iTECH: The Business Case for Social Networks

By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter

This article appears in the October/November issue of iTECH, published in the Oct. 19 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Online social networking site Twitter hit it big when Oprah signed up this spring, along with millions of her fans.

Let the record reflect that the trucking industry beat her to the punch.

Less-than-truckload carrier Con-way, San Mateo, Calif., sent out a Twitter message — a “tweet,” for those in the know — way back in January.

Truckload hauler Swift Transportation, Phoenix, joined Twitter in March.

Online social networks, of which Twitter is but one, are a spur of the information superhighway so new that the tar is still sticky.

However, companies contacted for this article already agree on a key point, which one executive summed up succinctly: Social network sites are “rapidly evolving into serious business tools,” said Tom Nightingale, Con-way’s chief marketing officer.

He and other trucking industry executives see social networking as a ubiquitous communications portal to all the eyes and ears in the supply chain.

Trent Broberg, Swift’s marketing director, said such sites help “create partnerships with not only drivers, but customers and vendors.”

Beyond the appeal of the digital bullhorn, there is chatter — if not always proof — of social media marketing’s power to drive sales.

So, what exactly is social networking?

It’s a lot like a cocktail party. Guests get name tags, pour into an open room, split into groups and start talking.

For full effect, swap “personal home page” for “name tag,” “Web site” for “open room” and “user” for “guest.”

Scores of millions of people are signed up on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the like.

Con-way’s Nightingale was especially keen on Twitter, where users “follow” one another and exchange typed messages capped at 140 characters.

One may wonder how to cram useful information into so few key strokes, but it’s not so difficult, as some in trucking already have learned.

In fact, each of the preceding paragraphs is small enough to fit verbatim into a tiny Twitter post. So is this one: Driver recruiting is big on Twitter.

Con-way, Swift, J.B. Hunt Transport, YRC Worldwide and Schneider National court drivers on the site.

Other trucking fleets, such C.R. England and CRST International, have posted video enticements on YouTube.

Tank carrier Quality Distribution has north of 900 followers on Twitter, where it is staging an online recruiting blitz.

The company regularly Tweets help-wanted messages, some of which specify the town where freight-hungry drivers can find shipments.

Only Con-way, Swift and Schneider returned calls from iTech seeking comment on their social networking strategies.

All three carriers are digging through the online social strata for qualified drivers, but only Swift and Con-way consented to interviews.

With recruiting “as competitive as it is, we’re just not able to share much about our work in the social media realm,” Schneider said.

Beyond recruiting, one carrier has used Twitter to take media coverage into its own hands.

This summer, YRC Worldwide delivered live updates, a tweet at a time, from the National Truck Driving Championships in Pittsburgh.

Twitter appears to be growing at the fastest clip of any social networking Web site — 44.5 million users at last published estimate. However, Facebook — where users swap photos and are free to post news and updates well in excess of Twitter’s content limit — recently claimed more than 300 million users. And MySpace is in the same neighborhood.

“I don’t think there are too many business-to-business companies out there that are just dying to be Facebook heroes. But the reality is, that’s where the marketplace is pulling us,” said Con-way’s Nightingale.

Con-way has several corporate Facebook pages, including one that company employees set up and later expanded with the carrier’s blessing.

These trucking companies have not waded alone into the churning waters of social networking. Just about every link in the supply chain also is along for the ride.

OHL, formerly known as Ozburn-Hessey Logistics, joined Twitter in 2007, a year after the site was founded. (The earliest social site, in the familiar personal-profile format, dates back to 1997, according to an academic study, but the linking of people with common interests is as old as the World Wide Web.)

Michelle McManus, OHL’s online marketing manager, maintains the company’s Twitter account, which the 3PL views as a networking tool first and foremost.

OHL is using social networking sites “to create intimacy, open some channels of communication and get some awareness for our company,” McManus said.

A year ago, awareness was exactly what the Tennessee-based company needed as it pushed through the final stage of its rebranding effort. Social networking sites struck OHL as a natural channel for getting the word out.

Some of the people McManus has networked with on Twitter “tend to ‘re-tweet’ the information I send out,” McManus said. “Your connections all have their connections.”

Building brand awareness through word of mouth is not the same as a traditional advertising campaign.

“You can’t stand around with the bullhorn all the time,” McManus said. “You have to engage people.”

