By now everyone is probably sick of hearing about social media. People's personal lives are inundated with contact requests on LinkedIn and fraught with friends' frequent Facebook status updates. But whether they like it or not, the hype is justified for insurers. Social media not only is here to stay, but it's also perhaps one of insurers' greatest assets going forward.
"There is potential business value for insurers to use social media in several areas including increased sales, brand development, professional development and staffing," says Karen Furtado, partner with Boston-based SMA. "In 2011, insurers and agents will begin to make progress on brand protection by creating a proactive presence on selected social media sites and expanding their exposure through integrated social networking plans for both internal and external use."
Indeed, the business value to insurers revolves around the fact that they're now essentially forced to play in the social space, in which they know their customers, employees and potential employees reside.
While maintaining a presence on key social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is of great importance for insurers, developing a social media strategy goes beyond setting up a presence and managing the dialogue. Insurers also will need to identify specific groups of online customers and tailor the message and medium in which it's conveyed specifically to them.
"Look at the Hispanic and Asian markets," says Karen Pauli-Bradshaw, research director, insurance, TowerGroup, "they're highly mobile and very social-media-intense. You have to approach those markets differently-they think and behave differently and they view the world much differently. Going forward, it's going to be more about segmenting your strategy."
Identifying the target market and customizing content specifically for it is a tack already taken by Westfield Insurance. The Ohio-based insurer isn't so much concerned with specific ethnic groups as its niche customers.
"We're looking at specific pockets of customers or potential customers," says Katie Herbst, Westfield's Web & social marketing manager, P&C marketing. "For example, we're looking at how to reach out specifically to agribusiness customers. There are a tremendous number of them who are active online, especially on Twitter. One of our blogs is specifically designed for them."
Heading into 2011, Herbst says Westfield is turning its sights toward the hospitality market. In addition to a blog, Westfield is interested in implementing a customer forum, which would allow current and potential customers to interact both with each other, and with the insurer's employees and agents.
Another key for insurers' social media efforts going forward is ensuring that they have the proper analytic technologies in place to assess and manage their social media strategies.
"Carriers still aren't terribly deep in analytics," Pauli-Bradshaw Karen "but getting both the Web and internal analytics in place to assess how their strategies are working, how they can dissect and analyze segmentation strategies, and what's going on that's new is of great importance. Without the analytics, it's just wasted effort."
San Francisco-based Esurance, which specializes in maintaining strong relationships with its customers using social media, employs multiple methods to track its online success.
"Right now, we're doing what many other companies are doing-basing our success on the number of 'likes' on Facebook, the number of followers on Twitter, and then use a solution from Radian6 to monitor the buzz," says Paul Thompson, Esurance's social media communications specialist.
The dashboard they use from Toronto-based Radian6 enables them to measure how many hits the term "Esurance" gets on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Esurance then tracks the hits over time and compares the trends to see when the company is spiking and when it's falling. "It's more of a PR metric to see what people are saying about us," Thompson says, "but also lets us see the sentiment of that coverage as well as the general volume."
Esurance has used Radian6 since January, and is pleased with the results. Prior to Radian6, they used PR Newswire to monitor mainstream publications, which had no social media element, so they manually tracked social buzz in Excel. Thompson says that exercise was eventually rendered impossible with the rise of Twitter.
Additionally, Thompson says they track and trend all of their Facebook and Twitter followers' accounts. "We have an online video distribution that we include in our social media metrics just because we're finding that content is a big piece of spurring the conversation online."
Westfield, which previously paid for Web analytics, now uses Google Analytics-a free tool. Herbst also uses HubSpot, Cambridge, Mass., for search engine marketing and social media reach, and works with a marketing firm to help turn that data into actionable information.
"Social media is still a frontier right now," Thompson muses. While that may be true, 2011 may be the time for insurers to tame it and make it their own.
