A new blog can be set up in a snap.  You can add a Facebook page for your insurance agency in just a few minutes.  Your insurance agency can prove it is in the know by setting up a Twitter profile.  Starting a social media account is easy.  Keeping up your shiny new blog or Facebook profile takes time, so much time, that most blogs quickly fall silent; in 2008 Technorati – the blog devoted to blogs – found that of the over 130 million blogs they tracked, only 5% had been updated in the last five months.

Deriving real business benefit from social media takes even more effort, and likely some cost, despite all the pundits who extol the virtues of this fee medium.  There is no doubt that blogging and Tweeting can add first stage SEO benefits for your insurance agency if you put the time and effort into these communication tools.  But what about the benefit of attracting a legion of loyal friends and fans to your social media space?  This may be most difficult of all for an insurance agency.

This week, Marketing Sherpa published a chart showing why consumers become fans of businesses.  While all of the reasons people friend businesses can be leveraged by insurance agencies, the top two, “Learn about new products and features” and “Learn about specials and sales” can probably be ruled out.

Why Consumers Become Fans of Businesses

( Note:  Max Connectors are defined as people with over 500 ‘connections’)

Insurance regulation prohibits discounts and sales, so unless you can be really creative, you are going to be hard pressed to post any content in this category that will attract a consumer following.  There is plenty of product innovation taking place in the insurance industry, as those of us working in the business know, but new product features and services tend to hold interest only to industry insiders.  That new coverage provision just can’t mesmerize the populace the way the newest iPhone, Windows operating system, or hybrid sports car can.

The remaining two content categories – “Company Culture” and “Entertainment” are probably rich enough to provide a thematic basis for your insurance agency social media content, but regularly posting this type of compelling content isn’t something most of us have been prepared to do.

I’m not suggesting that leveraging social media for the business benefit of your agency isn’t a strategy you should consider.  But I am saying that Facebook and blogging are not money-for-nothing, get-rich-quick schemes.  Social media takes as much time, effort, and expense as other business development options, so weigh your expectations and commitment accordingly.

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.

Marketing Sherpa posted survey results about how businesses in general think social media (SM) fits into the marketing tool box.  Basically, most businesses see SM as a complementary, but not a replacement tactic.  However, most businesses view SM as important enough to warrant its own budget line item and staff.  What does your insurance agency think about social media like Facebook?  Take a poll and me know.

I have sat through a couple of webinars, and read several articles about web marketing in the last few weeks. And I’m afraid every one of them missed the point. When I hear somebody talk about a tool or medium as a thing unto itself (as in web marketing), I suspect they are too enamored of a new technology and prone to believe that the technology itself constitutes a sea-change. And often, the way that sea-change is positioned in these webinars, you would have to believe that you have to abandon all of your former practices and adapt to the sea-change, or drown in the tidal wash.

Take insurance for example. I would suggest that what people want from insurance providers, and what insurance providers need to deliver, has not changed in decades (if ever); to wit: peace of mind, economy, information on demand. The fact that an insurance agent might be using streaming video on YouTube, a blog, or website to serve up what consumers want doesn’t change the essential nature of the business, and probably doesn’t constitute a sea-change.

I was reminded of this by my fellow blogger, James Hawley, who flipped me a link to an article appearing in the LA Times. The story featured Manchester United goalkeeper Ben Foster’s use of an iPod to study the tendancies of an opposing player. What made the story novel is that the iPod was used just moments before Foster successfully defended a penalty shot.

Foster didn’t turn into a technologist or web geek. He was still playing soccor the old fashioned way; he was also just using his powers of observation to stack the goal defense odds in his favor, as goalkeepers have done since the advent of the game. That Foster used an iPod to get a tendancy update moments before a shot didn’t change the nature of the game, it just made Foster a smarter player, and resulted in a blocked shot.

Professional or Amateur?

There’s a lot that can be done with video, and having video production capabilities in the family (the kid with the Mac)gives you options. Clearly there is a place for professionally done video production, as well as a place for (reasonably professional), low/no cost, self-made videos (the 50-something with the digital camera).

