I’m publishing this post from inside the all-day Executive Management Session at the DAIAB Conference at Rehoboth Beach, DE. The session lays out like this:

Morning – Baseline understanding on Social Technologies

• 90 minutes: What it means and how to leverage it
• 90 minutes: Web sites, Blogs and Twitter

Afternoon – Tactical How-to’s on Primary Business Social Tech

• Measuring Results
• Linkedin
• Facebook
• FourSquare
• Mobile
• Viral Media and Video

Bonus, time-permitting: RSS, Alerts, Analytics

This group is focused on the Property & Casualty side of the insurance space. The Association members are regional and local agencies selling both commercial and personal lines products. Several niche insurance companies provide the products. And of course several business partners support the environment with various business operation and marketing services. Good people working hard to provide valuable risk-management services to the business community. An example: insurance products specifically designed for the coastal environment – flood, hurricane, that kind of thing. Always fun meeting new people, learning about new applications and products, and seeing how Social fits in.

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A few learnings to share from a recent all-day Social Media Marketing strategy session with an insurance company and two pilot participants:

1. Doing a Social Media Marketing pilot is always a great way to “test before you INvest”.
2. Extremely helpful on several levels for the insurance company marketing folks to invite the compliance folks into the session. Why? That’s a subject for another post.
3. Insurance marketing partners are chomping at the bit to start using Social.
4. Our “Ideation Session” turned up several really solid Social Media Marketing opportunities to chose from.
5. Good decision for the company to use marketing dollars already in the budget to fund the pilot. Takes the issue of money right off the table. Pretty small investment in the grand scheme of things.
6. A lot of the technologies needed for the pilots are already in place and can be reused, for example on Facebook pages, with minor variations.
7. Many others but confidentiality prevails.

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Next week: Another all-day Social Media Marketing strategy session with a large insurance agency.

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I’m also attending Scott Klososky’s Social Tech Bootcamp in Chicago. Can’t wait to see all the new Social Tech stuff he’s been working on.

Btw, if you’d like to collaborate on a Social Tech Bootcamp for your company or for your clients or prospects, reach out to me. I can guarantee it to be an extremely effective use of time any way you skin it.

A few recent pics:

Sunrise at the Gifford Pinchot State Park after visiting Gettysburg

A coiled-up Delaware Black Snake glaring back from the marsh

My golfing partner grabbed the thing – amazing to see.

Coming right at the camera! Yikes!

Still don’t get Twitter? Reach back to me. I’d love to hook you up. Love to teach your team how to build a powerful InfoStream. It’s not about celeb’s and mindless chatter; quite the contrary if you know what you’re doing. If you click through on these, I guarantee within 15 minutes, you will get some high-value nugget.

Here’s a quick list of Follows that will immediately begin feeding your brain and raising your IQ on a variety of topics. Some of these I already had Followed, but the original list comes from here. (Tip: To save time, copy/paste the tweet, tweet it, then click on the resulting live links to Follow the people. Or find my original tweets, Follow, and/or ReTweet.)

@carolyndouglas @mashable @wedge @CommAMMO @SocialMedia411 @FrankEliason @shelholtz @AMANet @armano @HubSpot @shonali @rohitbhargava

@copyblogger @DavidBThomas @lizstrauss @mathewi @pewinternet @jowyang @marshallk @MarkRaganCEO @DougH @jeffjarvis @sharonodea @Crescenzo

Btw, “Not enough time”??? Kill your email, or at least dial it back to select times during the day. Tell you what, using Twitter has taught me the value of the five B’s of public speaking – Be Brief, Brother, Be Brief :-) So with your email, when possible and appropriate, cut back the content. It’s possible – and actually helpful quite often.

Whadyathink?!? Agreed? Disagree? Any other great Follows?

Picture of the week:

Yep, my son was Commissioned – 2nd Lieutenant, US Army, Field Artillary. Read the story here

Hope I get this right… Kind of did it in a hurry…

Recently, I started coaching a B2B sales team on how to use Linkedin. I discovered a very simple barrier, easy to rectify, and thought I’d share the solution with you. This is something I had taken for granted, but it apparently isn’t common knowledge. Pardon the redundancy if you already know this…

Problem: When you go to your Linkedin Home page and scroll down, notice the “Updates”. Are the references all about who’s connecting with who, new job postings, and group updates or comments? Is this of value to you? If not, IMHO, perhaps the most useful part of your Linkedin Home Page is being buried – thoughtful Updates by your network. (These Updates come from the “Share an Update/Attach a Link” box at the top of the Home page.) I find them to be quite useful most of the time.

Solution: How to change your settings to see more of these Updates by your colleagues rather than the default Linkedin network Updates

1. First, open a new tab or window with a new instance of Linkedin so you can keep this thread open while you follow along…

2. Go to the top-right under your name and click “Settings”
(You might have to Log-in on the next page)

3. On the Settings page, scroll down and look for the lower left tab “Account”. Click that and then slide to the left and click “Customize the updates you see on your home page”.

