Twitter and the blogosphere were ablaze this week with the buzzsurrounding an Accenture study that found three-quarters ofU.S. consumers prefer to buy insurance products through agents andother trusted sources rather than online.

The study of more than a thousand Americans at least 18 yearsold who own one or more insurance products showed that 73percent preferred to buy auto and home insurance products from anagent, and 75 percent preferred to buy life products from an agentor trusted source, such as an employer or financial advisor. (Theexception is “younger and more affluent” customers, who preferredto buy products over the Web: 39 percent of consumers aged 18 to 24and 28 percent of buyers with incomes above $60,000 said theypreferred online purchases, especially for auto and homeproducts.)

This is a bit of welcomenews for independent agents, especially the smaller MainStreet guys who are struggling right along with their customers inthis tough economy. Am I surprised? Not really, considering thatsome of the biggest players in the business world are thedoing the worst right now.

For years, smaller agents have been bludgeoned with predictionsthat they're headed the way of the dinosaur. Ironically,these are the types of businesses that are poised to succeedin the worst economy in decades, probably because they've alwayspracticed the ”doing more with less” philosophy that bigcorporations have just recently been forced to adopt.

The National Federation of Independent Business's indexof small business optimism hit 86.6 last month, breaking a4-month pattern of declines. And the American Express Open smallbusiness monitor of firms with fewer than 100 employees showsthat 77 percent think that managing their firms over thelast several hard months has made them better at managingtheir businesses in general.

NPR recently aired a segment on how half thecurrent home foreclosures could be avoided through loanmodification. Banks take a massive hit on foreclosed property,so it's in their best interest to work with troubled mortgageholders to keep them in their homes. Yet amazingly, megabankslike Wells Fargo and Citibank are literally ”not setup” to deal with the problem, even though they saw it comingages ago–and the bigger the bank, the bigger the problem.

It got me to thinking that the bailout mantra of “too big tofail” could have just as well been applied to the dinosaurs.

Small is beautiful!