In fact, there was a recent news item featuring CNN’s opening of ‘bureaus’ in seven cities where they previously did not have one. Expense is a determining factor in opening and maintaining a network news bureau – equipment, technical personnel, etc. The new CNN bureaus will provide broadcasts via web casts, ‘directed, filmed, and produced’ by the reporter. The vastly reduced cost of that kind of production makes it possible for CNN to provide direct coverage in more areas – an example of how fast and inexpensively produced video can coexist with higher production value programming. In fact, CNN has taken this a step further with their iReport service, where virtually anyone can report news and publish video ‘story’.

You have to wonder if there is a ‘best’ balance between videos that are slick and professional, and videos that are not edited with layered soundtracks. I’m sure there is no one right answer, but I’m going to throw this out there: providing only slick, commercial grade videos may suppress total views. Allstate Insurance has had a YouTube video channel for over two years, and the total views have been somewhat underwhelming at 7,114 (and 4 videos account for nearly 75% of all views). There are 37 videos on the Allstate channel, most have been viewed fewer than 200 times. I’m not suggesting that Allstate has not achieved acceptable ROI from its YouTube channel; remember, production and publishing costs would be low. I am suggesting that commercial grade videos may not always be the best way to go on the web, particularly when videos are published to a social site like YouTube.

What does this mean for your insurance agency? Don’t be afraid to have employees, customers, and others in the community produce videos for you. Worry less about matching TV quality production values, but focus on quick publication and community relevance. Your video views, and site traffic, should go up.

In the earlier days of the internet, companies big and small limited access to the web to a few key employees and frequently did not provide email addresses. That reflex to restrict was born of a combination of two things: the clarity with which businesses recognized potential employee abuse of web surfing and non-business emailing coupled with the inability to grasp the advantage of quickly gathering information and communicating instantly using the same tools.

Most businesses learned how to manage concerns about productivity and resource drains, and employees now routinely use the web and email. In fact, particularly as web services begin to replace networked or desk top office suite applications, most of us couldn’t conduct business at all without web access.

We’re seeing a similar reaction from businesses, particularly larger ones, in response to Web 2.0. Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking apps are switched to the always on position at home for employees in their 20′s and 30′s, but are locked down in the off position at work. But change is taking place, just as it took place in the 90′s with email and web use in general; check out this article from IT Week.

YouTube is often Web 2.0 non grata. Of course band-width is an issue; a bunch of employees watching videos via the web simultaneously could bring internet browsing to a crawl company-wide. But an increasing number of companies and agencies are using YouTube videos for instructional, promotional, and general business communication purposes. Locking YouTube out, whether for band-width or productivity concerns (aka screwing around)is a short sighted reaction. Companies are starting to get past the fear of Web 2.0 unknown. Those that persist in the just-say-no approach are bound to miss out on a competitive advantage.

Comic-Con, the convention for all things comic books, is a highly sought after event. Cities are now falling over each other in an attempt to attract the 2010 convention. Yet, Comic-Con goers are light spenders. If the local economy isn’t getting a boost via premium hotel bookings and restaurant expenditures, then why the competition to host Comic-Con, and what could that possibly have to do with your insurance agency?

Comic-Con attendees are prodigious bloggers and users of social and web 2.0 media and communication tools. In the parlance of viral marketing, they are ‘sneezers’ – people who spread the word. Viral marketing is predicated on the exponential communication effect of one person sharing a message with five friends, and then those friends in turn sharing with five more friends each. Pretty soon thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have received the same message within a short period of time. Sneezers are critical to a message going viral. Does your agency have any sneezers in your customer base? How could you attract more sneezers, and how can you make it easy for them to share your message with others?

Here are a couple of thoughts…

Insurance newsletter articles can be a little on the dry side. Why not lighten those up by including related, but humorous videos, courtesy of YouTube. The articles might not get ‘sneezed’ around, but the videos might. Here’s two:

Road Rage

Driving with Distractions