Insurance Agent Web Power

So, six months behind this blog, Fast Company scrutinizes Dells ‘Twitter-driven’ sales. On the one hand, they note the success of Twitter as a sales tool; on the other, they note, as I did six months ago, that the ‘Twitter-driven’ sales are a drop in Dell’s bucket. It’s true that all Dell’s tweets cost them nothing, but as the article points out, tweeting takes time and there are pitfalls to be avoided. In short, while I think Twitter can be a useful branding tool for insurance agents, I don’t think Twitter is worthy of all the hype. It may be something you fit into your branding arsenal after careful consideration. As a straight up sales vehicle – I think it’s probably a non-starter for insurance agents.

Poor old email.  Celebrities don’t use it to communicate their fans, and infotainment talking heads encourage viewers to check their Twitter tweets. So is email dead?  Should we send out the funeral service notices?  The chart below tells the tale.

Poll:  How do you share information you receive in email?

Despite the hype surrounding blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and social networking in general, email is still the way most people share information with friends, family, and associates.  Social media is a very, very distant second.  That doesn’t mean that your insurance agency shouldn’t be developing a social media strategy, but the chart should give you a visual clue as to the amount of time you should be spending on that social media vs. gathering, managing and using email addresses.

There is ample evidence that suggest too many options delay decisions and increase dissatisfaction with the choices we make (See Barry Schwartz’s excellent book on the topic: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less). Enter a new definition of quality, posited in a Wired Magazine article: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. The article leads with discussion of the cheap, and easy to use Flip Ultra camcorder. Despite the lack of features, the camera has sold like hot cakes, grabbing a 17% share of the camcorder market in just two years.

Other ‘good enough to get on with it’ products and services cited in the article include gmail and Zoho Writer, a Microsoft Word substitute with fewer bells and whistles (but most of the features you are actually likely to use). Oh yeah, and what about the advantages of a (relatively) unsophisticated, unmanned Predator aircraft vs. a $45 million F-16 (options, including pilot, may cost extra)?

Wired isn’t alone in noticing that cheap and simple solutions are often the best ones. In the upcoming sequel to Freakonomics – called Super Freakonomics – Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner have included a chapter chapter entitled The Fix Is In – And It’s Cheap and Simple.

I think this movement toward ‘good enough is more than effective’ is good news for agency manager perfectionists. Instead of wrestling with decisions about which expensive and complex software or web service to work with, just go with what works, and can be had for little or no money. Here’s a few favorites that insurance agency managers should be thinking about:

For video calls, and free long distance, try Skype. Depending on features you may wish to add (a traditional phone number, the ability to call out to land line or cell phones, e.g.), you may pay a few dollars a month.

And speaking of YouTube, there is no simpler way to get your video converted for streaming and to add it to your website.  We have been using YouTube for a variety of purposes at Confluency Solutions, and set up our own channel a little over a year ago.  Use YouTube videos to explain insurance coverage, the claim process, or to highlight safety issues.  Oh, and the cost – free.

Video email can be free, or you could pay as much as (gasp!) $99 a year.  Eyejot is our service of choice.  At Confluency, we use it for proposal deliveries, conference/trade show follow ups, and to set up renewal reviews.

Email management, CAN SPAM compliance, and newsletter sign ups can be facilitated by several services.  MailChimp is free, as long as your ’subscription’ list is $500 or less.  After 500, the monthly fees are low.  (Your insurance agency might have 2,000 customers, but how many email addresses do you have?)

For web conferencing, including document and screen sharing, try DimDim.  The service is reliable, easy to use, and free for up to 20 attendees in a session.

The list could go on and on, but in my experience, these are good places for most insurance agencies to start.

You could say ‘insurance’ is the answer, and at some level, it is.  But that glib answer makes many of us miss several of  the imperatives of any business:  getting customers, keeping customers, and making sure our customer relationships are profitable (so we can stay in business).  I attended a recent agency association convention where I heard two comments repeated that I have heard for years:

1.  Oh, you guys do web stuff?  I’ll give your information to my technology guy to review.

2.  I’m in the insurance business, not the technology business.

I felt the need to post my take on those comments, but I didn’t feel like typing.  So here’s what you get:

Social media marketing is work; it takes time, it is a game played by different rules than most agents are used to.  Results will probably come slowly, and be difficult to measure.  With all my skepticism, I still believe that insurance agents should be taking measured, disciplined forays into blogging, Facebook, YouTube…and yes, I suppose even Twitter.  The Ten Commandents of Social Media, posted by Lon Safko on the Fast Company blog, is a great place for most insurance agents to start, although I wouldn’t recommend following every commandment (I like to think of them as suggestions anyway).  Below are the commandments reproduced, along with my opinions of whether they are elective or mandatory.

Commandments 1. Thou Shalt Blog (like crazy)

Elective. Blogging takes time.  Having said that, it wouldn’t hurt to start a blog, even a personal one that you share with only a few people.  At least you will become familiar with the medium.

Commandments 2. Thou Shalt Create Profiles (everywhere)

Mandatory. This isn’t hard or time consuming and has the defensive benefit of securing your business user name on the different social networks (this is different than claiming your insurance agency domain name).

Commandments 3. Thou Shalt Upload Photos (lots of them)

Mandatory. There are lots of places where you can do this:  Facebook comes to mind immediately, and don’t overlook photo sharing services like Picasa and Flickr.

