Social Media is a Conversation with Professor Ashley Nelson

Today's PICA Workshop recap is by PICA Chairman, Patrick Faherty.

As a Professor of Practice at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University in New Orleans, Ashley Nelson (@anelsonnola) has created and is teaching an advanced communications class on social media. Her first success was to simply get the course approved, despite some reservations from business school faculty. Now that the course is on the schedule, though, it has been a huge success, with 50 students signed up for class and another 28 on the waiting list to get in.

“We’ve also already had a student hired specifically because they have a background in social media,” said Ashley. “There’s a new generation of customers coming up and this is how they want to communicate, so smart businesses are going to get good at this.”

Although a lot of Ashley’s presentation focused on Twitter, she did recommend that any organization delving into social media first develop an overall strategy and then make sure you integrate all the tools. PICA has taken this advice by cross-referencing links to its blog (http://pica-connect.blogspot.com), Twitter (@PICA_Connect) and LinkedIn Group (PICA – Professional Insurance Communicators of America) pages. Soon, with help from some of our members, we’ll also be launching a new PICA website. We hope to further develop our strategy by using these tools, but the most effective way to get timely PICA updates right now is to follow us on Twitter.

Twitter is known as a “micro blog” because it is limited to 140 characters. However, because you want users to “re-Tweet” your messages, that further confines you to about 125 characters. As with any good communication, content is key when using Twitter. It’s vital to understand your audience and design Tweets that have a call to action and has useful information. Message quality, not quantity, is the goal for which we must strive.

Ashley also shared some tips for how to come up with Twitter topics, which include:
• Answer the question, “What has your attention?”
• Share links to article, videos and websites
• Ask questions to stimulate a discussion
• Tweet about other people’s material that has caught your attention
• Re-Tweet other people’s useful Tweets.

There was a lot of nuance and tons of information to Ashley’s presentation, which was a great reason to attend the workshop! Probably the most important lesson PICA Workshop attendees brought back with them for business purposes, however, is to develop a social media strategy before implementing these tools (i.e., don’t just start a Facebook or Twitter account for your company if you don’t know why you’re doing it). But if you don’t have these pages already saved for your organization, you should probably go ahead and at least reserve company pages on these sites before someone else does it for you.

Thanks to Professor Nelson for the crash course on social media and, especially, how to effectively use Twitter. While it looks like social media will be a continuing topic at PICA Workshops for the foreseeable future, I believe we’ve received some solid tutoring the past few years from Michael Wilder (@michaelwilder) in Las Vegas last year and Ashley Nelson (@anelsonnola) and Cindy Crescenzo (@creativecomms) this year in New Orleans. We appreciate their insight and guidance as we move forward, both for PICA and the companies for which we work.

Workshop Recap - Commissioner Jim Donelon

Welcome to our first speaker recap from this year's outstanding workshop! Today's post comes from PICA member Kirsten Faherty:

What an honor it was to have Commissioner Jim Donelon speak to PICA, especially considering that everyone in New Orleans' insurance industry is very busy right now with the recent need to open area spillways to avoid additional flooding. In fact, Commissioner Donelon was coming to us right from an interview on the morning news. I really appreciate that he was able to join us.

The first thing I noticed about the Commissioner is that he is truly a take-charge person. While Jan Wright had prepared notes to introduce him, she didn't need to use them because as Jim came in, he said hello, found a chair toward the front of the room, asked if he could sit in it and then jumped right in! That capable attitude is exactly what you'd need to have if you were going to oversee all of the insurance happenings for a state like Louisiana, which has had more than its fair share of catastrophic events.

Jim covered a lot of ground during his hour with us. He had a lot to say about Louisiana, both from a professional standpoint and because he has lived there his entire life. Here are some of the main points that stood out to me:

- Even after Hurricane Katrina, only 40% of people living in Louisiana have flood insurance. I thought that number would be much higher!

- The National Flood Insurance Program paid $15 billion in property damage in Louisiana alone. That number is just staggering and really illustrates just how much damage people experienced as a result of Katrina.

- Katrina is the highest insured loss in the history of our industry, at $25 billion total paid.

- The levees are now the best they've ever been, and Commissioner Donelon believes that with $15 billion in reinforcements over the last five years, they are now equipped to withstand another hurricane like Katrina.

Commissioner Donelon explains the state of the insurance industry in Louisiana.

A good question asked by our group was, "How has Louisiana avoided insurers pulling out of the area (due to previous loss history)?" Donelon explained that, unlike what has unfortunately happened in Florida, Louisiana agents are able to profitably write insurance. The way that the state and most carriers handled losses after Katrina has made Louisiana "a poster child for how to do things right." Considering that in Florida, Citizens Insurance is first in the state, and it's sixth in the State of Louisiana, we can see that other carriers are able to do business profitably.

The Commissioner has been involved in the insurance industry for a long time and has seen many losses, but he maintains a sensible, positive attitude. Considering everything he has witnessed, it was reassuring to hear him say, "Our city is stronger today than it was the day before Katrina hit," and that he is, "cautiously optimistic that the bad days are behind us and good times are ahead of us."

I learned a lot during our hour with Commissioner Donelon, but the strongest fact that I came away with is that Louisiana's insurance industry rests in very capable hands.