Use social media to be an expert and shape perceptions

Do you see a vase or a customer screaming at an insurance agent?

After dying Easter eggs with my son this weekend, I came into the office Monday morning and was greeted by a co-worker with. “Dude, what happened to your fingers, did you get arrested this weekend?” After a long story about how I was chased by the cops and had to jump off a bridge into frigid water before being wrangled into a squad car, I admitted I was joking and clarified the stained fingers.

This Monday morning fun got me thinking about perception. Aside from some cheeky “spokespeople” and omnipresent TV ads, the insurance industry is not exactly a hotbed of viral or social web marketing success stories, nor is it often the topic of discussion by today’s influential marketing minds. Which is why I was elated to see Sonia Simone from Copyblogger offer, The Difference Between Salad and Garbage.

Ms. Simone weaves a tapestry of Woody Allen quotes and practical advice on niche building that insurance professionals at every level can learn from. I especially liked:

“Instead of being a hapless insurance salesman, become the expert on insurance for coffee shops. Or NASCAR drivers. Or lion tamers…You can learn that customer’s language, understand their problems, and get insanely good at resolving the issues they’re most likely to face.”

One of the most powerful returns from an effective social web program is the ability to influence perceptions of your agency. Whether you’ve had negative press, are new to a community or just concerned about perceptions of the industry as a whole, social media can be influential. We’ve discussed having a social web insurance strategy before, so we won’t go down that road, but the idea of influencing people’s perceptions plays right into Ms. Simone’s post about finding and becoming an expert on a specific niche.

If you’re known as the curmudgeonly, style-less insurance salesman, you have the ability to become the pizza parlor insurance godfather, the liquor store insurance sommelier, the Noah of flood insurance or even the brown gold manure hauling insurance maven. These are all perceptions you can create for yourself or your agency with some creative blogging, Facebook/Twitter status updates, and if you’re lucky, a sense of humor.

Maintaining a casual but professional dialogue with fans and clients is not only good for retention, but good for topical related policy growth (like the flood-inducing monsoons in New England right now). Social media can be the quickest, most efficient way to communicate insurance coverage updates, rate-lowering tips, advice and more without putting much effort into it. And of course, the more you put into it, the better the return since dialogue and conversations ARE the new marketing.

If given the choice, most people would probably prefer being stranded on a desert island with an insurance salesman over, say, a pack of rabid pitbulls. But we can do better than that. Like ink-stained fingers from egg dying to my previously clean record, industry generalizations and past actions don’t have to define your agency, but they will if you don’t influence them.