Archive of tag "AccuQuote"
11/18 AccuQuote: Social media for the analytic marketer (Public call) Click here
11/19 SMBC: Legal roundtable (Private member call) Click here
12/16 Word of Mouth Supergenius: Learn to be a fantastic word of mouth marketer with 12 how-to classes, 12 real-world case studies, and 6 brilliant authors. You’ll learn practical, hands-on techniques to get started, grow your program, and earn amazing word of mouth. (Public event) Click here
Come to BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media on November 10 in Atlanta to hear Coca-Cola, UPS, SunGard, Orange Business Services, ConAgra Foods, Turner Broadcast System, Newell Rubbermaid, and The Home Depot share case studies in corporate social media. You’ll learn how to get started, get past roadblocks, and make your social media program phenomenal — in one afternoon, for just $250.
You’ll get practical, how-to advice on creating great content, getting management buy-in, educating employees, keeping lawyers and regulators happy, simple and ethical disclosure, and engaging fans. You’ll ask questions, discover new ideas, and get answers from people who have been there, done that — all in four hours.
Register and learn more about BlogWell here.
As a company that strives to be analytical and to measure results in everything they do, AccuQuote works hard to track and monitor the results associated with their social media activity. In his BlogWell Minneapolis presentation, “Social Media for the Analytic Marketer,” AccuQuote’s VP of Marketing and Business Development, Sean Cheyney, outlines the strategies the brand uses to track the ROI of their social media programs.
In his case study, Sean shares how AccuQuote uses tools like Feedburner, Google Alerts, Twitter Search, and Twitter and WordPress API’s to track engagement and reach. Sean also covers how they’re able to show that 2% of their leads are coming from blogs, and how they’re tracking social media partnership leads through unique links.
(Special thanks to our lead sponsor, Globalpark, for help making BlogWell Minneapolis possible.)
BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media in Minneapolis on August 13, hosted by General Mills, was a fantastic sell-out event that featured some great social media case studies from McDonald’s, Mayo Clinic, Progressive, General Mills, Ford, Walmart, CME Group, and AccuQuote.
We’d like to extend a big thanks to lead sponsor Globalpark, as well as sponsors Jive, Visible Technologies, Biz360, Compendium Blogware, and Zocalo Group for help making BlogWell possible, as well as a thanks to local partners the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, the Minnesota Chapter of the American Marketing Association, i612, and the Social Media Breakfast – Twin Cities who also provided significant support in bringing BlogWell to Minneapolis.
And a big thanks to all the folks that helped share the event via Twitter. If you missed it, here’s a few of the great tweets we saw:
hughweber: It is fascinating to just listen to execs from General Mills ask for insights from execs from McDonald’s…this is great #blogwell
fleurword: RT @halvorson: General Mills CMO: “Nothing is more fundamentally social than recipes.” Simple insight; somehow blowing my mind. #blogwell
gz_: General Mills CMO Mark Addicks: Brands move from creators to curators. #blogwell
chelseafanjj: RT @robbinphillips: #blogwell being social is not a department its a point of view: general mills #blogwell
cmortensen: RT @scottyhendo: General Mills used Pssst (150k influential consumers) to launch Progresso Chicken Broth – no trade, print, etc #blogwell
gialyons: Flip recorder has changed how Mayo Clinic presents itself online – interviews of medical folks working on diseases, etc. #BlogWell
swaynewilson: Mayo clinic now “syndicating” their weekly radio broadcast via mp3 podcast. Will save $250K per year in syndication costs #blogwell
johnfschneider: Don’t just pitch the media, be the media. @gaspedal #blogwell Rock on Mayo Clinic!
tcar: Mayo Clinic’s Employee Social Media Guidelines. http://bit.ly/LL4t #blogwell
MegCanada: Interesting to hear Mayo talk about privacy concerns (sounds like what we do @hclib) #blogwell
chavoen: RT @spikejones: Progressive used Twitter to monitor water levels in SD floods to know where to send their people. #blogwell
CraigPladson: Progressive understands how to articulate the business value of social media. Props to Matthew Lehman (@mattcleveland). #blogwell
almostthor: Progressive on social media “We need to be there because out customers are there.” #blogwell @gaspedal
ColleMcVoy: Progressive working with The Customer Respect Group to measure how well their brand is being “received” on Twitter & Facebook. #blogwell
deluxecorp: @progressive uses Twitter trends to determine what kind of content is on website and facebook page #blogwell
DigiLunch: McDonalds working on how 2 get employees 2 leverage their own Social Networks and become Brand Ambassadors RT @ryanestis #Blogwell
chelseafanjj: RT @wtongen: McDonalds put all social media efforts under national control not the 21 regions. #blogwell
copenhaver: listen, participate, lead …sound strategy by McDonalds #blogwell (via @chrscarpenter)
LadyRiposter: Estimated McDonalds is talked about every five seconds. Huge opportunity for them. 27 mil visit/day in the US alone. #blogwell
rickmahn: Looking at social media as another way to cultivate relationships with customers long term – McDonalds #blogwell
danmandle: After May Clinic and CME Group presos I’m convinced old media is not dead. It’s too great a partner for new/social media. #blogwell
deluxecorp: CME social media started on facebook and evolved from a page started by a fan in Norway. #blogwell
eBob: The CME wants to turn customers into fans. Brand enthusism. #blogwell
deluxecorp: CME using Twitter for customer service as well as news sharing for their customers. #blogwell
craigsanatomy: 3 things the CME uses SM: 1) Brand Enthusiasm: Turn customers into “fans” #blogwell
bethkathan: @Walmart, 90 percent of employees log on to mywalmart.com every 10 days from HOME! #yam #blogwell
homedepot: Good ideas from Walmart about connecting customers, employees #blogwell
nathanschock: Corp Comms of Walmart: using Twitter as an early-warning system for conversations about their brand #blogwell
bethkathan: Walmart twitters from major meetings such as the shareholders’ meeting #yam #blogwell
