INSURANCE 2.0

If you can’t distil your social media goals in one statement, you don’t have a clearly defined social media strategy. Most insurance businesses are going to dive into social media marketing in 2010. How many do you think could distil why use social media strategy? 90% wouldn’t know the answer or would say its where our customers are, or it’s important we should have a facebook page or a twitter page.  All these reasons are valid reasons but still aren’t clear goals. Most businesses get it wrong, where they confuse launching into social media as a goal and then hope it will bring them customers or improve business engagement. Hope is not a strategy.

How every business could use each of the popular social media networks / platforms could be unique, driven with clear goals. You can’t be everything to everybody, and then your business is in the danger of being nothing to nobody.

It’s important for businesses to identify business goals and then drive contact strategy with their customer. For some businesses it could be to increase customer base, for some it might be to drive sales, for some it might be to reach new channels of customers, and for some it might be to crowdsource product development. But you can’t have all of them as your goal because your strategy might get diluted.

Its very important for your business to distil your social media strategy in one sentence or else it might fail to reach its objectives.

Tweet This  Digg This  Stumble This 

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

Tweet This  Digg This  Stumble This 

Insurance is deemed as a boring industry with very little innovation. Most of it is due to old legacy systems and merging of layers of different systems talking to each other. The industry has second thoughts about change. Times are now changing and few insurance businesses are advocates of innovation in the online space. Some online insurance businesses have started hiring usability experts which is an indication that there is a willingness to bring innovation.

I’m a huge advocate for customer focused design and if insurance businesses start using their customers for product development, they will discover a wealth of ideas that’ll help insurance businesses build next generation online models. Insurance 2.0 is still a fiction because insurance businesses haven’t figured out the area of opportunities where they can introduce customer engagement or two way communication.

I find insurance is one of the toughest financial services product to work with. We spend so much on it yet hope we never use it!

I have a theory about 5 stages where financial services interact with their customers. This is applicable to most financial services and not just insurance.

1. Educating

2. Quoting

3. Buying

4. Servicing

5. Deepen Customer Relationships

Most sites do (2) Quoting and (3) Buying well enough, although usability in quoting is far from perfect. The biggest area of Insurance 2.0 opportunities are around (1) Educating (4) Servicing and (5) Deepen Customer Relationships. Some brands are moving into DIY servicing, online claims, chat, click2call etc. But it’s the opportunity to educate and acquire customers then deepen the relationship & retain customers where I see the opportunities exist to really differentiate. Introduction of web 2.0 technologies like Ajax could be used to improve Quote and Buy stage of the cycle.

Insurance 2.0 will soon be a reality in short-term future.  Some insurance businesses are already innovating towards opening new channels of two way communication with customers.

Tweet This  Digg This  Stumble This 

An online community can be created with very little spending or a business can spend a half a million dollars and still not achieve traction. Its not technology which make engaging online communities, its the people and the business idea which unite people to share and air their veiws and thoughts. Insurance businesses are little slow at reacting to online trends and therefore haven’t caught with with times to have a social media strategy or create an online community to communicate more directly with their customers. If you are an insurance business and want to start your online community, this is how you should go about it.

Its important to ask yourself a few questions before you go spending millions into building a community:

• Why do I build a community?
• How can I make the community more engaging for its users?
• What features do I want available to the community users?
• What will be cost of building the community?
• How do I manage the community?
• Are there any competitors in insurance who already have build a community?
• How much time and resource is needed to launch the community

There are few ready made products like Ning which provide free platform and tools to build a robust online community. Even wordpress has several community builder plugins to establish a low cost online insurance community. Advantage of going with a free tool is you can spend your time and resources to think of business idea of running the community and customising the look and feel of the community rather than developing it from scratch.

Here are some important driving forces to manage your insurance community once you have decided to launch it.

Hire a community specialist resource

This resource will act as a member of community and make sure the brand is not being misused and violated. They will also look after the interests of the community and manage it from spam, banned topics and act as a host to the community.

Identify active community participants

Once a community is launched you need to tap into the active promoters of your insurance brand and set your strategic objectives with them so they can bring more people into the community. Doing this is tough withing the insurance space.

Manage your audience expectations with right content

Content is key success factor of community. Your audience needs coming back to the site for new content. If you are launching a new insurance product or changing existing ones, its good to take your audiences veiws online and engage them in the discussion. You can call it crowdsourcing.

User-Generated content should be promoted

Make it very easy for users to publish content easily and effectively. It adds new content on your site every day which is excellent for your SEO strategy and also it keeps your readers engaged with your updates.

The biggest challenge for an insurance business is the idea behind launching an online community. I leave that to you to think as that’ll be giving away too much.

Tweet This  Digg This  Stumble This 

Readers are overwhelmed with hundreds of articles about adoption of Web 2.0 for the insurance industry. Many businesses are not in a position both with Information Technology framework and customer mind set to implement web 2.0 strategies in their business, but are still about to do it because its COOL.

Web 2.0 technologies in the insurance industry may not be the key survival factor but definitely a key differentiator with competitors. Only problem is the risk of doing it. Any idea which involves crowds or network effects to run it might fall flat on its face if not done properly the first time.

There is a lot of hype about insurance 2.0 and what it can do for insurance businesses and their customers. There is a lot of research and evidence to back up the hype, but this hype has lead to high expecations which are unreasonable for many IT teams in insurance businesses. Diving into insurance 2.0 just for the hype and not backing it up with a sound business plan might turn out to be very expensive for the business in the long term.

A business case fit is critical between your web 2.0 strategy and your insurance business model. It’ll definitely suit already pureplay online only insurance business models like Youi and Swiftcover.

Insurance 2.0 is definitely the way forward but just dont do it because it’s cool.

Tweet This  Digg This  Stumble This