MIT Sloan Management Review
July 16, 2013
Anna Granholm-Brun (Maersk Group), interviewed by Robert Berkman
Danish shipping and energy company Maersk Group had nearly 100 years of history as a strong, silent type before corporate brand manager Anna Granholm-Brun came along. Now the global powerhouse embraces the social media spotlight.
Anna Granholm-Brun, corporate brand manager at Maersk Group.Whatever the reason, Maersk Group has a history of keeping a low public profile. “The press would call and we just wouldn’t have anything to share or anything that we really wanted to share,” says Anna Granholm-Brun (@annacbrun), the company’s corporate brand manager. “It was just, ‘no comment.’”
All that has changed. California-native Granholm-Brun has been with the Copenhagen-based conglomerate for four and a half years, helping the company embrace a new social savvy. She developed the company’s first social media strategy with C-suite support and has grown Maersk’s social community to over a million fans and followers. The company has over 1.3 million likes for the Maersk Facebook page alone and often gets over 100,000 views of its corporate videos at the Maersk YouTube channel.
Maersk Group is a collection of companies focused on shipping, oil production and drilling. Now listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, the company was founded in Denmark in 1904 with a single freighter; Maersk Drilling was founded in 1972, and Maersk Oil started producing oil in North Sea that same year. The conglomerate had revenues of $60.2 billion in 2011, and today employs 152,000 people globally. In 2013, Maersk Line, the group’s shipping company, plans to launch 20 Triple-E vessels, said to be the world’s largest and most energy-efficient container ships. Maersk Group is led by Ane Maersk McKinney Uggla, granddaughter of the founder.
In a conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review’s Robert Berkman, Granholm-Brun explained how the company has shifted from one end of the transparency spectrum to the other, why there’s so much value in a good story, and what it took to sell social to company executives.
Maersk is on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Google+, China’s Sina Wiebo and more. How did the company become so active in social media?
The Maersk brand has gone through a huge transformation in the last 10 years. We used to provide a “no comment” when the press called. We kept a low profile and didn’t market ourselves to the extent that many other companies within our industries of operation did.Marketing and branding of the Maersk name really came into play over the last five years. We had become an industry leader because we offer top notch service, not because we were marketing ourselves day and night. We started to talk a lot more about the services that we provide and the capabilities that we have as a large conglomerate connecting the logistics and trade chain all together, moving from truck to train to the vessel and getting across oceans and connecting continents.
Over time, as more companies became transparent about their operations, we found ourselves needing to disclose more. Now, we’ve gone to the other end of the spectrum and are not only giving comments in the press, but we’re hosting conversations and asking people to engage with us. We’ve defined transparency as being open and upright about what we do and how we do it.
Can you give an example?
We needed to be a lot better in looking at our target audiences and finding out what their agendas are — focusing on that first and foremost and then seeing how Maersk can be an enabler for them.
A prime example is how we’ve worked with small business owners in Ghana. Instead of going in and giving a big speech as to how Maersk can connect Ghana and small businesses to the world, we actually focused on a motorcycle manufacturer who needed to get parts shipped in so that he could then build the motorcycles there in Ghana and ship them out to the rest of the world.
We focused on: what is it that he needs? When does he need these parts? How important is it that he gets all of the parts in a timely manner?
It becomes a great branding story, to show how we’re helping him to connect to the world to bring not only his finished motorcycles to the people in Ghana but also to connect with other markets in Africa.
Maersk Line, which is the world’s largest container shipping company, is also doing an amazing job with getting industry professionals and opinion leaders in shipping to talk about what is the future of shipping and what are the values and what is it that customers really want in shipping.
You are helping seed discussions around that?
Yes, we’re having great conversations on LinkedIn in groups and on Google+ that are specifically created for those topics. It’s certainly a goal to move toward being the thought leaders as well as projecting the voices of the thought leaders within the industries that we’re working in.In terms of the culture of Maersk, was it easy or difficult to get your executives to adopt social media?
I would say that it was a pretty tough thing to sell and still is a tough thing to sell internally. We’re a very traditional organization filled with people who are used to and more familiar with traditional methods of communication externally as well as internally.
For instance, I heard a story that there was another executive here at the company who, when informed that there was talk about how they needed to get on LinkedIn and start using it as a recruiting tool, said, “But if we ask all of our employees to get on LinkedIn, they might leave us.” And it was really funny, because whether or not we want our employees to get onto LinkedIn, it’s up to them if they want to leave, with or without LinkedIn.
But it was actually a great way for Maersk Drilling to get the voices of their employees out on there so that their employees could gain a higher stature because they were from Maersk Drilling. And they could say, “this is what I’m working on, these are the great things that I’m able to do at Maersk Drilling.”
How did you sell the idea of opening the company up on social media?
