Guest Blogger Nibby Priest, GoVaughn.com Insurance: “High-Touch Relationships”
August 6, 2010 by admin · 4 Comments
For Aartrijk’s new series of guest bloggers from in and around the insurance industry, we welcome Nibby Priest of GoVaughn.com Insurance Agency, a full-service independent agency headquartered in Henderson, Kentucky, and serving Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois.
About Nibby: Nibby began his insurance career in August 1983 as a part-time employee in his father’s business, then joined the agency full-time in 1986 after graduating from Eastern Kentucky University. Nibby is known nationally for his insurance agency automation consulting work with the AGENA Corporation and National Users of AGENA Systems. He has also worked extensively with Henderson Community College as an instructor in various computer-related classes.
1. What has happened in the past year with your agency/firm now in the area of branding? What changes or initiatives have you been working on? What is the top challenge right now for companies like yours?
We are trying to brand more with our online name GoVaughn.com Insurance, instead of our old, long name Vaughn Insurance Agency Co.
We have dropped our Yellow Pages, TV, radio and newspaper advertisements. Our biggest challenge is making sense out of it all, even though we know that the time we are spending in social media and new media (online advertising) is really the right way to go.
Guest Blogger Pat Alexander, InsuranceEcoSystem.com Founder: ‘Brand and Message Are Inseparable’
July 26, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Pat Alexander, founder of InsuranceEcosystem.com
The Aartrijk team is pleased to welcome — for the first time — guest bloggers from in and around the insurance industry, starting this month.
To kick off this occasional series, we welcome Pat Alexander, founder of industry blog InsuranceEcosystem.com and a Brand Camp 2009 alumna.
About Pat: In 2009, she launched InsuranceEcosystem.com as a resource for the insurance industry and a way to spark more conversation about her areas of expertise in independent agencies, coaching and technology. She describes Insurance Ecosystem as a blog that “provide[s] you with communicators that don’t normally blog but have great views and information to share. Each of these individuals … [has] so much to contribute in their area of expertise.”
1. What has happened in the past year with your firm now in the area of branding? What changes or initiatives have you been working on?
After Aartrijk Brand Camp 2009, I developed a plan to redesign my primary Web site, PatAlexander.com, and give it a fresh look and to develop a blog where individuals of interest to insurance agents could blog regularly or at their whim. Developing this blog included developing a brand for it as well as an audience.
In Your Face, Facebook! And Out of Mine
May 19, 2010 by Charles Wasilewski · 3 Comments
OK, it’s been building for a while.
But when two of the most powerful women in the media both dissed Facebook (in the same week), I knew something was up. And down.
What’s up is media scrutiny of Facebook about privacy. What’s down is public perception of Facebook (if negative or questioning media coverage can be a proxy for negative public perception).
First of the powerful (in my media world) was Laura Mazzuca Toops, she of the insurance trade publication American Agent and Broker. Her blog post of May 6 2010 headlined “Are we due for a social media backlash?” charged: “Facebook alone is single-handedly doing a lot of harm to the concept of social media. On top of infuriating users by changing its ‘fan’ settings to ‘like’ and generating lawsuits by changing privacy settings, just this week there was another ‘security flaw’ that allowed users to view other people’s private live chats and friends requests.”
But if that wasn’t enough, here came Betty White on NBC’s culturally iconic “Saturday Night Live” on May 8 2010. The self-professed 88.5-year-old, in her opening monologue, credited Facebook for creating a groundswell of consumer sentiment for her to host the show. Then she said in her amusing way: “I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite. People say ‘But Betty, Facebook is a great way to connect with old friends.’ Well at my age, if I wanna connect with old friends, I need a Ouija Board …. we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had phonebook, but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon with it.”
Then another: “In my way, seeing pictures of people’s vacations was considered a punishment.”
Zing.
Pretty funny of Betty White, but is she (and our lesser-known insurance trade editor) on to something?
Yes and no.
Ever since Facebook announced “Open Graph” (which allows it to share your Facebook profile across a wide range of other Web sites), it’s been privacy enemy #1. (It was pretty high on the list before that, too.) Noted columnist Chris O’Brien of SiliconValley.com, the Web portal of the San Jose Mercury-News: The latest changes have “sparked an intense backlash among some leading figures in the technology community over the privacy implications this sharing raises, although it’s unclear how widespread the discontent is.”
danah boyd (yes, no capital letters in her names) of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the author of a Ph.D. dissertation “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” was more blunt about Facebook’s latest moves: “People are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences.”
I happen to think that nature will find an equilibrium. In the meantime, lessons learned: Check your Facebook privacy settings (here’s a video showing how). And remember that the companies fueling social networking are for-profit businesses fueled by venture capital funding.
Meanwhile, Facebook is on the verge of reaching 500 million members, up from 120 million users in December 2008.
On Point with Peter van Aartrijk and Rick Morgan, Episode 19: Having Fun Growing Business
May 11, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
“On Point, with Peter van Aartrijk and Rick Morgan” is an audio conversation with insurance industry leaders who champion change and challenge all of us to think.
Linda Rey is a second-generation agent and owner of Rey Insurance in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Frank Rey founded the agency in 1978 to serve bilingual clients in the local community.
Linda discusses how she has incorporated the use of social media into the agency’s marketing strategy. For Linda, it was an “effective way to be present, visible, and increase awareness and exposure.”
On Point with Peter van Aartrijk and Rick Morgan, Episode 17: Integrating the Social Web in a Large Agency
April 13, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
On Point with Peter van Aartrijk and Rick Morgan is an audio conversation with insurance industry leaders who champion change and challenge all of us to think.
So, how does a large independent agency with multiple offices approach new marketing and communications opportunities on the social Web? They apply it first inside their own firm.
Peter and Rick spoke with two representatives in IT and communications at a forward-thinking independent agency, Holmes Murphy Insurance. Based in Des Moines, Holmes Murphy has 13 offices in 11 states, 500 employees, and 77 years in the market. Read more
On Point with Peter van Aartrijk and Rick Morgan, Episode 16: Commercial Lines Is An Accommodation
March 29, 2010 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
On Point with Peter van Aartrijk and Rick Morgan is an audio conversation with insurance industry leaders who champion change and challenge all of us to think.
Peter and Rick spoke with Steve Brooks, an independent agency owner in Westlake Village, Calif. who is a proponent of personal lines and social media as a marketing tool.
While many agencies sell a mix of commercial and personal lines, Steve is very focused on upscale personal lines accounts. He started his firm from scratch 20 years ago, and is 98% personal lines.
Personal lines is stable, with higher persistency than commercial, especially in an economy where businesses are moving their insurance, or going out of business altogether. And the personal lines book is worth more to an agency, Steve says.
Traditional media—such as TV ads and direct marketing—don’t work as well as they once did for personal lines, he maintains. He likes social media—like Facebook and Twitter—for reaching a higher-end clientele. “It’s hard to measure ROI on social media sites,” he says, “but the intangible references are priceless.”
And he likes to work relationships. Commercial lines agents refer preferred personal lines to Brooks because they take the line seriously and want it handled well. “You can’t wait until business slows to start doing this,” he says. “You need to be doing it all the time.”
The podcast was published Monday, March 29, 2010. Run time is 24 minutes 18 seconds.