Insurance Industry Explores Social Media, But Nothing To Write Home About (Blogs, Forums, Social Networks)

Categories: Challenges, Industry Index, Social MediaPosted on April 26th, 2008

I’m doing research for a client, to find out any examples of insurance companies using social media to connect with it’s customers. I’ve done some scanning over a 48 period of time, and asked my twitter (a social computer) followers, who gave a tremendous amount of helpful links. Since I’ve received many links from the community, I won’t hoard my findings, but share them in public. I’m thankful for those that help me, and I try to give back on this blog.

Overall, without surprise, this industry has not adopted these tools, as one would expect. Whether they should or not should start with by answering these questions:

Are their respective decision makers using social tools to find answers about products and services?

If so, which tools are they using, and how are they connecting?

Would insurance customers benefit from asking and answering questions directly to each other?

I did find a few examples, yet just small blossoms in the field, no clear wins that would make a case study of complete success or failure, among them include:

Pick Your Advisor, India
This website allows users to select a financial or insurance advisor using a friendly personable interactive selector. Each of the advisors has a picture asscoiate with them, and a psuedo blog. As I looked closer, most of the blog data was not being used, or was being used like a chat room.

Allstate Community Forum
It appears this forum (code suggests it’s powered by lithium software, see the whole list) which launched in late 07 is a great example of a company embracing it’s customers using community software. Sadly, there’s very few messages and discussions. The forum is segmented by role (singles, couples, parents) and you can start to see some Q&A occurring. In my recent report on Online Community Best Practices, I found that companies must have a kick start plan to get their communities going.

esurance fan opportunity
Esurance’s aggressive online advertising of it’s cartoon like superhero “Erin Esurance” is causing some fandom, and some are dressing up like her. Mack questions if esurance should embrace some of these fans, but I’m not so sure. Is the goal of the cartoon campaign to drive awareness, or involve in a discussion about insurance. Some have mixed reactions on interacting with fake personas, so perhaps a different strategy would be needed.

Embrace Pet Insurance, Facebook
For those of us who have pets, care can often be expensive for family members, as a result, embrace pet insurance launched this Facebook group. There are 83 members in the Facebook group, few discussions, a handful of wall posts and no applications.

Various Blogs
Perhaps the most interesting insurance related blog is Singapore’s Tan Kin Lian, a former CEO who is “I write this blog to educate the public about insurance, finance and current affairs in Singapore”. The archives go back to 2005, and there are a handful of comments on many of the recent posts. He posts frequently, and is using it in a Q&A type format. On the other hand, there are new blogs appearing, such as this one from Golden State Life Insurance (only 3 posts)

Enterprise Collaboration
In a recent Forrester report, Oliver Young’s case study highlights how Northwestern Mutual benefits from internal collaboration using the Awareness platform. I’m sure there are many other examples, but this industry is often not forth coming. Shel Holtz has additional commentary.

Rehashing of Commercials on YouTube
Liberty Mutual launched a TV commercial series called “Pay it forward” that was published on YouTube (it doesn’t appear to be sanctioned from the brand), with 150,000 views. They could easily take this campaign to the people by creating a campaign letting the community share their stories view text and video. Interestingly, a few folks decided to take the time to parody the video. Update: I’ve just been notified about the Responsibility Project by Liberty Mutual, a video campaign with a blog (comments enabled), I don’t see much community aspect.

Active Forums
Perhaps the most vibrant examples are these various forums. Insurance is likely not a daily activity, and members may prefer to ask questions anonymously to each other. In this forum for insurance agents, called Insurance Forums (top thread has over 60,000 views and 1000 responses regarding a convention). AM/PM insurance has a thriving community, appears to be a customer community. Kiplinger an financial analysis resource has a forum for general insurance discussions.

Geico’s Caveman
This isn’t a great example of social media, but Geico’s caveman has interactive marketing elements where you can visit his “crib”, also the character appeared in real life at a recent SXSW party I attended.

Zuzzid, Norwhich Union’s Community Ratings
To me, this is the perhaps the promising program, a website where community members can speak out about, rate, and rank insurance agencies. Sadly, this community has had little traction, just a few postings, and if you read the bottom line it’s created by an insurance agency, UK’s Norwich Union (which coincidently has the highest rating) for this to work, it’ll have to be from an independent source.

