Insurance Agents of Oklahoma have started a group. They’ve done this for a couple of reasons. Number one is the young agents in their group want it. Number two, they want to take their offline events, meetings and try to extend them into the online space. They’re just new in the arena with LinkedIn, but I think you’ll see more agent groups, in particular, go into this.
Another blog comes from Clements.com which is a specialty insurance provider which brokers and writes direct business for international exposures. They’re based in Washington, DC. They’ve launched a blog called Global Insight, which deals with all things expatriate. Clements’ clients are all expatriates, Americans who work overseas. You can see here from a video, it’s actually a You-Tube video that they’ve uploaded to their blog. But they take on all topics. They talk about the difference between a U.S. spec car and a non-U.S. spec car, which is important if you’re insuring your vehicle in Europe or somewhere overseas, to the best chocolate in Belgium, which is my favorite posting. When you have clients in 160 countries, as they do, the Web is a particularly good way to reach out.
Now, I mentioned before interactive Websites, which aren’t necessarily social media Websites, and this Aetna health insurance portal, it seems like it’s been around for a very long time, but I think it’s important to point this out – that user-passworded Websites that give them access to not only general information, but their own specific information. They’re sort of standard fare in the industry now but they’re important because this is what consumers want. They want that immediate access. They want access to information and they want to know what happened with their claim and that type of thing.
Before I move on to Mike and let him take over, I think there are three things to look at in social media in insurance and financial services. Number one: think influence, not control. Organizations have to make this mind shift and social media is really pushing to do it. Consumers are more in control now with social media than they’ve ever been before. It’s hard to imagine the genie going back in the bottle. As they used to say, “Deal with it.” Secondly, think about person to person. Marketing traditionally is that one-to-many approach, which is still valid, still very important, very cost efficient, but consumers are working in this person to person environment now so companies, again, have to adjust to this reality. Thirdly, show up. Woody Allen said 80% of success is showing up. Oversimplified, of course, but insurance organizations just aren’t showing up in great numbers yet in social media. Understandably, it’s a new phenomenon, relatively speaking, but consumers want them there. Probably the biggest consideration is when we show up, what do we do and how do we deal with this?
MCDONALD: Thank you, Charles. We have Charles’ contact information on the screen there. It’s very easy – charles@aartrijk.com. Also, in our GoToWebinar tool there’s a little section there called ‘questions.’ We’re going to turn it over to Mike in a second but if you have something that occurs to you or you want to address, just put it in there and we’ll get to it after Mike’s presentation. At this point, I’m going to switch it over to Mike.
WISE: Just a couple of comments on Charles’ presentation: Web 2.0 is all about consumer generated content and interactivity and consumer-driven resources. You know we’ve all be talking about consumer driven for quite a bit of time and now with Web 2.0 it really seems to be here. As we all know, at least on the marketing side – I know E-Fusion deals with the operations side as well – but at least on the marketing side selling anything, including insurance is all about being at the right place at the right time with the right message. So, if you think about the place – where are people spending their time? It seem to be that they’re spending a huge amount of time on the Web. So it seems that being all over the Web with your marketing message is the right thing to do at this point. Especially since there’s a growing trend – I’m not sure if listeners are aware of this, but – there’s a growing trend of people moving their home phone number to a Web-based portal or cancelling their home phone number all together in lieu of their Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10