Commandments 4. Thou Shalt Upload Videos (all you can find)

Mandatory. And leave the commercials out (remember those things you FF past using TIVO).  Nobody wants to see them.  Be educational, tell a story, feature your staff in the community.  There is no excuse for not taking advantage, this is maybe the lowest hanging fruit in social media because video upload is free (see YouTube, Viddler, and a bunch of others), and the video can be embeded all over the place once it has been created and uploaded.

Commandments 5. Thou Shalt Podcast (often)

Elective. You should really be doing video anyway.

Commandments 6. Thou Shalt Set Alerts (immediately)

Mandatory. Facebook and other social network services will send text messages to you, and other services provide similar options.  You should be using Google Alerts, or another service to keep tabs on where your business name pops up.  You need to monitor what people are saying about you for obvious reasons.

Commandments 7. Thou Shalt Comment (on a multitude of blogs)

Elective.  Or Mandatory. I can’t decide.  Monitoring blogs can take up more time than you might be willing to commit, but commenting on the right blogs and social media can raise you profile and establish you and your insurance agency as an expert – there can be real brand value in this, and your time expenditure can be managed.

Commandments 8. Thou Shalt Get Connected (with everyone)

Mandatory. If you want to build a social network, this is how you get started.  That is, once you have established your profile.

Commandments 9. Thou Shalt Explore Social Media (30 minutes per week)

The most Mandatory of all. At least that’s what I think.  Thirty minutes a week isn’t too onerous a time commitment to explore and become familiar with a phenomena that has the potential to shape how business is done.

Commandments 10. Thou Shalt Be Creative (go forth and create creatively)

Mandatory. I’m going to cheat on this one by including the rest of the Fast Company blog post on this commandment.  I’m reading between the lines:  don’t do product commercials.

And the most important commandment is creativity. That’s all. It’s just creativity and having fun. But you know what, that’s what your customers want. They want to see transparency. They want to see authenticity. They want to see you having fun. They want to be able to relate and communicate.

I have dabbled with Facebook and Twitter over the last several months and have immersed myself in the growing litany of webinars, seminars, blog posts, and white papers about social media and business marketing.  A few mornings ago,  I read a NY Times article about the US government requesting Twitter to delay maintenance that would have shut down the network just as Iranians were lighting up the Twit-o-sphere with election protest tweets.*  My prediction is that proponents of social media marketing will point to this as proof of Twitters power and applicability.   That’s exactly the level of rigor applied when pundits conclude that all businesses need to get on the social marketing bandwagon or suffer erosion of sales and market share.

I’m not converted.  Not yet.

I have opined in an earlier post that social media activities should be categorized as branding initiatives.  And I absolutely believe that companies need a social media strategy to protect and promote their brand.  But I’m ascribing a much narrower benefit and use for social media marketing than most of the effusive yea-sayers.

Consider the following factoids about Bank of America and Dell, Inc.:

Bank of America -  59 million customers worldwide

Dell, Inc. – 76,500 employees, about 300 million in unit sales in 2008

Let’s consider some differences between the two.  Bank of America appears to be doing little with social media while Dell has been aggressive.  BOA operates in the financial service and banking sector (most unpopular at the moment), while Dell markets sexy computer products.  BOA is far the larger company in terms of customers, employees and revenue.

Dell gets a lot of credit for using social media as a marketing tool, BOA, just about none.  Now, consider these factoids:

Twitter…

Bank of America – 1,279 followers.

Dell – 658,679 followers.   And you might take a look at this Twitter-friendly media placement regarding 2008 Dell sales:  Twitter has made Dell 1 Million in Revenue

Facebook…

Dell - has  31,391 fans.

Bank of America -  has 1,722 fans.

At first blush, it looks like Dell gets it right and BOA doesn’t get it at all.  Dell appears to have earned $1 million in 2008 sales from Twitter.  We’re left to guess at BOA’s Twitter revenue, but I’ll bet it’s nil.  BOA has 1,722 Facebook fans.  That sounds like a respectable number, but remember, BOA has 59 million customers.  Their ratio of Facebook fans to customers is a pathetic .00003.

But Dell, who ‘gets it’ has a Facebook fans to customers ratio of .0001.  A lot better than BOA, but still not very impressive.  And if we look at the ratio of revenue ascribed to Twitter as a ratio of income to followers the number is very modest $1.52 per follower.

I’m not suggesting with all this that Twitter and Facebook have no business marketing applicability.  But I am suggesting that before you launch your agency into a social marketing initiative that you take a sober look at the amount of time you will spend on it, and the likely tangible benefits.  And watch out for the hype.

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*”…there are less than 10,000 Twitter users in Iran (Sysomos via BusinessWeek) and less than 100 of them seem to be active.” – from a post in Gauravnomics Blog, questioning the media-attributed role of Twitter in the Iranian election protests.  It’s worth a read, and points up the effect Twitter hype has had in misrepresnting the impact of the service in other than business contexts.

Do I see the benefit of Tweets/Twits/Twittering/Whatever from a marketing perspective? Absolutely.  Am I benefiting directly from my Tweets?  Nope.  Do I think there are people with interesting advice for using Twitter?  Yep.  Do I believe the results are in yet?  Stay tuned on that one.  Meantime, for all you curmudgeons, here’s a video about Twitter.  If you don’t like it, well…what about it?  Wanna step outside and Twit it out? (click the icon in the right margin).