Julie Armstrong, Peterbilt Motor Co.’s electronic communications manager, agreed with that philosophy. Armstrong said the truck manufacturer sees social networking Web sites as a tool for outreach, not business development.

“We’re going into the world of social media because we find that many, many truckers and many, many trucking companies are engaging the outside world in a social medium,” Armstrong said.

Peterbilt is most active on Twitter, though the company was in the process of fine-tuning a Facebook page when reached by iTECH.

Marketing is apparent in many of Peterbilt’s Twitter messages, but the manufacturer shies away from soliciting business directly though the Web site — in part, because Peterbilt’s corporate Web site already is set up to funnel potential truck buyers into the dealer network, Armstrong said.

“We want to make sure not to duplicate any functions of our [corporate] Web site,” Armstrong said. She added that Peterbilt has yet to post coupons, special offers, dealership incentives and the like on Twitter, and that it doesn’t plan to do so.

This friends-first, sales-pitch-later strategy — endorsed by social networking consultants and embraced by some in the trucking and logistics businesses — is precisely the opposite approach from the “tweets” that helped a campaign by Dell, the computer maker, become one of the most oft-quoted examples of cashing in on social networking.

The Round Rock, Texas, PC-maker announced that it had netted about $2 million in revenue over the summer from a Twitter account used to hawk refurbished PCs. Dell’s Twitter feed consists — almost exclusively — of sales offers.

With B2B social networking still in an experimental phase, transport companies have not yet milked millions out of such sites as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

As Swift’s Broberg observed, “We’re on first base here with a new communications technology.”

Even so, one online load board already has managed to make the cash registers ring with a marketing strategy that leans heavily on the “social” aspect of social networks.

Bryan Jones, president of Getloaded.com, said his company jumped into the online social sphere in February and already has seen a payoff.

“In terms of how many convert, we’ve seen at least 10 new signups a month,” Jones said, referring to the number of people who reach Getloaded.com through a social networking channel and then sign up to browse the company’s online postings of spot freight and truck capacity.

Getloaded.com charges truckers $45 a month — or $99 a month for a premium account with a few more bells and whistles — to browse its database. Brokers pay $45 a month to post loads.

Not exactly Dell numbers. Then again, Jones said selling subscriptions wasn’t really the point of his company’s strategy.

“We went into social media not to drive sales but to expand the community,” Jones said. He views social networking tools as a logical extension of the message board that Getloaded.com developed on its Web site years ago to reach out to owner-operators and freight brokers, its core consumers.

Jones said drivers “communicate back and forth with one another” on social sites as they did on message boards. “They’ll say, ‘I’m interested in going here and hauling for this carrier. What do you know about them?’ “

Community-building efforts notwithstanding, Getloaded.com has taken a page out of Dell’s playbook and pushed out promotional offers though social networks from time to time.

Others are actively searching for a similar networking sweet spot.

Con-way’s Nightingale has a vision for a socializing-to-sales strategy that also would drum up truckloads of data about how customers behave online.

“We’re going to start to be able to see ‘click streams’ from point ‘A’ to point ‘Z’,” Nightingale said, “and point ‘Z’ looks something like a purchase.”

Here’s how it would work: a carrier posts a message on a social networking site about a new service or a special rate in a certain lane. Included in the post is a link to a section of the carrier’s Web site or to a blog the carrier has created to promote the service.

If the post catches the attention of a shipper, that shipper could click on the link and, by following the virtual bread crumbs, wind up at the carrier’s online order form.

The data generated by a potential customer’s journey could be captured and analyzed by a carrier’s sales team — including whether the customer contact completed an online form or abandoned the process halfway through it.

“The Web makes things very traceable,” said Kipp Bodnar of Howard, Merrell & Partners, a Raleigh, N.C., advertising and marketing agency. “If I share a link to my blog post on Twitter, for example, the URL shortening services tell me how many people click on that link, instantly.”

URL shortening services compress mile-long Web site addresses into a short string of alternate characters. Ordinary hyperlinks make no record of who clicks them, or when. Links created with shortening services, on the other hand, create an imprint that can give marketers insight into whether their networking efforts are roping in potential customers and driving them toward a sale.

Social sites offer “a lot from the business intelligence side that has yet to be ad-dressed,” Bodnar, the consultant, said.