4. On the resulting dialog-box:

a. First consider clicking the top toggle “How many updates do you want on your homepage?” and change that to 25. If you’re in there scanning your network’s activity, you might as well see as much as possible at a glance, my opinion.

b. Most importantly, un-check three items:

i. “New connections in your network”
(unless you really like to see that, but this data also shows up in “People You May Know”)

ii. “Jobs posted by your connections” (unless you’re job-hunting of course)

iii. “Groups your connections have joined or created” (unless you’re actively looking for new groups to join)

c. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the dialog-box.

5. Return to your Home page (top left) and scroll down, scanning the updates that were previously not there. Notice the difference? Helpful?

One final tip: This will vary depending on how many or few connections you have and how active they are. But if someone is dominating your resulting Newsfeed with content that’s not really useful to you, if you float your mouse over one of the update bars or rows, a little, gray “Hide” button will show on the top-right corner of the bar. Click that to Hide updates from that person. It won’t un-Connect you, it will just remove them from your news feed. You can also unhide them later. So this might be appropriate for headhunters in your network (no offense, perhaps you’re just not in the job market), people that are more personal connections that share a lot of perhaps useful content, but just not of interest to you, of course that Mike Wise dude (geesh!), etc. etc.

FWIW. Hope it helps optimize your Linkedin utility.

Shameless Plug: For more help maximizing Linkedin for business, or other Social Tech training and marketing/sales strategies including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, etc., give me a shout.

Oh yeah, if you’re on Facebook, perhaps also Like my WebWisedom Facebook page. I will be testing a new Facebook business marketing tool this summer on that page, so watch and see the change… https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hudson-OH/WebWisedom/392220300843

If you have any comments or other related tips, by all means Comment and/or Share.

Thanks, Mike

Insurance, Compliance, Social, & Multi-Channel Marketing – “It’s a lot to bite off all at once.” -What About Bob!

Wanted to give a quick shout-out about a Webinar I was asked to help with.

Background: Distribion, a new member of the association I’m involved in, PIMA, caught my attention at the last conference. So I decided to check out their system in an effort to better understand their value prop , especially in the context of PIMA members. After a quick, high-level demo, I could see that the tech definitely has great utility for organizations that are leveraging multi-channel marketing. Of course my expertise is about e-Commerce, Web sites, Web marketing, and Social Technologies. So it was interesting to see how Direct Mail, Call Center Marketing, and other channels can be integrated into a common dashboard.

In talking about the insurance industry, they asked me what I felt were some of the biggest challenges in the insurance space relative to Social Media Marketing. Short answer… legal and compliance issues have kept many insurance marketing organizations on the Social Tech sidelines. I shared a recent project I’m working on where I’m helping an insurance company with a pilot marketing project. I’m orchestrating a process with the carrier, a couple of their agencies, and compliance folks. Interesting.

Of course that started with a research project sponsored by the company’s marketing department where I was tasked with an assessment of the Social Media Marketing and Compliance landscape. That ended up being very helpful in bringing the legal and compliance folks up to speed on Social Technologies, breaking down some functional myths about Social, illustrating what other carriers are doing with Social, researching and describing current guidelines by the NAIC, etc.

At the time, Distribion folks reached back to me and suggested perhaps we do a joint White Paper, perhaps a joint Webinar, that brings together these Social Media Marketing and Compliance concepts together with Marketing Technology concepts. So fast forward several months and here we are.

Next week we’ll be jumping on a call to discuss these subjects. Edgar Rodriguez, Sales Exec with Distribion will be facilitating a session with myself and Deb McAlister-Holland. Deb recently joined Distribion to lead their marketing efforts – very interesting background that brings a rich perspective I’ve appreciated getting to know in preparation for this Webinar. Check out here new ecosystem at www.distributedmarketing.org

Here’s what the Agenda looks like:

• How Google Changed Marketing Forever
  
• The Empowered Customer & the Echo Chamber
  
• 21st Century Marketing in a Regulated Environment
  
• Social Media Guidelines & Compliance
  
• Empowering Producers & Local Marketing
  
• 7 Things Marketers MUST Know About Online Marketing

Again, “It’s a lot to bite off” in 60 minutes. But it seems like it should be a worthwhile effort. The ensuing White Paper should be good as well. If you have anything you really want to know, feel free to use the Comment below, Linkindin, Twitter, email, call me, etc. Happy to help in any way…

Btw, not sure how many of the attendees will be on Twitter during and after the event, but I’d like to suggest the Twitter hashtag: #MCRE for Marketing & Compliance in a Regulated Environment. In fact, I’ll make a note to stay on Twitter for a half-hour after the Webinar to kick around thoughts and ideas. Ala HubSpot, we’ll call it the “Twitter After-party!” I love it.

Links:

Register here

Linkedin Event (Click “Attending” for an easy way to Share with your Linkedin network)

Perhaps Share this post as well. The more insurance folks that assimilate some of these concepts, the better. Definitely encourage you to send it to legal and compliance folks.