Pemco wants to be like you
Pemco, a Northwest insurance agency in US, launched am interactive marketing site called were a lot like you that shows many profiles of potential prospects, and allows members to upload theirs. While it appears most of the content is created by the agency or the company, there’s very little area for member to member interaction (what social media is about). A good start, I hope they take this to the next level, and let the community really take hold and drive, create, and discuss the content.

Findings
There really isn’t much activity happening in the insurance industry to use social media, and where it may be successful, it could likely be behind the firewall, impervious to public viewing. Update: Jeff Jarvis is also on the hunt for industries that are somewhat impervious to social media, I’ll agree, social media isn’t great for everything, let’s use our heads, not everything is a nail..

Lastly, I’ve received half a dozen emails and tweets in total saying they are working with a client on social media, but can’t disclose the details, or will ask the client, or the project has ended. A very quiet industry, indeed.

In general, most financial and insurance industries are going to fall just behind the curve of mainstream adoption when it comes to social media tools, they rightfully will wait and vet out what works and what doesn’t.

If you see any other examples of insurance companies solving real business problems using social tools (I’m not as interested in toe-dipping), please leave a comment.

Related: I did this same list for the Finance industry, see Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 4:48 am and is filed under Challenges, Industry Index, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thanks for sharing, I’ll definitely be following you on Twitter from now on

Posted by Mr Boin on April 26th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Just added ZUZZID to the post.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on April 27th, 2008 at 2:34 am

Jeremiah, Regarding your request about insurance and financial services industries using social media, i will point out that the private equity industry is trying out social media with its use of blogs and podcasts. Two venture capital firms: Levensohn Venture Partners and August Capital both use podcasts (and have blogs) as education tools for their entrepreneurs as well as prospective entrepreneurs. Also The Deal uses podcasts as a means to extend the life of their conferences to existing and other audiences.

Posted by jennifer jones on April 27th, 2008 at 10:06 pm

Thanks Jennifer, besides those two, (and the Deal) are there any other firms actively and whole-heartedly using social media?

For those firms who are trying to reach the web 2.0 entrepreneur, they’re using the right tools.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on April 28th, 2008 at 6:10 am

[...] Jeff Jarvis and Jeremiah Owyang are discussing the merits of social, web 2.0, VRM concepts in the context of financial services. [...]

Posted by The Web 2.0 Social VRM impact on Insurance and Financial Services on April 28th, 2008 at 9:04 am

I think looking at the insurance issue only from the perspective of consumers is limiting. The real opportunity for insurance and other areas will be in the application of social media tools to achieve better business results. VRM looked at from the businesses perspective also provides opportunities for social media. Replace the concept of individual contributors in a work environment for consumer and all the same needs are there. A manager is looking for new vendors, new solutions, to share information, etc. Most industries are in fact more collaborative than competitive in execution. There is a world of opportunity there.

Posted by Elaine Bolle on April 28th, 2008 at 9:15 am

Thanks a lot for the link. A quick perusal of our forum will show you why it is dangerous for insurance companies to jump into the vertical. No company, no matter how good or strong, is without its negative aspects. Well, people love to talk about negativity much more than positivity, so those points rise to the top.

It is always a struggle to see just how negative people are in the social networking medium.

Posted by Sam on April 30th, 2008 at 6:39 am

[...] you’ve seen from my recent post, there are few successes in the insurance industry. While every company must listen, the return on participating may not be right for every company [...]

Posted by COO and CFO Questions on May 1st, 2008 at 1:19 am

Hey Jeremiah,

My company NixonMcInnes did a blog for an insurance company in the UK called More Th>n.

Check it out at http://living.morethan.com

Posted by Patrick on May 1st, 2008 at 2:01 am

jeremiah, thanks for the link.

Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to drag our company and our industry single handedly into Social Media aspect of the internet.

Posted by Michael Musselman on May 1st, 2008 at 2:57 pm

[...] : Insurance Industry Explores Social Media, But Nothing To Write Home About. [...]

Posted by Ugens links pÃ¥ del.icio.us (26.04.08 - 02.05.08) | Morten Gade on May 2nd, 2008 at 6:01 pm

[...] strategy expert and Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang also recommends these additional questions: Are your target customers using social media to make their decisions? Which tools are they using [...]

