INSURANCE 2.0

Social media is mainstream in few industries, but definitely hasn’t made its way into insurance space. Few companies like Direct Line have experimented with community creation around Tea helps people in emergency. That idea never took off and overall its been gloomy. 2010 might be different as more and more insurance businesses understand the importance of it and following on the success of comparethemarket case study.

The following 5 areas will be the biggest growth areas in social media for 2010.

Location Based Applications

These applications could be web based, mobile based or any other interactive platform. Users are getting used to news and information coming to them rather they having to reach out for them. Twitter launched geotagging service so users can precisely find the source of the tweet on the planet. The potential of creating a whole new social media platform is low but potential to use the existing platforms and leverage them into bespoke new ideas is high.

Augmented Reality Applications

Most AR applications in 2009 were basic simple experiment to showcase the true potential of AR. There are quite few applications which show you nearest tube stations in London or nearest banks, coffee shops, restaurants, petrol stations etc. They are cool, but of low utility, shaky screens and not the best user experience. AR applications of new breed will take over our lives in 2010 and it will practically go mainstream by summer. Few major brands like Bacardi are already investing in AR and I don’t see some daring insurance businesses lagging behind. Most AR applications are marketing gimmicks, but some high utility everyday use type applications are on its way.

Social Search will grow

Google is not getting into trouble but will loose market share. Search engines taking social media criteria into consideration will gain market share. It doesn’t mean Google wont change its code to be more competitive. Business models of user reviews, facebook and twitter has had a huge impact on how we treat information these days. Search engines will start taking this into account when ranking pages. Facebook bought friendfeed to get involved in real time search. Microsoft’s Bing introduced few social features and are eating away some of Google’s market share.

The Fourth Screen Revolution

2010 is the year of the mobile. More and more applications would be accessed using mobile. Bandwidths will improve. Smartphone market penetration will surpass normal handsets. Growth of data intensive handsets like iPhone and BlackBerry will naturally influence the users to access more information when on the move. Businesses which wont a defined mobile strategy for 2010 will loose market share and will be reactive followers in 2011.

Enterprise level 2.0 applications

Few major businesses might evolve to create enterprise level solutions for bigger businesses to manage the social technologies

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Social Media strategy is a buzzword for many businesses to dip their toes into. Most businesses are doing it without a goal. They hear the buzzwords in popular media sources and follow the leaders without applying any business logic. The social media goal is of higher significance than social tools. The tools are one level down and quite simple to use once you can define your social media strategy goal in one sentence. Don’t just open a twitter account, or publish a facebook page because you want to do it to please the board of directors. The social networking tools if applied without much thought could damage your business. Another question which is common for businesses to have is how a company can effectively allocate marketing resources if they cannot define the value of investment?

So WHY create a Social Media Strategy?

Whether businesses like it or not, people want to interact with their brands. A recent report by Forrester Research said 93% of users believe a company should have a social media site. Also 42% of adults and 55% of youths want to interact with their favourite brand using one or more social media tools.

But HOW they want to interact varies

26% of adults prefer online discussion forums
21% prefer videos
15% prefer profiles on social networking sites like facebook and twitter
Only 12% prefer blogs
And less than 10% listen to podcasts

The SCIENCE of Social Media Strategy can help any online business, financial service business, retail business, service or product provider launch a social media strategy. It’s suited to most business models.

Search
Communicate
Influence
Engage
Novelty
Content
Establish

Search

There are hundreds of things being written about your brand in the social space. Search for them and find out what’s being written about, it could negative ranting or positive raving. But it’s important for your brand to identify those spaces where your customers talk about you. Technorati and IceRocket are good sources to stay tuned about your brand. Google Alerts is also a nice free tool for the same purpose.