Executives don’t have a lot of time, so it was a matter of making sure that results and findings within social media are spoken to them in a language that they pick up on — that is, we need to point out the business case.
We make sure they can see the return on investment and how this is benefiting their business. How, for instance, it’s helping their employees to become better brand ambassadors, or how it’s able to bring more high level industry leading employees into their company.
So employees are encouraged to share their stories?
Yes. You know, we’re a company where there’s a lot of just absolutely amazing stories. For instance, I had a friend whose dad was a captain on one of the vessels, and he was just about to retire. He’s been with Maersk for many, many years, and he’s been in the shipping industry his entire life. I think he started out running away to a shipping school or a cadet school when he was three years old, and he was caught waiting at the front door because he wanted to start school and he was only three.
So he was going off on his last tour with Maersk and I managed to get him to write a weekly blog for us to document his last tour. And we went through his life with some blog entries about how he got into shipping and why he liked it so much, how did it change over the years and the stories that would come to his mind when he went to all these new ports. We were able to give him a voice.
Initially, he didn’t know what social media was, he didn’t know what a blog was. But by the end, he was so interested in the way that it could project his stories. He was also interested in helping people who were thinking about getting into the maritime industry who might think, “this is really cool. I think this could be for me. Where can I find out more information?”From there we started to give officers and cadets a similar opportunity. I sent out a very simple newsletter to all of the officers and the cadets saying, “if you’d like to be a social media ambassador for Maersk Group, let me know.” What we end up doing is telling the story of what Maersk does and how we do it and the values that we live by through the very trustworthy and honest voices of the people who work for us.
I now have first-hand accounts from seafarers to convey the story of what we as a company do and can offer in shipping, in transport. The stories offer a window into the culture and work life in Maersk, but in a toned-down, less corporate voice. We post Maersk stories on Tumblr and at the Maersk YouTube channel.
What are you doing with social media internally?
We initiated a project for increasing internal collaboration. Although there are some areas where collaboration undoubtedly could be helpful, the project kind of crumbled a little bit in the beginning because we didn’t have a strong purpose as to why we as a global conglomerate needed to be collaborative from business unit to business unit as well as across business units.
However, since that project was started in 2011, some business units themselves are now taking little steps towards establishing their own areas of collaboration such as on platforms such as SharePoint, Podio and Jive.
We do have one business unit, Damco, that established what they called a Damco People’s Network internally to help their sales people connect with other sales people in areas where there were potential leads. Before, what would happen is that there would be, for instance, essentially one person in Copenhagen who knew of a sale that could happen in China. And that person would go to one other specific person because they had met that person or they knew someone who knew someone who knew that person.
But now what the Damco People’s Network enables them to do is to sort expertise based on the profiles that every employee has to create in that system. They’re able to get directly to the person who is best suited for the job, and that not only saves time, it enhances customer service and sales. That was a really great example of setting the purpose as to why do you need social functionalities internally and then putting it into action.
Image courtesy of Maersk Line.We’ve heard about that kind of thing from other companies — figuring out a way to connect people internally who might not already know each other.
Yeah. A sales person can be only so powerful if they are working alone in their office, but when you get them connected to a global network of sales people magic starts to happen.
Another business unit that is doing something interesting with sales is Maersk Line. It’s using its sales force with the added functionality of Chatter to connect its sales teams on a global level and create a knowledge database. That database informs everyone on the team who to go to for what topic area, while simultaneously promoting a productive sales culture.
So what are you hoping to accomplish next with social media?
I want to establish a global content providers’ network on varying levels. A global level of content providers would not only provide a consistent and constant voice, but the ability to provide a relevant and local perspective.
Until we can successfully develop a network for promoting local relevance of the Maersk brand, I think we’re kind of at a standstill. Because the we aim to be a global company that customers can say they trust — a global company that is seen as an enabler for countries to fulfill their economic potential.
That is the level of detail and kind of relationship building that we need to aim to create, so that when we do have our local sales people out there or our local employees or leadership go visit someone, they’re establishing a face-to-face relationship. We want customers to be able to say, “I saw what you did on social,” or “I saw the blog post that you did about where the energy industry is going and it really spoke to me, so let’s talk a little bit more about that.”
Here’s an example. We showed two movies as free content on local TV in Ghana, and we then coupled that with a social campaign to build on the awareness and activate those people to come and join our community in that country. Soon after, our Group CEO was scheduled to visit Ghana. The TV stations that we had communicated with and the people we had made relationships with the first time around enabled us to be able to have our CEO scheduled to be in three or four TV interviews within 20 minutes.
That wouldn’t have been possible if we only had traditional channels of communication to rely on. Digital marketing and communication enabled us in that example to achieve the penetration we were after, and it continues to enable us in our daily brand building and communication activities.
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