Posted by Social media key to marketing mix | Small Business Trends on May 15th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

[...] Insurance Industry Explores Social Media, But Nothing To Write Home About An overview of social media in insurance. A very short overview I might add. (tags: insurance) [...]

Posted by The Zone Read » Blog Archive » links for 2008-04-27 on May 18th, 2008 at 6:03 am

[...] with previous times I’ve asked you for your opinion on reports, I do share what the community findings were, and how I’m going to proceed. Thanks for crowdsourcing with [...]

Posted by What do you look in a White Label or Private Label Social Networking Vendor? on May 19th, 2008 at 8:30 am

Marketing online in insurance we ended up going after social media. We’ve tried blogs and are about to setup a forum. So far the only real success we’ve had in social media (ignoring link baits which didn’t drive real links) is a question answer system we setup (http://www.global-health-insurance.com/questions). This seems to work quite well. Its defunct at the moment however we’ve spent 6 months developing a much more robust version.

Posted by John on May 20th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

add this

http://www.responsibilityproject.com/

Posted by jko on June 6th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

[...] Social media for the insurance agency [...]

Posted by Ongoing list of Social Media in the Financial Industry on June 23rd, 2008 at 3:20 am

Posted by Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders « Social Media.Online Games.Virtual Worlds on June 24th, 2008 at 9:57 pm

Jeremiah:

I know I’m reviving a thread from a few months ago, but hey, that’s the beauty of Social Media.

I struggle to find ways to use social media in an insurance company for a few reasons. The biggest challenge is content.

If it is a commercial insurance or other type of insurance company that primarily is B2B or through insurance agents, I think there are numerous opportunities. The audience is definitely interested in reading more content about insurance.

In the personal lines insurance world (property and casualty for example) it’s much more challenging to develop content because, honestly, who wants to read about their car insurance? They want to get it, pay for it, and hopefully never use it.

That’s my challenge right now and I’m having to get creative in some alternative ways to take advantage of the power of social media without tarnishing the impression of the company by jumping in to the fishbowl in an inappropriate manner.

Kevin

Posted by Kevin Behringer on June 26th, 2008 at 12:20 pm

Jeremiah,

Any activity on the side of medical insurers? Are any of the medical insurance providers using social media to discuss the industry or speak with customers?

Cheers
Neil

Posted by S. Neil Vineberg on June 30th, 2008 at 8:27 am

Kevin, it’s true, they are higher walls for this industry to cover, but it could be worse, they could be pharma!

S Neil.
I’ll add them if I see them!

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 1st, 2008 at 4:53 am

[...] is one of the first that comes to mind. As Forrester’s prominent social computing analyst, Jeremiah Owyang writes on his blog “social media isn’t great for everything, let’s use our heads, not everything is a nail . . . [...]

Posted by DigitalWatch » Blog Archive » Social Media & Insurance? on September 4th, 2008 at 10:31 pm

[...] Media by Industry: Auto, Finance, and Insurance. Need to find examples for your boss or client? These lists can [...]

Posted by Jeremiah Owyang’s recommended web strategy reading « Beyond Digital Media on October 19th, 2008 at 4:29 am

[...] And Jeremiah Owian of Forrester Research wrote in his blog: [...]

Posted by Insurance and Web 2.0 « Edgewater Technology Weblog on October 27th, 2008 at 10:43 am

just came across. Nice blog

Posted by Cami on January 8th, 2009 at 10:42 am

Can you please provide more details.

Posted by Kevin Condor on January 9th, 2009 at 7:29 pm

You should check out changeinsurance.ca

Aviva has a full Q&A site - very strong.

Posted by AMR on January 18th, 2009 at 2:30 pm

Have you seen the insurme.coms blog stuff (especially there videos… hilarious!)

http://www.insuremeblog.com/

As a former social media consultant forced to enter the family insurance brokers business expect to see some interesting things come out in the brokers side of thing.

Insurances origins in fact smell a lot like social networking and the worlds top insurance company runs very different to the standard insurance companies you write about.

