is not worth an awful lot unless it’s open and horizontal. In groups, customers can learn from each other, which might very well turn out to be the most valuable part of our presence on LinkedIn.
Introducing social commerce
In addition to these things we’ve filled out the default LinkedIn tab for company profiles called ‘Products & Services’. Here we describe a number of our core products, and through this we’ve basically jumped on the social commerce bandwagon: People can recommend our products to their network – and comment on them, too.
In a digital landscape where peer-to-peer recommendations have long proven their effectiveness that’s a really important step. And LinkedIn let’s us implement this functionality without further ado.
So, if you’re a Maersk Line customer, please follow us on LinkedIn. And remember to look out for our upcoming customer groups.
