OFFICIAL LIVEBLOG: BlogHer Business '09 - Allstate Case Study

Session Description: BlogHer co-founder Jory Des Jardins interviews Lizzie Schreier, the woman responsible for Internet Marketing at Allstate, and responsible for working across departments at her company (including Legal) to build a social media program that is innovative, achieves measurable and desirable results, all within the unique regulatory environment that Allstate, as an insurance company, is beholden to. Learn how Lizzie built the case for social media engagement.

The Allstate case study is brought to you by GasPedal and the Blog Council.

Jory reminds audience that the case studies are being done in rapid fire and encourages audience participants to ask questions. Jory says she loves this case study because Allstate is a highly regulated industry and its difficult to be in the social media space when you are in a highly regulated industry.

Lizzie Schreier has been Senior Internet Marketing Strategist at Allstate Insurance. Says social media is a potential liability from an insurance perspective. Lizzie says when she was told to start social media, she went to legal. Within two weeks over 20 attorneys were involved. An attorney said, " Ain't no way that crap is going to get through legal." Lizzie did her homework. She went into other highly regulated industries, found out what they were doing and shared those findings with her legal team.

"I basically did their homework for them."

Choose Your Words Wisely. Can't use the words advice or recommend in any of our comments.

The attorneys said you can have your forum but you can't talk about insurance.( Audience laughs since Lizzie works for an insurance company)

Schreier's approach was to go on a fact finding tour. She said she had to start with ground zero. She said they had no idea why they were there.

The decision was made to open up the forum to let people talk whatever they wanted to. Every week Lizzie reviewed activity on the forum with the attorneys. Lizzie says by taking this baby step approach the attorneys started to gain a comfort level with the forum and the conversations that were occuring there.

Jory : "The case study spawned other projects that were not successful."

Lizzie: A lot of the other groups within Allstate would go in to legal and wanted to do much bigger projects. Lizzie says because she took baby steps she was able to get more campaigns out the door than the other groups.

Lizzie explained she is part of Allstate's direct marketing group. Our group saw the value of using social media to build a stronger relationship with customers and potential customers.

Question: How were you able to respond without getting legal approval every time you wanted to respond to a question?

Lizzie: "It was a trust issue. We also created some templates of things we could say under different situations.

Question: What did you want to accomplish with the program?

Lizzie: "The interesting thing is if you asked me what we wanted to accomplish it was vastly different than what Leadership wanted. Leadership wanted people to connect on a message board.

Lizzie had different goals. She says she wanted to educate consumers about what is important to them regarding auto insurance. Measure through organic search. We needed more people talking about Allstate and how we could help them

Lizzie says on some tactics have been very successful. Friender Bender has delivered a 50% conversion rate.

Questions: How did you attract people to come and talk on message board and talk about things other than insurance?

Lizzie: Never got it to a high level of traffic. Says it worked to her favor because she said she could go to the attorneys and say, "See there is nothing to worry about it's not getting a lot of traffic."

Question: Asked about leveraging internal social media with the external initiatives?

Lizzie; Hasn't been a totally

Question: Has this impacted traditional marketing.

Lizzie; Yes, to a fault. There is a lot of misunderstanding on how to use social media. Bottom line, we are still an insurance company. We can't replace evertyhing with social networking. Lizzie says leadership is in love with it.

Lizzie says we need to educate leadership about the metrics.

Question: How are you integrating this with your website?

Lizzie: We are going into those programs and leveraging them with our social networks. Now have a section on website. Allstate Updates that integrates all the social networking

Question: How are you defining success and do you have to quantify it?

Lizzie; One very attractive thing is that you can do it very inexpensefully. We are measuring our success not only from a retention perspective but also from a conversion perspective. We are in the direct group, bottom line its about conversion.
The other group is looking at it from brand and loyalty -two very different success metrics.

Question: Have you brought in other companies to come in to talk to leadership.

Lizzie: We haven't but I have leveraged the attorney at Wal-Mart with our legal team. Lizzie says being part of the blog council has been very beneficial.

Question: What is next?

Lizzie: It's a loaded question. Leveraging the work that is already out there and getting it more visible with our core target audience. Biggest challenge to make sure we leverage it and other programs throughout the organization with the vehicles we have going.