Our Experts Weigh In

How Do You Communicate? Insurers Jumping On Social Media

By Natalie Ho (Published in SOA Reinsurance Section - Reinsurance News July 2010)

During our annual Freedom to Think reception this year, we had the opportunity to poll our community of clients, partners, and staff on "How do you Communicate?" We asked each of our attendees to select a name tag with a pre-printed icon that represented their preferred form of communication.

As a business, we want to ensure we are using the right form of communication channel to reach out to our community. With the rise of several social communication channels, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, we wanted to see what the current preferred communication tool is.

I am sure many businesses share the same challenge as LOGiQ³ - operating in the Web 2.0 world but servicing a traditional industry, such as ours - Life Insurance. However, to our surprise, the LOGiQ³ community is more progressive then we had thought! Here are the results to our poll, expressed as a percentage:

26% of our attendees preferred to use email communication (not a surprise), but followed tightly by LinkedIn at 22%, Facebook and Phone calls, both at 18%, Twitter at 13% and lastly, traditional postage at 3%. This is certainly insightful information for us as a business, as it allows us to focus our communication to these preferred channels. It also allows us to connect with our network on a real time basis, providing relevant content, and listen to what is being said on their preferred channel.

LOGiQ³ has presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and most recently launched our THiNK Blog, but how do we compare to the rest of the industry?

I did a quick search on LinkedIn inputting the key words Life Insurance and Life Reinsurance under the company search option, and it returned 125 results. Of these 125, it included companies such as ACE (4,954 followers), Sun Life Financial (7,280 followers), Swiss Re (5,924 followers), AEGON (5,226 followers), RBC Insurance (1,302 followers), and Partner Re (677 followers). I performed the same exercise on Facebook and Twitter, results were definitely not as compelling as LinkedIn, only a handful of companies have presence on Facebook and Twitter. However, there were a lot of mentions by consumers on these two sites, meaning that people are talking about life insurance and life reinsurance. Companies should be proactive in leveraging on these tools to listen to consumers' feedback.

Though our industry is not yet as progressive as others, those companies who are innovative are leveraging on social media to make their businesses better.

The Insurance Networking News webpage published a blog in February, 2011 by Craig Beattie. It speaks on an event hosted by Celent in London, "How Digital & Social Innovation Challenge the Insurer Business Model", with the first presentation given by Chris Denison, managing partner at AXA Innovation Hub, and Manjit Rana, partner in Innovation Hub. The presentation explained how AXA UK plans on utilizing social media and other technologies to determine individual digital profiles, define target challenges and identify solution generators.

Life insurers are also using social media networks to detect fraud in submitted claims. Investigators are now using sites such as Facebook to investigate suspicious claims. They're looking for clues that don't add up to the claim submitted, such as someone bragging about running a marathon while submitted a claim for an injured back, etc. Though data gathered on these sites are useful, they can only be used as insight and never as final proof of fraud.

There have also been talks that social-networking data could be used to help price policies. Insurers could use information posted on social networks posted by an applicant and compare with lifestyle choices and medical histories actually filled out on their application.

Many businesses are treading lightly with the use of social media because there is a lack of concrete measurements on the value it brings to a business. It is difficult to measure the success of implementing a social media strategy.

I don't believe social media is a "must", more so it is another communication channel (talking and, more importantly, listening) to reach our community of clients, partners, and staff.

 

Natalie Ho is AVP of Corporate Strategy at LOGiQ³ Corp. in Toronto, ON, Canada. She can be reached at natalie.ho@logiq3.com.