Building the World's Largest Ship (in 76 seconds) from Maersk Line.

 Thanks go to Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group, for pointing me to this excellent article by Jonathan Wichmann, Head of Social at Maersk, the Danish shipping giant.

He advises: "Hire a journalist not a marketer."

He describes the mandate:

The job of these corporate journalists is to go out, locate stories and tell them without compromising their journalistic integrity. They are to withstand the pressure when internal people from various projects approach them to have their ‘success’ story told. It’s the journalist’s call to decide when it is a success story and when it’s a ‘not-so-successful’ story that we can hopefully learn from.

With this approach you build trust, both within the organisation and towards external stakeholders such as the competitors, media, customers etc.

 And the benefits are already being seen.

We are already broadcasters in our own right. And in the bigger scheme of things: we’ve gained influence and control by losing it (as some would term it), through social media.

What all of this requires is credibility. The ability to talk openly about your own mistakes, be self-critical and even to talk objectively about competition.

 You have to read the rest, it's an excellent case study of how one of the world's largest companies has managed to establish a media reach larger than some of the established media outlets.

Corporate media and the social twist: Why you need to do it yourself (and do it now) | The Digital Blueprint

And if you need help in becoming a media company contact me: I'm opening a new services arm to help pay for my journalism here on SVW.