Still Time for If Vahinkovakuutus to add insult to Injury

If Vahinkovakutus will even try and rip you off when you leave. You cannot trust If at all

Nice story relating to cancelling your matkavakuutus. Thanks again If Vahinkovakuutus. A nice touch to end my pain with you as a service provider.

View the feed on facebook

If Vahinkovakuutus charge you 30 euros to cancel your Travel Insurance with them even though you have had it for years. Nice Customer Service once again!

My Last Response: End of the Dialogue

Well as i just posted, If Vahinkovakuutus have given their last response to me. This is my final response to them on this subject. Pretty self explanatory so i won't comment any more but just leave it like this.

View the thread on Facebook.

If Vahinkovakuutus's Last Response: End of the Dialogue

Well this is it. It seems that If vahinkovakuutus have lived up to my previous experiences of Finnish customer service. If are not going to do anything.

If Vahinkovakuutus have not agreed to change their terms and conditions so that if they supply wrong or misleading information to a customer that they will take responsibility for this.

If Vahinkovakuutus have not agreed to publish on their Facebook group the results of their review regarding the use of a third party in their emergency call centre.

If Vahinkovakuutus have not agreed to publish on Facebook the results of their review into the lack of customer service other than for sales in their shops.

If Vahinkovakuutus will not pay the additional expenses incurred to me personally as a result of their self admitted failures in communication.

Do you want an insurance company who treats their customers like this? They refuse to engage me in the arena that i wish. Why are they on Facebook? They obviously have not heard of SCRM (Social Customer Relationship Management) and the main reasons people engage companies on facebook. Increasingly customer service is one of them.

View the conversation thread on Facebook.

Well it seems apparent from this If Vahinkovakuutus do not and never did want to engage me on facebook. With almost every response they have tried to eject me from their Facebook page. It is clear that this was something very new to them, they are not use to and do not like offerring customer service in a public forum. However the golden rule is if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about. It seems clear that If Vahinkovakuuts do have something to hide and they certainly do not want to share it on social media.  least in my eyes they have performed poorly.

See my final response to this and the summary of the entire conversation.

End of Day Summary Day 10

If Vahinkovakuutus Refuse to Give me Straight Answers

Well it has been another increasingly frustrating day. Yesterday i posted a request to If vahinkovakuutus to just answer my questions directly. I am tired of fighting with them. I have clearly outlined my argument and so have they. As such i posted some clear questions for them to answer.

Well their response to this was something a politician would have been proud of.

They totally avoided the questions and as such i reposted requesting clear answers to those questions. See below.

View the thread here

If Insurance have blocked me from their other regional Facebook Pages (see post here)

Nicely done and really in the spirit of social CRM. If you are just making your self look stupid. Nothing offensive was placed there and nothing critical of If. Yet again If vahinkovakuutus are trying to control social media as if they owned it and it was their own website. When will they learn social media etiquette states that you should not try and control the conversation especially when there none offensive content.

Interestingly i need to add an update. I am now unblocked and can post again. Is this a response to the above post?

I Finally Published the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Post (click here)

I promised to write a post about SEO for blogger blogs in particular for some time and now i have finally done it. I wish that i had known all of this information before i began but at least now i think i have fairly good SEO as my blog is appearing on the first page of google searches for the keywords i wanted.

I seem to have noticed a slight backlash against my strategy. (see post)

It seems that If vahinkovakuutus have experienced an increase in postive feedback on their Facebook page. Was this as a response to my own behaviour. I take a look at this possibility from a cultural perspective and consider that it may be a response to me being a foreigner and a defnsive position taken as they feel that i may be atacking Finland as a whole.

I have expanded my use of social media again

I have now posted on to If's competitors social media walls and referenced my story by stating

"aren't you glad you are not an If customer". Op-Pohjola coincidently liked my post.

Op Pohjola's Facebook Page Wall

If Vahinkovakuutus have blocked me!

How is this for nice customer service and PR. In terms of social engagement If vahinkovakuutus have again failed.

This time it is not If Finland who are necessarily at fault. I have been blocked from using the other If regional facebook groups.

As i mentioned in a previous post i have been using If vahinkovakuutus's own social media as a piggybacking strategy and tool against them. This could have actually been beneficial to them if they had not lost the opportunity that i originally highlighted to them in the start of this story.

As i mentioned in the social media as a piggybacking strategy post i would later reveal how succesful this was. Well during the first day i did notice an increase in traffic from Latvia, Lithunia and Norway in particular but interestingly not from Sweden.

This was short lived however. Today for interest sake i decided to take a look to see if those original links i had put to link to my blog were still there.