You see, Toward the end of the seventeenth century, London’s growing importance as a center for trade increased demand for marine insurance. In the late 1680s, Mr. Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house that became a popular haunt of ship owners, merchants, and ships’ captains, and thereby a reliable source of the latest shipping news. It became the meeting place for parties wishing to insure cargoes and ships, and those willing to underwrite such ventures.Then as now, anyone who was seeking insurance would go to a broker, who would then hawk the risk to the individual risk-takers who gathered in the coffee houses or in the precincts of the Royal Exchange. When a deal was closed, the risk-taker would confirm his agreement to cover the loss in return for a specified premium by writing his name under the terms of the contract; soon these one-man insurance operators came to be known as “underwriters”.

Today, Lloyd’s of London remains the leading market (note that it is not an insurance company) for marine and other specialist types of insurance, but it works rather differently than the more familiar kinds of insurance.

Posted by Justin on January 19th, 2009 at 3:19 pm

[...] read make me wonder otherwise. First, almost a year ago, there was some speculation on a few blogs, triggered by a post from Jeff Jarvis, about “Insurance 2.0.” In particular, a comment [...]

Posted by Social Home Buying? « extensions on February 6th, 2009 at 2:36 pm

Thank you for this list, I am always looking for examples to share with our independent agency partners. We are working to educate agents about how they can use these tools to add value to their business. My company (Ohio-based Westfield Insurance) has been using blogs to share knowledge about managing risks, here are links if you are interested … we have been getting a positive response from bringing a more personal approach to providing info to customers.

http://infosec.westfieldinsurance.com/

http://losscontrol.westfieldinsurance.com/

Posted by Katie Herbst on February 17th, 2009 at 8:56 am

[...] for Forrester Research, provides the most complete ongoing lists that highlight developments in the insurance and financial [...]

Posted by Speaking of money: Financial service firms that give value « i scream social on March 15th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

Thanks for the article. There are quite a few Insurance companies, including agents and brokers that are very interested in social media and what that means to expanding their branding reach.

I was recently interviewed by Program Business on how our agency is implementing these new tools. “ISA: Using the Power of Web 2.0 in Marketing Strategy” http://www.programbusiness.com/3.0/News/NewsArticlesDetails.aspx?ArtID=4286

InsuranceCampus.org (http://www.insurancecampus.org/) is a community of Insurance professionals and the biggest topic going on right now is Social Media.

Also, the Agents Council of Technology (ACT), which is part of the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America (IIABA) is dedicated to learning and creating resources for Insurance professional in regards to Social Media/Web 2.0.

I hope these are helpful to you!

-Kristin

Posted by kristin on April 23rd, 2009 at 8:29 am

Twitter works great and also http://www.agentzoo.com for Social Networking

Posted by Roger on April 29th, 2009 at 8:49 pm

I have found insurance companies reluctant to participate in social media platforms, in part due to the confusion as to where in the organization this sits. Is this a PR issue where it is dealt with as an ill-advised attempt to control message as with external press or is this a website group problem who have the technical ability to try and activily participate without trying to control but lack authority.

Where does social media fit in organizations currently?

Posted by Terry Golesworthy on June 1st, 2009 at 10:14 am

I am researching the same topic right now - social media cases for insurances. Thanks for this great post and collection, it helped a lot.

I just wanted to mention that Allstate has since added Twitter, Facebook fanpage, Youtube channel and Podcasts to their social media range, all of which can be found on the bottom of their website http://www.allstate.com

Regards! Helen (@helvatter)

Posted by Helen Vatter on June 17th, 2009 at 2:35 am

Working on this very same topic form a norwegian perspective. During my search for “best practise” a came across http://www.resdagboken.se - run by Europeiska travel insurance. The page has community aspects. Also available in english…

Posted by Preben Lybekk on June 23rd, 2009 at 12:24 am

We recently launched QuoteRunner and feel that there is a tremendous opportunity to engage and connect with our fans and customers. We would like to have a unique relationship with our readers.

So with that in mind we launched:

http://www.facebook.com/insure
http://twitter.com/quoterunnercom
http://www.youtube.com/user/Quoterunner

Please visit them and let us know how we are doing.

Thanks

Posted by QuoteRunner on June 23rd, 2009 at 11:47 am

That’s great, I never thought about Insurance Industry Explores Social Media, But Nothing To Write Home About (Blogs, Forums, Social Networks) like that before.