Insurers Leveraging Social Media to Improve Customer Acquisition and Retention

Watch Your Tone

When it comes to social media analytics, perhaps the most important factor, and the most difficult to quantify, is the tone of postings. Like PEMCO, Philadelphia-based Independence Blue Cross (IBC) uses Radian6 to measure this aspect of its social media presence.

"It's an expectation for people to get on social media when they can't find other solutions to their problems," says Shawn Mahoney, director of creative services for the health insurer. "We can use that data."

Radian6 CMO David Alston says the vendor's platform allows users to classify and prioritize social comments based on sentiment and degree of potential influence. "We do have a sentiment classifier that can classify sentiment on a post or tweet, which can give you a sample size of how many positive or negative comments you've had in a certain amount of time," he says. "Our platform listens for not only the source, but also for how many comments a post got or how many people bookmarked it in Delicious or Digg."

IBC ($10.5 billion in total revenue) is a prominent user of Facebook for social media initiatives, most of which revolve around non-insurance, affinity-focused activities, according to Mahoney. The company's Healthy Steps program, which launched near the end of 2010, lives in a tab on the carrier's corporate Facebook profile (facebook.com/ibxfb) and features health and wellness content, he relates. IBC also creates separate Facebook profiles for other programs, such as its Blue Cross Broad Street Run 10-mile event.

Gathering and analyzing data from the popular social network has been an ongoing process, Mahoney says. Facebook Insights, the social media giant's proprietary suite of metrics, didn't provide as much breadth as IBC wanted, he adds, so the carrier implemented a system from Portland, Ore.-based WebTrends to gain a broader view.

"You get a surface look from Insights, so we went out and engaged WebTrends to help us out," Mahoney says. "One of the things we noticed about the run page is that it's truly a community page -- it's people that have a unique interest, and that's runners. We put info out there, but it's really people there interacting with each other."

This strategy is shared by PEMCO. "Our social microsites are positioned to help connect insureds to like insureds and help expand the social experience around insurance," PEMCO CIO Weeks notes.

'A Perfect Marriage'

New York-based AXA Equitable ($133.4 million in Q3 2010 premium) also is expanding the social experience around insurance. The life insurance carrier launched a series of retirement planning-focused initiatives, including videos and other content, that it promotes through social networking.

"We are a highly regulated industry, so we want to make sure we're resonating with the things that make the most sense," says Connie O'Brien, SVP of Internet strategies and development for AXA Equitable. "There was one statistic I heard that said people spend more time planning a vacation than their retirement. This is something that people need to think about, and we thought it was a great way to leverage social media -- let them know they're not alone."

AXA Equitable's parent company, Paris-based AXA Group, uses Cambridge, Mass.-based Digimind for social media analytics. Stateside, the company uses other tools, as well, including some free options. "We're constantly monitoring, and we have weekly metrics that we look at to see what's going on," O'Brien says.

In November, AXA added buttons to its website that allow readers to share content directly from the site through social networks. "We had one idea in marketing, and we went to IT and they said, 'Here's a better idea,' " O'Brien says. "[It] is a first in our industry," she claims.

On "The Source," a site AXA launched in March 2010 to provide customers with applicable, timely content other than company news, content sharing is available to more than 300 social networking sites. "It gave us an opportunity to engage bloggers and online media that traditionally, from a PR perspective -- I don't know how much was done," explains Michael Arcaro, AXA Equitable's VP of external affairs. "But we recognized the value and reach of that audience."

AXA's O'Brien adds, "It's a perfect marriage -- it's marketing that's enabled by technology."

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio

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