Communicate

It’s important to communicate with your customers in the same place where they are hanging out. You could choose to promote your brand or protect your brand. But to do that you have choose the medium or platform of communication. You could launch a blog to increase communication and collaboration with customers and open them for comments. You could also establish a Facebook persona and increase awareness among your customers. You could launch a community catering to your customers interests. You could open twitter account and manage some of the customer service from there. There are lots tools you could use to communicate, buts it’s important that it’s done in a consistent manner.

Influence

Once you have started communicating and launched conversation platforms, it’s important you don’t control the conversations but influence them. It’s important you listen, follow and come back with responses which are understandable for the user. At first it might be chaotic to follow so many voices, but soon a pattern is represented and you could response with statement which answers combinations of conversations.

Engage

Engagement differs with industry. Financial services have low engagment with their customers compared to media and technology. It’s important you engage with your customers and deepen trust and customer relationship by bringing in transparency. Take criticism positively and encourage feedback. Take feedback on board and proactively manage customer expectations with short bursts of information updates. But it’s important you participate as you might trigger a World Wide Rave or prevent a World Wide Rant. You could engage your customer with thought provoking articles, products, blogs, advertising, humour and it’ll vary from business to business. Be respectful, human and considerate with your audience. A report by Engagementdb defined four engagement profiles:

 1) Mavens - Brands which are actively engage in 7 or more channels. Brands like Starbucks and Dell fall into this category. They don’t just engage actively, but its part of their core marketing strategy and their participation positively impacts their bottom line.

 2) Butterflies - These are brands which flutter around 7 or more channels, but are not as active as the Mavens. Brands like American Express fall is this category and social media is not 100% mainstream for them.

 3) Selectives - These brands engage is six or fewer channels but have above average engagement. Brands like H&M and Philips fall into this category. Very few resources are dedicated to social media for these brands.

 4) Wallflowers - These brands have six or few channels of lower than average engagement. McDonalds falls into this category where they are just dipping their toes is social media waters.

Novelty

The devil is in the details. Whatever method you choose to engage with your customer, there has to be a novelty factor to it. You just can’t copy others content / media and pretend to bring something new. Anything original has a much longer shelf life. Any idea which was a viral for one business is very unlikely to be a viral another. Most facebook pages have same tools and features, but brands still manage to personalise it by giving the pages its own persona and that’s what triggers customers to engage with those pages.
Novelty doesn’t have to spaceage, it could be simple things done with original thought and original goals. Also remember, what’s in it for your customer? If nothing, don’t bother.

Content

You could create content with your users using several collaboration tools. Many businesses like Dell (IdeaStorm) and Starbucks (MyStarbucksIdea.com) are collaborating with their users to improve product development. Some call it Crowdsourcing or Customersourcing. Many businesses provide all social networking tools as standard feature in all content pages so users could share it across their preferred social site. It’s important to align content with community needs and also encourage user generated content. One shouldn’t moderate any criticism and manage it with reactive or proactive responses where necessary. Quality and quantity of content varies with your social goals. If developing a community is what you are after than you need a full time team dedicated towards content needs.

Establish

Once you have done your search, communication, influencing, engaging, novelty and collaboration, it’s important you establish yourself and follow the above cycle of listening, learning and launching. You can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and your customers will establish a relationship of trust with your brand. It takes a bit of effort to reach the establishment phase but once there you will already be in the zone of momentum where you are constantly communicating and engaging with more and more customers and establishing deeper relationships. Do remember people congregate around relevance and value.

The SCIENCE of Social Media needs to be tested with measurement. You could measure your social media success with comments, twitter mentions, facebook fans, RSS subscribers, clickthroughs, video views, links, inbound traffic, diggs, stumbles and many more.  Do keep in mind, doing it all may not be the right thing to do, but something must be done.

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The evolution of social media has proved that car insurance businesses dont need big marketing budgets to have an online success. There is nothing as a free marketing campaign but many smarter ways have arrived to capture the online audience.

