Insurance industry gets social media – check out the Twitter use at #BIBA2011!

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Mairi

Last week UK brokers gathered at their annual event, BIBA 2011 in Manchester and for the first time in UK insurance and broker communities, social media was used fairly widely.
This follows hot on the heels of risk managers and insurers gathering in Vancouver a week earlier for RIMS 2011, which was a staggering success on Twitter.
BIBA attendees used #BIBA2011 to bookmark their tweets about the event, RIMS used #RIMS2011.
What was interesting was who was using Twitter. In Vancouver, what was most striking was the use of Twitter by BIG corporates – there is a list here in the last blog – but included Aon Corporation, FM Global, XL Capital, ACE Ltd, Zurich, Willis and Marsh. In the Manchester event, there were a lot more individuals and much of the noise came from press such as Post Magazine, Insurance Age and Insurance Times and their reporters. Continue reading →

Happy New Year Insurance and Reinsurance People! Six ways to have happy social media planning in 2011!

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Mairi

Firstly, Happy New Year to you all – may you all have a prosperous 2011.

Secondly, thanks for your support in 2010, and for reading my blog. Last year was a year when many wholesale insurers, reinsurers and service providers start to use social media. Some jumped in with both feet, while others dipped their toes and others still watched from the sidelines to admire the ripples… and see if anyone drowned in this medium that scares so many.

Results were varied. Under the sheer weight of the work needed to harness the power of LinkedIn, blogging, Facebook and Twitter successfully as a big corporate, some floundered, others lost their way and some even gave up the ghost and left their excellent work hanging in cyberspace. Some kept hacking away at the cliff-face and have made real progress in their understanding and use of the medium within the restrictions of the corporate world. Continue reading →

How to convince an executive to invest in social media? Speak his language.

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Mairi

I was just reading the blog post by Mike Wise on getting executives to “buy in” to social media – and it made me think to post up my thoughts on this here as it is something I deal with all the time.

I spend a lot of time with executives talking about social media. And I am often brought into board rooms to help the executives understand what social media is and look at it to see if it can help them in their particular field.

To get the “buy in” (I don’t like that word, but it fits the bill), I feel I need to look at it from their perspective. I take time to show them that there are good ways to use these things – and the four pillars – blogging, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – are simply tools that will make it easier to communicate with other people. Just like when websites came in. Or emails became the norm. Or Blackberrys took over the insurance world. Continue reading →