cell phone. If fact I was at a conference this week on Monday and Tuesday that I’m going to be referencing a little bit later and one of the presenter who is a person that’s steeped in the social network space commented that – she lives in New York City – she’s never had a home phone in her apartment in New York. So, there are some very interesting trends. As we know from a marketing standpoint, direct mail and any kind of mail content that you’re trying to push out to your target market – 80% of direct mail is being trashed even before it gets a second look. So, I guess that’s all a backdrop for why the Web and why you should be using the Web to promote your products and services.
The other interesting, too, is MySpace is attracting over one billion visits a month, so it’s the highest trafficked Website today. The average user is spending a huge amount of time in their average visits. So, if you want to promote your products, you’d better be thinking about MySpace as a place to be. Like Charles was saying, you’ve got to be there. The other thing to remember is, as always, word of mouth is an extremely powerful way of promoting any product. As I said, right place, right time, right message. For example, if I buy a house and a friend of mine comes up to me and says, ‘hey Mike, congratulations on your house. By the way my buddy sells home insurance; I know he’d love to talk to you.’ So, of course, if that’s a trusted friend I’m going to call that person. That means I’m not going to go to Google and search on homeowners insurance. I’m going to pick up the phone if I’ve got the number or I’m going to email the insurance agent and probably conduct that transaction directly with that agent. If he has an online vehicle for me to complete the process, even better – like we saw last week with the Progressive F-3 application.
There’s just a tremendous amount of power in that right place, right time message and the word of mouth. So the Web, if you think about positioning yourself online, to capture these scenarios the Web is really where you can really have maybe the biggest bang for your buck. I’ll be talking about what one company has done in just a second.
I’m showing LinkedIn and the reason I’m showing LinkedIn is as I mentioned in my introduction, one of the markets that I serve is the association and group insurance market in addition to the other side which is agent driven. One of the phenomena we are seeing with the Web is the concept of self-forming associations and groups. For example I did a quick search on LinkedIn of chemical engineers. You can see that in my search window. So, I searched groups for chemical engineers. You see what came up. There are 31 groups that came up and it’s ranking them by the number of members, so this AICEG seems to the official chemical engineers group. It’s got the highest number of members. When you click through, it shows you the members of the group that are also in my network. I have Andrew Didero, who’s second on my list. So, using LinkedIn I can find a way to connect with Andrew. Then, here’s the homepage, which is the standard Website for this particular group. If we were thinking about it from an insurance perspective and we wanted to sell insurance to this audience, if we go down to the member center and start looking for what sort of insurance benefits I get as an AICEG member, there’s a page on here that describes all the different life insurance and professional liability insurance and so forth. If I click through to this 20-year group term life insurance link, it brings me to a website that describes that particular product, 20-year level group term and this page that you can see on the bottom is sponsored by Marsh Affinity Group Services. They’re obviously the broker that has a contract with this particular association.
However, if we go back to LinkedIn, as we all know there are plenty of opportunities to promote your insurance products through the group and there are also advertising opportunities as well. The interesting thing about social networks is that people are self identifying their life circumstances. For example, if you have a member of LinkedIn and perhaps they’re looking for a new job with a new engineering firm in this particular case, they’ll identify themselves as a member of this group and they’ll also identify themselves as somebody that’s looking for a new job. Maybe with that job change you might want to market to them a short term medical insurance policy. Well, you can actually target that audience through this tool with your message. So, it’s an extremely efficient way to market an insurance product through LinkedIn and through a social network where they’re self identifying themselves.
That’s one example of insurance marketing through social networks where people identify themselves. In preparing for this we (Charles and I) did a little bit of research about what insurance companies are really doing in the social Web. One of the companies that we found that did a little bit of stuff, not too much. I’m going to start – I don’t want to be critical or anything – but maybe the more “toe in the water” type of things and them I’m going to finish with a company that really dove into the deep end of the pool.
Here’s a little You-Tube vignette that was promoted by MetLife on life insurance. [AD RUNS]
Clearly what MetLife is doing – and this has had 119 views, 2,000 channel views – MetLife is trying to promote the concept of pooling in insurance. Obviously MetLife has been using the Snoopy cartoon for a long time with the blimp and everything. So they put up this You-Tube and if you want more information they have a special website that you can click through. Although I would say they might want to have a quote engine positioned right here so someone can