start running a calculator as to how much life insurance do I need? You know, I’ve got this income and these assets and I’m interested to know how much life insurance I need, then if it tells me, maybe it will give me a quote on what the premium is for that level of coverage and maybe an ‘e’ application. That’s one example of what one company is doing.
The other site that I’m looking at right now is a blog that’s been put together by Liberty Mutual and it’s called Responsibility Project. What they’re trying to promote in the final analysis is responsible driving and responsible homeownership and the concept that as a responsible person, customers can help reduce claims. It’s all about education but it’s also about branding. You know you have the Liberty Mutual and when you click through you can get to their main site and get quotes and so forth. What they’re trying to do is to use the blog concept to promote their products, so that’s an interesting use of interactivity. You can see that there are comments and I’m sure some of these comments are Liberty Mutual folks; but hopefully there are some comments from the general public asking questions and so forth. I will say that as a blogger – and I’ve been blogging for about three or four years now – blogging is an extremely effective tool at getting your message out there and interacting with your audience, driving credibility, driving traffic, driving search engine rankings with the key words that you’re focused on and so forth. So, that’s something to really consider. Here’s another that Charles and I worked on. Charles did a good job on posing a question that asked what are insurance companies doing out there on the Web.
One of the answer to the questions, just from the general LinkedIn population was this scene exchange site which helps somebody who’s been in a car accident get information about where to get their car fixed – body shops and so forth. When you click on vehicle-owner it asks you to register for the site. I can’t click through because I haven’t been in an accident. It will actually search on your claim through the public database and it will position the body shops in your area that are accepting claims for your insurance. So, it’s all very, very intuitive. Very similar to what we saw last week with Progressive auto and how they’re sort of mashing up different databases of information central to one source or piece of information on the user. Also, inside of the scene exchange of the body shops there are user-generated comments about the body shops. So – yes, I used this body shop, they fixed my car, I had a fender bender last month and busted the front light and they did a great job, very fair, etc. That’s a great example of providing a useful resource to the audience.
Now if I were an insurance company I would try to go and find these guys (Liberty Mutual, Progressive, Geico, Esurance) and I would sponsor this. This is a great tool, a great job. We want to sponsor this page so that we can get our branding right here, front and center.
An obvious marketing opportunity there. So, that’s an example. This is another example that was put out by Travelers, which is also about education. It’s an interactive, multi-media piece [AD RUNS].
An interesting piece on interactivity, education and so forth. So, now I’m going to close with a company that I think is just absolutely killing it when it comes to the social Web and Web 2.0 and answering Paul’s original question of ‘is the Web out of control?’ and I think that Esurance has done one of the most phenomenal jobs and I think their results are showing it.
I saw this presentation by Esurance two days ago at a conference I was attending and I got permission from Kristin Brew, the director of brand and public relations who gave the presentation to show the A.M. Best E-Fusion audience some of the slides that characterize what we’re talking about here. Most people know Erin Esurance is a cartoon character that Esurance uses to promote their auto insurance platform and coverage and their whole value proposition. Eric Esurance is sort of a crime fighter – selling insurance and solving crime at the same time and so Esurance started in 1999 as an ‘online-only’ auto insurance play. Of course, competing with Progressive and Geico and everyone else that was out in the Web sphere at that time – very early stage. In 2004 they thought they needed to have a new marketing campaign. Here’s a little bit of information about Esurance. Today, they have 500 million policies in force and so forth. What they did in 2004 was to figure out how to use the customers and come up with a marketing campaign that is really driven by the customer.
By the way, one of the things that Kristin said was that they have a very conservative CEO and CMO. It’s not like they’re these wild-haired people out in San Francisco. They’re a pretty standard insurance company that’s conservative. What they ended up doing is they really have a 4-pronged attack which was using the social Web to drive brand awareness, letting go of what they call the creative commons, which are really all of the marketing aspects of their insurance marketing collateral and intellectual property and so forth. They fused offline and online events so they sponsored offline concerts and such and then had an online session with people to submit their pictures, or their music, etc., so they’ve done a lot of work in that area. They spent a lot of time with Google alerts and with all different Websites out there and listening to what the Web, their customers and prospects, are saying about them. If you start from nothing in 1999 and start doing this cool campaign in 2004, here’s some of their results in 2007. They’re really just hitting they cover off the ball when