Original Post added to If Insurance Swedens Facebook Group

As you can i see i did not put anything offensive or derogatory i just asked simply would you be interested in seeing what is going on in Finland?

Well it seems that this is enough for If Vahinkovakuutus to block me from their other Facebook groups. Well that is a nice engagement strategy. Granted it is not nice for those areas and they were just trying to protect their own customer base but i think that this goes against the principles of Social CRM.  Also i believe that this also fuels the negative perception of If as a whole. I did not attack them i did not criticise them on their own social media i just tried to engage them. I only posted once on those Facebookg groups.

Once again nicely played If Vahinkovakuutus. You are showing the world that your social media strategy, social engagement and customer service suck.

In a response to this i have today mentioned politely the existence of this blog on If vahinkovakuutus's competitor's Facebook groups such as Tapiola and Pohjola. They cannot control that media :-)



Visit Tapiola's Facebook Group

If Vahinkovakutus Must be bloody stupid!

Well yesterday i posted my questions to If vahinkovakutus.

See Post

Well they answered and i am sooo bloody annoyed by them it is like they were damned politicians. What kind of response is this!!!

I am very quickly getting very tired of If. There is no reasoning with them . I HATE INSURANCE COMPANIES!!!!!!

Yesterday i decided that i wanted to end this as i am just so tired of fighting what ultimately seems to be a losing battle. IF vahinkovakuutus just answer the questions so i can finish the damn story!!!

Well the tide seems to be turning

Well today i noticed for the first time that there seems to be a new pattern emerging of people publishing their success stories onto If vahinkovakuutus's wall. This has happenned a few times now but it seems to have increased in response to my actions.

Well this may mean that i have alienated my audience to the point where they themselves want to actively defend If vahinkovakuutus. Or if have been very clever and carried out their own counter campaign?

Why would the Finns turn agains me? I have not only been trying to overturn my claim decision but have also tried to get if to change their own terms and policies so as to protect other customers. It seems to me if anything they should be getting behind me.

Well i think again there are factors at play outside of my control. This is namely the Finnish culture. Finns are very patriotic and truely believe in all things Finnish and Finland. Finland is the golden land. BTW that is why when Finns leave for foreign jobs they often say they are never coming back ;-)

Anyway with the rise of  the True Finns political party and the increasing resistance to immigration of foreigners to Finland by the native population there has also been a clear switch of national attention to multiculturalism in Finland generally.

Well as a foreigner in Finland it may very well be that i have singled myself out as someone who goes against the tide, is not afraid to question and try something different. Also as a foreigner in Finland and with the sentiment to foreigners in this country i myself may have managed to portray myself actually as the bad guy in this story. Finns unite against the foreigner?

You may think this silly but it is probably true at least to some degree. I have encountered this so many times here almost to the point of stupidity.

In Finland there is a common dreaded word by all "putkiremontti". Basically it is when your appartment needs to be rennovated and have all the drains, water and often electricity replaced. This is usually carried out through all apparments simultaneously. Finland runs all its appartment buildings as independent companies that are run as democracies so when this happens there is a vote on the subject.

Well having been through this experience this is my story of Finns and Finland. At our housing company meeting we were presented with a proposal by the chairman's friend to do the work for an absolutely obsorbitant fee. I stood up and said that this was an absolute joke as the appartment building next door had paid half as much and that this was clearly a ploy to help the chairmans mate out. An old lady turned around and said to me "he does this work all the time, i am sure he knows what he is talking about, you should listen to him". The vote was passed and we paid double the price we should have.

Finns are very trusting, they do not like people who question, go against the tide, try something different or are of foreign origin. Unfortunately in this situation i am the entire wammy and as such perhaps have come in for a backlash from the Finns in spite of the rational argument that actually would benefit them if I am succesful.
However this would require a degree of empathy something that in my personal experience Finns are not good at.

If you are a Finn and are reading this you may not like what i am saying but consider this, what has happenned to me as a foreigner to actually make me think this way? We are formed by our experiences. We do not arrive with this impression of Finland it is programmed into us.

How to: SEO for your Blogger Blog

So finally as promised a post about SEO for Blogs. Well firstly why is SEO important for not only my blog but your blog.

SEO means search engine optimisation and basically means that you optimise your blog so that, among other things your blog will appear higher in search results for search engines such as google, yahoo and bing.

However this is not the whole story, as i mentioned in my previous post this will also have an influence upon the type of advertisements your visitors are presented with.

In any case without search engine optimisation it at least makes it very difficult for your audience to find you. This in turn means that there are an awful lot of quality blogs out there that have fallen between the cracks and simply for most people do not exist.

