According to several Internet sources, June 28th is National Insurance Awareness Day. Aside from a couple blog entries making reference to this notable industry date (which is also shared by Paul Bunyan Day), there does not seem to be any person or entity claiming the creative rights to the not-quite-Hallmark holiday.

A simple Google search brings back confirmation of June 28th as National Insurance Day, but the closest explanation from HolidayInsights.com states generically, “…you can be certain that insurance companies had a little something to do with the origination of this day.”

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a California health insurance agent’s tongue-in-cheek (I think) explanation of how his office celebrates National Insurance Day, which involves lighting a candle and some other celebratory activities. In their own words, “In fact, an exotic dancer is sometimes hired to heighten the festivities, but the dance performed, the ‘Insurance Dance,’ is very protective in nature. Just watching it performed gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling all over.”

Aside from these two posts and a few press releases looking to capitalize on the date, there’s virtually nothing that would make National Insurance Day noteworthy to anyone…until now.

Firstly, anyone who has more information about the origins of National Insurance Awareness Day, please chime in the comments section. Whether you’re an insurance marketing person staking claim to its invention or just an agency that’s celebrated in the past, we’d love to know what ritualistic activities make this day special?

For planning purposes, here are some suggestions to build on for future National Insurance Awareness Day celebrations.

• Offer to shred commercial partner papers and recycle for free in your office
• Sponsor a safe driving course
• Set up a wrecked car outside the agency with a sign, “Are you insured?”
• Get a pizza place to hand out your business card w/ every slice they deliver and offer to promote them for it
• Host an Insurance Awareness Day line dance
• Shoot a humorous video showing how insurance is often overlooked
• Have an agency rounding off contest – whoever adds the most policies, gets a paid day off
• Support a local non-profit that you are passionate about and encourage locals to match
• Dress like an insurance agent day – play up the stereotype, the less stylish the better
• Deliver baked goods or branded schwag  to VIP commercial insurance partners around town
• Host an insurance agency Olympics competition
• Publicly re-enact the some of the oddest insurance claims your agency has ever received
• Donate employees for a “Bring your agent to work day.”
• Do a publicity stunt with a partner or town (fire drill) to draw awareness to insurance
• Bake an Insurance Awareness Day cake
• Give away  “Home/Auto Insurance for a year” to the person who can share the most inspiring insurance story
• Have an insurance awareness scavenger hunt
• Send out a humorous email blast notifying people of the date
• Spend the entire day volunteering to call attention to the fact that insurance agents don’t just sell
• Cover yourself in dollar bills & business cards and carry a megaphone around town inviting people to grab you

With a little creativity and a keen grasp of your community, the ideas are really endless. While it’s a bit late for a throwdown in 2010, our calendars are marked and we look forward to making June 28, 2011 the Insurance Awareness Day that changed the industry…

Special thanks to @Carrie_AGIns and @AlysonDelPaggio for bringing the important date to our attention.

According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study, 61% of adult internet users in America (205 million), “…looked for information or completed a transaction on a government website in the twelve months preceding.”

In sharing this study, SearchEngineLand’s Debra Mastaler signaled a call to action for bloggers and web professionals looking to harness the local and national masses flocking to government websites. How you say?

People visit government websites for many different reasons. There’s the DMV, (un)employment, recreational licenses, social services, tourism, business licenses, issue/policy research, military and endless other forms and information sources. Even on the surface, with the right strategy, it’s not a stretch to make insurance marketing parallels.

To be clear, this is not a “get rich quick” strategy, in fact, it is quite the opposite. Leveraging a government website’s search engine traffic takes a balanced effort of optimizing links to the government sites, titles, content and making it readable and interesting enough to inspire people to share.

Look for hot-button issues and take a neutral but informative insurance-related stance. If you sell health insurance, optimize for the public health provider (in Rhode Island, its RIte Care) and be there to help people who are no longer covered. People seeking DMV forms need insurance. Business owners seeking licenses need insurance.

Insurance agencies that are situated in active hunting communities may consider Outdoor Insurance options to rank up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Be creative and use your own online government experiences as inspiration.

As mentioned, this strategy takes a commitment, but the potential “sticky link bait” created by leveraging government websites can prove to be a source of organic internet leads for the long haul.

Two articles published over the last two weeks put non-marketing insurance industry social media issues at the forefront, discussing the risks involved with social web engagement in two different scenarios. The first article, “How Insurance Companies Will Influence Rates Based On Your Tweets: Social Insurance Rates,” by Jeremiah Owyang, a respected blogger and strategist with the Altimeter Group, looks at how insurance companies will perform lifestyle reconnaissance via social media for clues on risky or healthy behavior, and adjust policy rates accordingly.

On the surface, it seems like a proactive move for health insurance companies, but the article points out several obvious challenges as customers wise up to nosy insurance providers. With plenty of legal, privacy and insurance marketing concerns unresolved, the ramifications are just starting to be hashed out.

The most interesting part of the article was Mr. Owyang’s conclusion on how the various “Social CRM techniques” could evolve into full-fledged, opt-in wellness programs sponsored by insurance companies that could result in reduced “Social Insurance Rates.”

“I would expect health and insurance companies to offer an opt-in method for existing wellness programs to be extended to tools like online education courses, participating in wellness programs with peers (like Nike Plus) or allowing members to submit location based checkins to the gym, healthy eating, and other pro-health activities,” writes Mr. Owyang. “We should expect that a forward-thinking insurance or wellness company offers an online incentive based program to encourage members to connect to each other, become more educated, and live a healthy lifestyle.”

While socially connected wellness programs like the one described may be years away, the vision of insurance companies incentivizing a healthy lifestyle monitored via the web sounds both promising and a bit scary. Do we want our health insurance companies to have even more personal information just to save a few extra bucks?

On the flip, few people will object to living longer and spending less on insurance as long as it doesn’t require a huge effort, and it seems wholly possible that opt-in wellness programs could achieve mass appeal among the health conscious who are already engaged on the social web. With the right promotion, these programs could even be a valuable image boost to an industry with a perpetual black eye.

Wellness programs already exist through some group health insurance plans, but the challenge will be scaling it up to accommodate millions of individual and family plans as health care becomes more readily available (mandatory?) by 2014. The fact that health insurance companies are still figuring out the social web combined with the vast resources necessary to process all this new data will create its own set of challenges.

Health care reform has created an “arms race” of sorts between health insurance providers positioning themselves for a windfall of customers as the legislation takes shape, while weeding out the unhealthy. Even with the challenges, playing to an increasingly social and plugged-in population is hardly a risk.

PART II – Insurance Risk and the Social Web, Keep Digital Foot out of  Mouth.