Allstate on Building Brand Loyalty

Lizzie Schreier of Allstate is at BlogHer Business talking about an online social media campaign she pushed through after a lot of hard work internally dealing with legal and regulatory issues.

Since there are so many unique regulations for the insurance industry, the legal department was nervous about allowing those viral online conversations to begin.

Insurance is not alone. A lot of companies are heavily regulated, such as pharmaceuticals and finance that it doesn’t allow for the value that crowd sourcing can bring to the table.

She gives us advice for going through the legal loop. “Make it easy for them by doing a lot of fact finding up front,” says Lizzie. “Uncover what their problems are and educate the legal department.”

She went into highly regulated industries and learned about their terms and issues, then used those examples to recommend guidelines they could implement that worked for other heavily regulated industries.

She needed to demonstrate to legal that it wouldn’t be as scary as they assumed it would be. Let’s sit down together and look at what the escalation procedures are and anticipate how we would handle it. 25 lawyers later, she said she could have a platform but couldn’t use it to talk about insurance.

Someone from Nestle in the audience asked which procedures worked and which ones didn’t.

“It all comes down to trust,” says Lizzie. We went in and said, “these are the worst case scenarios that could happen, and these are the kinds of responses we should have within a particular framework. We got them to get comfortable with certain words and phrases.”

The case study spawned other projects like SEO efforts. VehicleVibes.com was launched, starting with a few cities. The goal was to educate consumers and find out what’s important to them about auto insurance. One of the ways they measure their success is through organic search, i.e., organic rankings.

Recent blog post topics have included:

**Cities with the worst and least road rage

**Summer road trips for everyone

**Tell tale signs of road rage

**Cash for clunkers guide

**Your bad driving habits get on my nerves

They also launched Friender Benders, where consumers can participate in a site as a particular character they choose for their personality, i.e., Makeup Mary, Johnny Distraction, etc. You can then create and share animation through Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and others.

Through these games and tactics, they have received a 50% conversion from people to who have requested more information about auto insurance and quotes. These efforts overall have really helped to drive online quotes.