Method #1 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Its important not to spend your entire budget into a single big idea. The risk is high if it goes wrong. Its critical not to put all your eggs in one basket, but to spread it in variations across few ideas. Invest in multiple ideas and put further investment only on ideas which are working well. The web allows you to track marketing campaign success more effectively than any other medium. Some campaigns need continuous optimisation do get a synergetic effect out of them.

Method #2 to reduce your Marketing Budget

The internet has several free resources to promote your brand using social media. Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube are some of the available platforms to promote your car insurance brand and communicate with your customers. There is no need to create your own online car insurance community when there are so many already platforms and networks available.

Method #3 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Blogging honestly about your marketing, your business initiatives, your charity initiatives, and also steps your take to cut yours costs which then gets transferred to your customers. Blogs are a very powerful medium for your car insurance to communicate all those messages which are not normally expressed in web site brochureware pages. Wordpress is a zero cost and low maintenance blogging platform.

Method #4 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Mobile phone apps are much better than investing in ads if done properly.  Car insurance brands could easily create a nice app based toolkit for the their customers, it could be anything from insurance quotes to claims to ewallet. Apps could also be about something different and with no direct association with insurance.

Method #5 to reduce your Marketing Budget

Investing in online user experience and online content gives much higher long term ROI. Once you bring in the customer on the site, the content has to be engaging to make the customer feel comfortable. Investing in content is also brilliant for your SEO intiative.

Any car insurance brand to follow the above will survive in these downturn and still be able to communicate with their core audience.

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Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are the top three social networking sites in the world today. MySpace was the dominant one till 2007 and then facebook took lead in 2008, but 2009 seems to the be the year of the Twitter. 

Twitter understood something fundamental and innate about our modern online behaviour which Facebook and MySpace didnt - simplicity.

There are no crazy applications and terrible music affecting our personal space when on twitter. Its just 140 characters of communication to help you stay in touch with your customers. Its like a pulse instrument to know how your customers feel about you and an easy opportunity to manage expectations.

Going on facebook is a like a big school re-union party and visiting MySpace is like going to a bad music festival. But twitter is like the only social networking site you’d like to visit in real life as quoted by Tim Collins.

Facebook is working towards making the site more accessible to big brands which also enables brands to integrate facebook into their own site, but its not a quick fix and will take time to develop. Twitter wins over facebook when  it comes to communicating and and influencing your customers. Twitter allows customer to interact with their brands with tweets that are fresh, relevant and also independant.

If you are an online insurance business, twitter is where you should put your efforts and budget for internet marketing. Twitter may not yet have a commercial strategy to engage with the brands, but it definitely is the future platform for online insurance businesses to interact with their customers.

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Many online insurance businesses have branded social media presence with twitter and facebook, but most are not managing it well enough to preserve the brand identity. Inviduals and businesses have booked twitter ids like booking precious domain names. There is a threat of businesses not moving to social media soon enough and some individuals misusing the brand assets by booking their twitter page. The marketing benefits of using social media sites have already proven to be cost effective and communication effective but the risks of hurting the brand may not be ruled out.

Businesses can use some simple guidelines to protect their brand from being hijacked online.

Proactive Communication

Proactive communication using blogs, twitter and facebook can help manage customer expectations. Customer feel loyal to brands who announce little but high frequency communication to their loyal customer base. Many loyal customers protect and defend your brand in the social space if something bad is written by some others. Insurance brands usually are heavily criticised, therefore it’ll be a great for insurance businesses to manage those individual questions and criticisms by responding to them online using social media.

Book and Protect your brand

Your insurance brand and branded products are priceless intellectual properties of your business. Book your brand names and product names on twitter and facebook and anywhere relevant so that noone else can misuse them.

Be Vigilant

Be vigilant about every word being written about in blogs, reviews, social media site. Google Alerts is an easy way to keep track of everything good, bad and ugly about your insurance brand. Its also good to be watchful about misuse of brand assets.

Social media is changing the world of marketing at a rapid speed and most marketing departments are coming to terms with the new medium.  

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