I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Hearsay CEO Clara Shih. She and her team have spent a good amount of time and money developing a fascinating product that should be of immediate interest to every insurer that operates through agents, i.e. nearly everyone in the industry. Hearsay Social is an intriguing combination of a compliance solution, content management, workflow with analytics to measure everything.
Agents and social media in the same sentence normally also includes the words compliance and nightmare. Unbeknown to many carriers, many agents are already active on social media especially LinkedIn. Agents are natural networkers and invariably own the existing customer relationships; making new and retaining contacts is their bread and butter; collecting Facebook fans or LinkedIn subscribers is an extension of business as usual and should be a breeze for them. On the other hand, carriers struggle to develop meaningful social media relationships with consumers but are great at creating content. If the agent networking skills can be married to the creative skills of the carriers’ social-media staff then we might have a perfect match.
Compliance concerns are holding back large-scale adoption of social media in the industry and while it is a critical issue, solving the problem will do little to develop a distributed social media strategy. This is where Hearsay Social is looking to add value. Each agent uses a social media dashboard and that captures every post, tweet and message for the sake of posterity and of course the regulators. The dashboard also houses business rules to filter and flag items that might need further review. Using a SaaS (Software as a Service) approach, agents can use multiple devices including home machines and increasingly important, mobiles. That helps to cover the defensive role, now the offense.
Hearsay Social is a content management and distribution system. Insurers can suggest content from which agents can select what they consider best suited to their personal style and location. Agents can post directly, add a local twist before posting or ignore. This provide a benefit to the agent with a ready supply of good content but it also gives the carrier a distribution network through to the fans of the agent, vastly increasing potential reach. This is where the real-time analytics and modeling plays a key role with various levels of data provided for agent and brand pages. What content is popular with the agents; what content with consumers; which agents are most active; which geographies are working best –questions that add a different dimension to social media marketing. If an agent collects an average of 200 Facebook fans and 1000 agents distribute a specific link, this gives the carrier a potential of 200,000 eyes on the content, dwarfing the reach of the average carrier Facebook page. For carriers with non-captive agents, a smooth content distribution process could be very valuable while solving a compliance problem for agencies.
Hearsay Social promises to be a key player in the industry and has already announced deals with State Farm and Farmers, two of the larger agent networks. If you have agents and worried about compliance but also need to expand social media distribution, take a look at Hearsay Social.
I have embedded the company video into this blog post and while it is shameless advertising, and why not, it is very good and worth watching.
