I recently commented in the “Social Media Study Group” of the InsuranceCampus.org social site when someone asked what were some best practices that people had found for using social media in the insurance industry. There were some great comments on his question and I felt like I could add some value and so I posted my comment below.
I wanted to add to the discussion a little. Social Media is a medium where, if you get involved, your company becomes very transparent. Let me explain.
If you use it merely as an extension to your marketing then those you connect with will see that you are only interest in pushing marketing messages to them and not socializing with them. That is what marketing is, a message pushed out to an audience in hopes of influencing their behavior. People are instantly turned off by this and it can be very harmful to your business.
If you use social media to just connect and chat with people, it might help you to build those relationships with your clients and prospects but it will be a huge time suck. You will get caught up in conversations that will last for days and there will not be any business value added whatsoever.
What I have found to be the best use of social media so far is to do a hybrid of the two approaches. Provide relevant content to those you connect with and show them the social, or human side or your company. Relevant content includes new rates to help them save money, industry news that might affect their policies or added products and services that will enhance their security. Showing your connections the human side of your agency involves talking to them by asking questions or listening to what they have to say and providing insights and answers to their questions and conversations.
I am by no means an expert, just some of the things I have seen that work and don’t work.
What have you have you found that works in social media?
I am currently in an undertaking to reform our email marketing program after 2 years of trial and mostly error.
It is a long but rewarding road. I have been scouring the web for articles, resources and experts. I have found a ton. Some that I like and some that have just been a time sucker. I will share them in other upcoming posts.
What sticks out to me right now is this -
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!
I’m not sure how else to say it….
Here are a couple of tools to help you know your audience and tailor your email marketing plan to them.
Check these guys out. They are doing great work trying to test out the different clients and see what flys with each. In particular see their page on the acid test. The test was done in ‘07 but go to their Facebook Fan Page and join the discussion about getting the ‘09 test underway.
Speaking of email clients, do you wonder what email clients your subscribers are using? This service, fingerprint, gives you a piece of code to put in your emails and it will tell you which email clients your subscribers are using. I just signed up and can’t wait to see which ones are being used.
Email testing isn’t a new concept but some people still aren’t doing it. You can sign up for every email client out there and send to each account or you can use services like litmus or Pivotal Veracity. These guys have their act together and give you fast reliable results.
These are just a couple of things I found in the last couple of days. This is the intro to a more in depth look at email testing and optimization. I want to give you the tools to create an effective and in most cases a low cost email marketing program.
This is a great interview Anil Batra does with the CEO of Webtrends Alex Yoder. He speaks about the 2 things he focused on in his keynote at Engage ‘09, Openess and Elegance.
Here is a link to Anil’s original post as well. Thanks Anil.
I had a great conversation on Twitter with @rotkapchen about analytics. She said something that not a lot of people get, but really should.
A behavior in isolation of an intent is a fact without context. If someone does something + U don’t know why U’ve got bupkis.
To elaborate a little. People often ask to look at numbers, having no end goal in mind. They hope these numbers will somehow spur a flash of insight that will give them that magic KPI, you know, the one that tells you you are making tons of money from one single thing. KPI’s are what we make them, they aren’t magic numbers we find. We define the goals of the site and we craft KPI’s. They will tell us if our site is performing the way we intended it to. If it isn’t then we optimize.
The other important piece of this pie is the fact that we need to understand our users’ intent. This is where it gets tricky but insanely fun if you do it right. We have metrics to help us see users click paths, eye tracking reports, heat maps and so on. These all aid in helping us understand the intent of our customers but it is up to us to make those inferences. We need to really know who we are talking to and if we know our audience then, from the numbers, we can tell what their intentions are.
Something I’ve learned and relearned, and lately it has been drilled into my head, is that, as business partner to IT, when I am giving my vision for a project, I need to only be concerned with what I want to happen, not how it will get done. This is hard for me because I [...]
I recently joined a team to do a deep dive into creating buzz about our company and specifically looking into social media. I love what I’ve found. I’ve been able to connect with so many people that have actually helped me to learn and think. That’s when I started this blog. I wanted to get [...]
I’m a marketer that has struggled with the fact that my job is marketing.
When you turn on the TV or open up your favorite magazine you see my work. I make things look so good that you just have to buy them. I tell you what is so cool about product X and I tell [...]
That’s why I like social media, you get to know what people are saying about everything. Last night was a perfect example of my obsession with needing to know what people are saying.
On my 2 hour commute home I was on Twitter helping out a friend with Google Analytics. Then I got home, jumped back [...]
There is a new type of search engine out there…well it’s not a new search engine because it uses Yahoo! search, but it puts a twist on it.
When you go to goodsearch.com the first thing you do is choose your favorite cause. Then you can start searching the web. Every time you search for something [...]
I’ve been in charge of email marketing for over a year now. When I started doing it with my company we were using a $30 piece of software on a PC with a Pentium III chip. We had to install the software on its own PC because it took too long to send out our email blasts – keep that [...]
I recently commented in the “Social Media Study Group” of the InsuranceCampus.org social site when someone asked what were some best practices that people had found for using social media in the insurance industry. There were some great comments on his question and I felt like I could add some value and so I posted my comment below.I wanted to add to the discussion a little. Social Media is a medium where, if you get involved, your company becomes very transparent. Let me explain.
I had a great conversation on 
