I spoke with Magda Walczak, Head of eCommerce for Real Insurance about some of the challenges that she faces in her organisation and how they manage them. Here’s a video of my chat with her.

The interesting thing about social media is the breadth of areas within an organisation that it can touch. Unlike some marketing initiatives, which are all about a campaign, social media tends to be more about the relationship and the dialogue that customers (and potential customers) have with a company and each other in relation to a company.
These touch points might be in the corporate communications department, the call centre, sales, customer support, the list goes on. Social media is a two way channel of communication … like the phone. It requires both a proactive approach and the ability to respond rapidly to events as they unfold. It requires the ability to listen to conversations that you might not previously been aware of and it involves empowering but managing the voice of your employees in the social media space.
For many organisations this is scary and the last thing that they want is to engage in a conversation with a customer who might say something bad about them. In many cases, it seems easier to do nothing at all rather than navigate their way through a series of complex decisions that make the legal department turn blue. The truth is however, whether you are part of the conversation or not, people are talking. Whether you want to participate is really about just how deeply you want to bury your head in the sand.
Assuming you are ready to start the conversation, the next step is to figure out a strategy and what tools you should use to do it. This can be extremely confusing and frequently, the ROI is difficult or impossible to directly measure.

The financial services and insurance industries are amongst the most sophisticated digital marketers in the industry however they also face some of the greatest challenges in social media. First because they are the big targets for complaints and secondly because they are traditionally some of the most conservative in terms of risk aversion.

Magda will be leading a really practical session at ad:tech on how to use all the tools that social media has to offer. It promises to be a really interesting session.