Time Flies

It's truly amazing how seemingly innocuous diversions like Facebook and Twitter can suddenly rise above a societal function and develop into a business trend.

Deloitte takes a look at the social networking phenomenon in an article by Howard Mills titled "Building Social Media Into the Game Plan."

I certainly sympathize with insurance carriers who suddenly have to adapt a business strategy around a tool they thought only teenagers and college kids were using. Obviously, even as a non-business function, social networking has grown beyond teenagers, but it remains difficult for many of us to get our hands around how exactly a Facebook page or a Twitter account is going to help increase business.

Of course, the answer is these tools aren't going to increase business. They are communication tools, though, and communicating with your customers has been around longer than the One Card System.

In the Deloitte article, Mills quotes John Travagline, vice president of compliance at IMSA:

"What's happening is that, at first, insurance companies see the benefits of social media but think that they won't be able to implement it due to lack of effective controls. Then they say 'let's just prohibit it,' but it's too big and widespread to just prohibit it."

Sticking one's head in the stand has never been sound business strategy, but insurers can be forgiven for not understanding early on the possibilities social media could provide for them and their sales representatives.

Much like the Internet of a decade ago, the returns on social media are unknown. But if we learned anything from the last century it's not to judge something's value just because we don't fully comprehend its possibilities.

As Mills writes: "Plain and simple, social media represents a changing communication dynamic that is enabled by technology. As our personal lives have increasingly been empowered by mobile devices and popular social networking tools, we've come to expect the same communication modes to exist in the workplace and with the companies with which we do business."

There's no doubt the value of social media is still to be determined and regulation of how it can be used by insurers--particularly in transferring sensitive data--will be under close scrutiny in our highly regulated industry.

The regulatory and compliance issues will work themselves out, but until that time comes we can't afford to wait around, not if we want to stay in touch with a growing segment of the market that is maturing every day.

Are you sold on the value of social media for yourself and your business? Let me know and we can discuss it, either on this blog or at my Twitter account.