BlogHer Update! Best practice! AllState’s Lizzie Schreier

Lizzie from AllState

I am here in Chicago using to Blogging Best practices in 5 Case studies!
Here is case study #1! AllState!

My key take aways
1) Issues in regulated industries. Discussion of liability if someone takes advice from a Allstate message board. Seek advice from legal in these industries.
2) Have a strategy – don’t just “do social media”
3) Advise with others need to “approve” social media stategy. Her example was with legal:
a) First educate them on what social media is
b) Do your homework — know your facts. For instance, Lizzie from AllState went in with guidelines she wanted based on Farmer’s Insurance etc.
c) Show it don’t just tell it. Lizzie showed legal other message boards.
d) Prove, communicate, enhance, and repeat. Update the team!
3) Communications to the entire company — not just marketing is critcial!
4) Take baby steps, and then move forward to next strategy when success in one!
5) Track the results.
6) Lizzie leveraged resource from Blogging Council.

Some cool questions:
a) What’s your resource? One person.
b) What’s your next step beyond the message blog? Texting Tessa! Twitter and Gaming!
c) What are your results? Lizzie gave conversion rates of 50% plus to buy insurance! Online closure is moving higher.
d) How did you start ? They did no internal work first, they went to message board first.
e) How is the overall outlook in the company now? Yes, almost too much so. We do not want to go overboard. We are still an insurance company and we need to do many critical things in traditional ways.
f) What has this progressed? We have an internal board now to share best practices.
g) How do you quantify success? We measure acquisition of new customers and conversion in all tactics. Other groups in AllState are looking at it based on their stategy in terms of brand and loyalty.
h) Do you allow other companies to come in and share best practices? Not yet but I have used Walmart internally to move faster inside Allstate.

Bottom line to me is that regulated industries can use social media like Lizzie did and use her collaborative techniques to gain buyin throughout her company!