Thanks!

Hey, I just found another use for Blogging! It’s a productive use of time at 6am during a windstorm power failure when the only thing you have is battery power on the laptop – no internet, no lights, no coffee – can’t decide which is worse?!?!

So I read and shared this article this week. My guess is many of my colleagues in the insurance space will read it, gently cross their arms, lean back in their chairs, and think, “Yep, this is what I’ve been saying all along…and exactly why I haven’t gotten into all that Facebook, Blogs and Social Media stuff. It’s all a fad.”

Yes, we ARE in a bubble. But here’s the thing (and I’ll ask the crowd of readers to Comment their take below):

The article makes a sound analogy with e-Commerce during the ’98-2000 era. There certainly was a bubble and a burst. Dot-com’s were getting huge amounts of money with no revenue model, etc. etc. The crash hit, many of those companies faded out, etc. Don’t need to rehash all that.

But what came out of all that? Solid e-commerce platforms by solid companies. Not sure what the latest numbers are, but billions of dollars are running through the internet as companies put their products on Web sites and buyers buy them. Again, no need to justify and explain all that anymore – common sense and acceptable.

Why did e-commerce outlive the Bubble? I’ll argue the following. What do you think?

Individually – I’ll list three. Please add yours.

IMHO, it really boils down to Fundamental Human Behaviors

e-Commerce efficiencies with time and money – Didn’t people see pretty quickly that they could browse for books and music on Amazon.com faster than they could in the store? Didn’t Google make it incredibly easy to find pretty much anything you want and compare prices, vendors, choices, user ratings, etc.? [And now we have all of that on our smart-phones? And now we have things like Groupon, Web specials, discounts for Fans, check-in savings on FourSquare?]

Sharing – Didn’t people love to tell stories about what happened to them after they bought the products? Give advice to others in similar circumstances? Make recommendations? Comment from the peanut gallery? Be the arm-chair quarterback? Share uses? Rant about injustices? Solve problems? [Back then it was mass emails and Fwd Fwd Fwd, right? Now it’s Facebook and YouTube, etc.]

Helping – Didn’t e-Commerce make it easier for people to help each other? A fundamental behavior? Why do drivers flash their lights at cars approaching a speed trap?

Corporately – I’ll list five. Please add yours.

1. Industry leadership – Did the early adopters of e-Commerce realize long-term benefits as their systems matured through trial and error before the rest of the pack? When they figured out ways to do things better, faster, cheaper; to become known as an innovator in the industry; to develop ecosystems that snow-plowed the road for the industry, was there value in that?
2. Competitive advantage – Did companies with better e-Commerce platforms do better in the 2000s than the competition? And how are they positioned today in 2011? What were the difference makers? How about those that did things in-house versus outsourcing to specialists? Pro’s and con’s on that to be sure, but if we limit the thoughts to the legit, real-deal outsourcing companies…
3. Cost savings – Netnet, now that we’re 10 years down the road and e-Commerce platforms are in place, are cost structure differences yielding gains compared to the 80s and 90? Shopping? Distribution? Inventory management? etc?
4. Mass marketing – Did e-Commerce realize the potential for companies to immediately get new products out to wide bases of constituents? How about selling overstocks? What else? And now, what about this concept called “Revenue on Demand”?
5. Personalization – How about letting the consumer design their own product? Colors, features, accessories, timelines, etc.? Of course often for either a fee or for competitive advantage, right?

What are some other advantages of mature e-Commerce platforms?

Interesting side note: As I mentioned previously, I heard an insurance executive last summer say from a podium, “When will e-Commerce realize its potential?” I wanted to stand up and shout, “When you start doin’ it right, buddy.” Funny how that exec about 3 months later was canned. Oh, and 6 months later his Linkedin profile still lists him in the CEO role. Doh! I swear……. (I’ll save him the embarrassment of linking to it.)

So are we in a Social Media bubble? Absolutely. Will it burst? Yep. Then what? To answer the question in the original E-Consultancy blog…

“We’ll get back to reality and figuring out how to do Social Tech right like we shoulda’ been doing in the first place.”

My take? Social Tech is a specialization like anything else? It’s a discipline that must be mastered and kept up with? As to marketing? There’s a host of things that need to be done urgently today? If we don’t keep up, we WILL be left behind – just common sense. How costly will falling behind be? Again, my opinion, that seems to depend on customer switching costs and your competitors. Don’t underestimate the power of consumer ratings and recommendations, the viral nature of the social Web. Don’t be complacent. Change never stops.

What do you think? Good use of an hour to write this post? Any of this make sense? Please comment. Certainly link back to your site, your blog, or other writings. Please share with your network, ask them to comment, and see if we can get some of your thought-leader friends to pipe in.

Bubble or not, the critically important questions seem to be: Are there long-term utilities in Social Technologies? Does Social Tech align with core human behavior? And will early corporate adopters (caveat: who do it Social RIGHT) have long-term competitive advantage?