chavoen: Walmart says “more loyal community when you move from transactional interactions to collaborative or engaged #BlogWell (via @infogroup)
GraemeThickins: MP3 of my interview with Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford, yesterday at #Blogwell Minneapolis: http://bit.ly/1f7CRA
mikemost: RT @spikejones: “We’re not measuring social media on sales. It’s not a 1-to-1 kind of thing.” @scottmonty of Ford #blogwell
LadyRiposter: What’s next for @Ford? Humanizing the company. Cross-training comm. staff, connection w/ enthusiasts, online training, etc. #blogwell
moria: Scott Monty at Ford “Its not what where saying about ourselves, it’s what other people are saying about us.” #blogwell
jesseengle: RT @LadyRiposter: Must-see video of Ford CEO Alan Mulally on Twitter. http://bit.ly/lyWfj #blogwell
johnwernz: “(Social Media) We are able to track how many leads are generated, how much revenue we generate. ” @scheyney – Accuquote #Blogwell
deluxecorp: Love that AccuQuote is using Omniture to track leads and measure roi of blog, Twitter, facebook, YouTube. Great resource for me #blogwell
ColleenMick: Both @progressive and Accuquote claim they have the most boring product around. Still have successful social media. #blogwell
deluxecorp: AccuQuote is a life insurance company. Social media makes sense. They already communicate with every single client/prospect #blogwell
gaspedal: The diff uses of social media for AccuQuote: Lead generation, life insurance education, recruiting, PR, strategic partner promos. #blogwell
4:20 — Bob Pearson introduces Sean Cheyney, AccuQuote’s VP of Marketing and Business Development.
4:23 — Sean: ROI is a big question in social media. AccuQuote is very analytical in everything that we do. We say “we’ll do branding” but it’s a by-product of doing direct response. Early on, the question was how we can justify being able to use social media.
4:24 — Sean: Life insurance is an interesting product. It is a fully underwritten product; there has to be an agent involved. We’re talking about a very personal transaction, involving subjects that make people squirm.
4:25 — Sean: Social media is just an extension of the dialogue we’re already doing.
4:26 — Sean: But how do we measure the effects of social media? We’re measuring everything else, so we tried to apply that to social media. Some tools we couldn’t use, of course, but we’re a big Omniture shop so we used their web analytics tools for our blog.
4:26 — Sean: Two questions frequently asked when we first started blogging are 1) How do you measure results? and 2) How do you get around your legal? Well, we use our common sense.
4:27 — Sean: 2% of leads generated were coming from blogs.
4:28 — Sean: We recently got into podcasting and we’re using Feedburner to track new subscribers.
4:29 — Sean: We’re also looking at it from a monitoring standpoint. What were people saying about us? We’re using Google Alerts, TweetDeck, and Twitter Search.
4:29 — Sean: Lead generation is a big part of how our social media program fits into our company. Omniture has introduced a Twitter API and a WordPress API that we can use. We’re likely underreporting the leads we’re getting from social media, but by itself the number is already more than enough to justify the effort we put into it.
4:31 — Sean: The big focus of our social media efforts is life insurance education. Social media is a platform for dialogue. It took a while for me to get used to it, but we realized this early on. We put out a lot of information on life insurance. Our CEO posts five times a week. I post from time to time. We cross-post blog information and we tweet about them. This year we launched our video learning series.
4:33 — Sean: I want people to look at us and say, “You guys are in life insurance. My product is more exciting than yours; there’s no reason we can’t be in social media.”
4:33 — Sean: More recently, we’ve started to use social media for recruiting. We integrated our HR department into social media, so now we’re using social media to push out that we have jobs available and that we’re hiring. People are now finding us through social media and getting hired.
4:35 — Sean: Social media is also helping from a company culture standpoint.
4:36 — Sean: The other area that we measure is PR. We follow a lot of our reporters. People are coming to us and finding out about what we’re doing through following us on our blog and on our Twitter. We’re generating conversation based on what’s being talked about– not necessarily about us, but about the topic they’re interested in.
4:38 — Sean: We’re also using social media for our strategic partner promotions. We integrate our partnerships with what we’re doing in social media, and when possible we give them unique links so that we can track where our sales are generated from.
Q&A
Q: Not many are focused on lead generation. What are the first things you need to do to find leads for your company?
A: You have to adjust your thinking. You can’t just do a heavy push. We had to shut off a couple of affiliates recently because they were just spamming Twitter.
Q: If you’re taking more of an educational approach, are there other ways you’re connecting that to lead generation?
A: That’s why we’re tying that to the number of subscriptions.
Q: At this point, this is standard for you, but what obstacles did you hit at first?
A: There’s one tactic that we take as a sort of informal focus group that we call our blog/email combo. We’ll ask people what other products and services would they like for us to negotiate on their behalf and make available to them? We expected financial responses but we weren’t expecting other kinds of response. What we didn’t expect was the sheer volume of responses. We were inundated with responses. It’s not bad, but we weren’t expecting it.
Q: Your CEO blogs several times a week. Do you and your team help ghost-write them for him?
A: Some of what we do is we repurpose the articles that he writes. But he will be happy if he can talk about life insurance all day long. It’s his biggest passion in life. Giving him another opportunity to talk about it was pretty easy. We asked people once to ask questions and what we did was we took our CEO to a room, and used a flip cam to tape his responses. He liked that a lot.
The Social Media Business Council, formerly the Blog Council, is a brands-only community that helps large organizations build successful social media programs.
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BlogWell: How big brands use social media