Social Networking for Fun and Profit

Whether it’s used to market new insurance products or interface with current clients, social media is transforming the insurance industry landscape — and fast becoming a key tool for agents who want to grow their business.

That’s according to two insurance industry branding gurus: Peter van Aartrik, CEO of branding and communication firm Aartrijk, and Rick Morgan, a senior associate with the firm. Recently, Morgan and van Aaartijk sat down with Insurance Journal to discuss how insurance agents can — and should — tap these technologies to change the way they interact with clients and build their businesses. Their thinking: If an agency isn’t using social media yet, it should start. Soon.

At its simplest, social media refers to the use of Web sites to connect with peers, clients, competitors and the public at large. It’s a very simple concept that has very complicated and powerful implications. As a tool for insurance agents, social media can be leveraged to attract new customers, market new products and brand an agency by harnessing the power of the Web. And increasingly, as the Internet becomes more and more a part of every day, the use of social media seems likely to grow. So knowing how to use it will be a major key to any business — be it an insurance agency or otherwise — that is looking to remain relevant.

“On a macro level, social media is nothing more than networking using technology,” Morgan said. “It’s the same kind of networking that we’ve all done forever … now we’re using the Internet.”

It’s powerful. At its core, Morgan said, it’s a tool that can help Main Street insurance agents return to the hallmarks of their profession: building relationships. For a long time, independent agents “feared that relationships would go away, everything would be all about price, and insurance would become a commodity. What’s exciting about social media is that it allows agents to get back to a past time, to hook into a very human need to have trust, and do business with people with trusted relationships. This is a very exciting time, and I think it feeds right in to the independent agency world and how they want to do business.”

Social Networking 101

There’s a huge range of social media sites on the Internet, but three of the most useful for insurance agents are Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Although they overlap in some ways, each has its own functions, audience and niches.

Facebook is probably the biggest. The site claims more than 200 million users worldwide, and is growing every day. Although it began as a site for college students to exchange photos and other information, it’s increasingly attracted an older crowd — the fastest growing demographic on Facebook, for instance, is women age 55 and older. Users can post photo galleries, connect with old friends, join groups and trade information about what they’re doing.

It’s the same basic principle as another social networking site, LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn is focused largely on professionals, a fact that is underscored by the tone, look and feel of the site, which overall is more business-like. It’s most commonly used for business networking and recruitment, but users can do many of the same things Facebook offers.

Twitter, the social networking site of the moment, is a little different. The site allows a user to post short messages — 140 characters — which are available to anyone on the Internet, and are delivered immediately to the user’s “followers.” People can post links to articles, photos or anything else they want. Users build a following by continually posting content and links to share with others.

Which one should an agent use? “I wouldn’t say one is better than the other for an agency,” Morgan said. “It’s extremely important for any business jumping into social media to have an overall strategy, and then to pick the tools, or choose the tools or assess the tools that make most sense for what it is they’re trying to accomplish. There’s a synergistic value that comes by using more than one. So it’s not just about picking one and saying that’s it.”

Peter van Aartrijk agreed.

“Maybe another way to look at it is to say: ‘What do insurance agents do now to grow their business?’ They do a lot of face-to-face and telephone work. Telemarketing. A lot of out-bound. The meeting space they’re used to, whether it’s a chamber of commerce or Kiwanis or whatever, that still exists. But social media is like that on steroids, because you can reach a lot more people a lot quicker.”

Both Morgan and van Aartrijk advised agents to start by diving right in.

“You can go on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and very easily begin to build a presence for your agency,” van Aartrijk said. “It doesn’t take that long to set up, and once you start playing around with these things, you can see incredible implications for growing and servicing insurance, and it’s just starting to emerge.”

Try not to get overwhelmed, Morgan said. “A great suggestion is for people to get started by just playing. Do it on a personal, nonthreatening basis so it doesn’t have to be, necessarily, connected to your business, which is threatening to a lot of people. Get on Facebook and put in a profile. Find out how many of your old high-school or college friends find you and connect with you, just to get a sense of how all this works.”

Mixing Personal and Professional

One of the concerns many social networkers have is about the implications of mixing their personal and professional lives, which can happen often in a group where clients and personal friends share information. There can also be concerns about employees getting involved in discussion boards, posting comments and sharing material that hasn’t been vetted.

“This is a huge bugaboo for a lot of people, particularly corporate lawyers who are really scared, but even agency owners can be scared about what’s going on, ” van Aartrijk said. “In the old days, the corporation would be sort of defined by what it would send out. It would reach out and touch people with direct mail, telemarketing and so on. It was very one way.”

Social networking is redefining the concept of the brand. Now, the people who receive information about a business are reshaping the way that business communicates with its clients and potential clients. “It’s becoming really about the consumer, the customer, even the prospect owning your brand more than ever, and responding to it,” van Aartrijk said.

The idea of consumers owning a business brand can be very powerful. For agencies that already communicate with their clients regularly through newsletters, account rounding calls, and e-mail, adding in social networking could build even more trust with clients.

“Agencies can use these tools to help make their presence more viable, more aware, and more interesting,” Morgan said.

Set Some Rules

Agencies that want to tackle social media head-on should create an agency-wide approach for how they are going to do so, van Aartrijk said. “Take a look at the tools, experiment. Bring in everybody. Everybody should be looking at what this impact could be for the agency,” he said.

Agency managers should create some boundary lines, too.

“There ought to be some rules about ‘what are we going to blog about, what are we going to Twitter about, what is our corporate Facebook page going to look like,'” van Aartrijk said. “You’ve got to give some thought to it.”

Added Morgan: “Like anything in an agency, whether it’s technology or any other process, it needs to be managed and monitored. We’ve got procedures for phone answering and response and conversations. When e-mail came out, we did the same thing. Social media is really no different. … Part of the strategy, part of the management and part of the monitoring is all something that needs to be taken into account as companies begin to participate.”

This story was based on an installment in the podcast series, Agency Management Done Right, hosted by Wells Publishing CEO Mitch Dunford.

Web Resource
The podcast, Agency Management Done Right, Episode 2: Social Media, may be accessed online at www.insurancejournal.tv/videos/2434