Social Media ABCs

I speak with a lot of agents and brokers, either through this column or my work for the Personal Lines Growth Alliance or any of the other roles I play, and I find that "the more the merrier" philosophy definitely does not apply. When it comes to figuring out how to implement a social media plan to accentuate your overall marketing and communications program, where to start, how much to do and how to do it, are questions that can be overwhelming.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging, video, interactive websites, e-marketing, texting and mobile apps (read "App Attack") are just a few of the ingredients that might go into your recipe for a delicious (del.icio.us is another potential way to spice up content) meal of marketing and communications. But with which ingredient do you start and how much salt is too much and what about those prospects with peanut allergies? You get the analogy by now.

Planning a social media strategy and managing its execution is not easy and, like the environment itself, can't be done in a linear fashion. It's not as simple as ABC, but ABC might help remind you how to approach the process.

Assess

Begin by assessing your needs. How do you communicate with your clients? How are you marketing to your prospects? What is your agency's appetite for adopting a social media workflow? Do staffers have their own Facebook pages? Are any of them tweeting? Essentially, do you have people around you who understand this new medium and enjoy working in it?

You must have the infrastructure in place and an agency-wide commitment to go down this path if you are going to be successful. Even if you hired outside consultants to manage it entirely, your execution would belie the truth of who you, as an agency unless you internalized the culture and expectations of a social networking environment.

Brand

Once you've assessed your needs and how they can be handled within your existing marketing and communications activities, ensure you needs aren't in contrast with your brand. If they are, then decide if it is the direction to improve and grow your brand.

As an example, consider an agency that has been around for decades and is known for its stability, reliability, old-world charm and personal touch. The agency begins tweeting, creates a Facebook page and the CEO writes a blog. All good steps, but perhaps a bit unsettling for current customers who are used to golf outings and long lunches to discuss their renewals. It's great to go after the younger crowd, but you need to consider and plan for the addition of this new approach to relationship building if you want to smoothly integrate it. It's not an "either/or" but rather an "and" scenario.

Cultivate

Cultivate a culture of social media engagement. By this I mean instilling in your staff a dual thought process that considers what's happening in the world—whether it's your community, the region, national or around the world, in business, the economy or on a personal basis—that might have an impact on your customers and prospects.

The biggest mistake small business owners make when implementing blogs or a Twitter or Facebook presence is viewing these tools as another platform to talk about themselves and the products or services their companies offer. In the social networking world, that is the biggest turn-off. Unlike your more traditional marketing tools such as the Yellow Pages, newsletters or print ads, social networking is all about imparting knowledge and unbiased opinions. You need to create an image of your agency as being a valuable resource freely available without the inherent need to wade through marketing copy just to find the information.

Define

The next step is to define what your agency is going to do in the social media realm. Here's where a lot of agencies make their second biggest mistake: taking on too much at once. In the excitement of going down a new path, often agencies create a Twitter account and a Facebook page and start a blog, do some video, and before they know it, they wake up one day saying, "Now what? How do I keep all these balls in the air?" Other agents don't even get this far because they don't know where to start.

The best approach is to start small. Maybe it's engaging staff in writing a weekly blog, keeping in mind it shouldn't be about you but more about your customers and prospects. What do they care about? What should they know about insurance in general? How much do they really understand about the role insurance plays in their daily lives on a personal and professional basis?

Before you begin a blog, read other agency blogs. Look for blogs that you enjoy reading and figure out what about the posts make them compelling, then try to build that into your own. But don't just write the blog—make sure it is searchable:

1. Link to it from your website
2. Link back to your website from the blog or fully integrate it into your website
3. Add a link to the blog to all of your staffs email signatures
4. Next time you reprint business cards and letterhead, include the link right next to your website URL
5. Register the blog URL with search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Once you're up and running with a blog, you'll soon realize that the content you've been creating is great for tweeting or posting to a Facebook page. The key message here is that you don't have to create new content for every single platform. Repurposing the material over different social media tools just helps get it to a larger audience, thereby presenting your agency as a reliable resource of valuable information.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the numerous companies that help you with this process. Many have developed written content, videos and audios for use. Some even go so far as to build an entire integrated online presence from a website to video to a blog and more. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Bair, the Foremost Insurance Guy, about his company's new Social Media Suitcase. You can listen to the podcast at PropertyCasualty360 .com, which also hosts all of the PLGA podcasts. Jeff, a great marketing communicator for Foremost Insurance Group, has a lot of information for agents struggling with how to get started in the social media arena.

As a final thought, if you're still not sure whether you want to bother going down this path, consider this. The struggling economy has hit everyone very hard, especially businesses both large and small, which has resulted in a downturn in the commercial lines market. Personal lines, on the other hand, continue on an upward trend and represent to the independent agency system a potential growth of $150 billion, which direct writers and captive agents are going after.

Personal lines business has always been a difficult path to pursue for many agents because of the cost of acquiring new business. It is perceived as a one-off business waiting for a prospect to walk in the door. By using social media to reach their markets and connect with prospects, coupled with websites that includes a self-service aspect, many agents and carriers have found that the cost of new business acquisitions can be cut in half. And that's certainly well worth the effort.