Basically there are two sides to this coin. What you can do on your site-blog and what offsite strategies can be employed.

Onsite- Within your blog

The first thing to think about is your audience. Who do you want to attract to your site, what kind of search words do you want them to be able to find your blog with. With this in mind you need to.

1. Use your most important search words in the naming of your blog. If you already have your URL and do not want to change it then at least change the title as it appears on your blog.
2. Write a description (header) for your blog that describes the content and uses again more of your keywords.
3. Ensure you have enough content. The more content that you have on your topic the better.
4. Use the labels of your posts to also reference your keywords.
5. Not only thnik about volumes of content but also good content on a subject people are interested in. Volumes of traffic will affect your ranking.
6. Recent content needs to be added so as to keep the blog fresh and alive in the eyes of the search engines. See point 15 also.
7. Try and use your keywords in Headings of your articles and in their URL's
8. Use alt tags on your images. See how 
9. Use heading tags also See how
10. Site design. Obivously a nice looking site will work for your users but it also helps those little robots that search engines send to index your site. Avoid deadlinks especially and try and interlink the content on your blog. This will not only help your visitors navigate but also those little pesky robots.
11. Write optimal length posts at least 250 words.
12. Don't duplicate blog content in multiple posts.
13. Outgoing links. By Adding links to sources outside of your blog that is relevant to your content then this should also help your blog appear higher in search results although exactly how effective this is is often debated.
14. Add a sitemap to your blog. This is nice actually for your users and may/maynot help with SEO but here is the solution i employed. See here. You just need to create a page and paste in the HTML from the linked blog. This is the easiest solution that i could find in the blogosphere.
15. Ping. Use tools such as Pingomatic to tell those little robots to come and take a look what is going on. Also add your blog to google's blog search. See also offsite SEO.
16. Submit your site to be indexed from google webmaster tool site submit.
17. Add a sitemap under google webmaster tools simply sign in with your blogger account and go to sitemap as shown in the below image. All blogger blogs have a predefined sitemap that automatically updates. To add yours simply add rss.xml to the url of your blog home page. This is effectively your rss feed and not really a site map but it will allow google to index it. 

Offsite SEO.

In this respect quite honestly there is not so much that you can do. This is because you cannot control this yourself for the most part.

One of the main factors affecting this are offsite links that direct to your blog. There are some services where you can buy these but i would not recommend that as it requires spending money and also there has been a crackdonw on this practice by search engines in recent times.

However one free way to generate these links is by having your blog listed in various blog directories. This also has the added benefit of being able to garner yout blog a little extra traffic from these services. For the most part adding your blog is free to these services but quite often these services require a reciprical link back to their service to be added to your blog. I have added a page simply called blog directories where i have added these links. Some services will offer you a specific code snippet or button code that you can simply paste into the HTML of the page of your reciprical link location. Click this once to let the services know that you have added the link. Others will just require the location of your link and they presumably check this manually later.

In any case adding your blogs to these directories may take some time for the directories to process so start as soon as you have enough content that they will agreee to add your blog. I would recommend at least 10-15 posts to start with.

Almost all of these services ask for a description of the blog and meta key words so i would recommend spending some time thinking about this. Save this into notepad or word so you can simply cut and paste it in each time. If you don't do this, it will very quickly become annoying if you are trying to add your blog to many directories in one session.

Here is a list of blog directories available on the web. This should keep you occupied for quite some time ;-)

Well that is about it. And Just to prove it works here is what i managed to achieve using these techniques. I managed to get my blog to appear second in googles search results for "IF Vakuutus" (if insurance in Finnish) second only after If's own Finnish site even though none of my content was in Finnish.

Adoption of Twitter in the Insurance Industry in Finland

As part of this story i first attempted to engage If vakuutus through Twitter. I discovered that If vahinkovakuutus had no twits and only a few followers and did not follow anyone except their Norwegian counterparts.

You can read more about If' Vahinkovakuutus's social media performance via the blog Post If Vahinkovakutus Social Marketing vs If Sweden Social Marketing.

In any case i decided to have a look at whether or not this pattern was reflected by other insurance companies in Finland.

So in short i took a look at the above. Finnish insurance company's presence on Twitter.

Good news, they were there!!! but..........

Pohjola

Well enough said a big company in Finland. There is no description, the default image, no following, only a few followers, not even a link to the website, no tweets. Well there was not any other. My Evaluation is POOR

Well enough said another large insurance provider in Finland. There is no description, the default image, no following, only a few followers, not even a link to the website, no tweets.  Well there was not any other. My Evaluation is POOR

I have never heard of this company but they seem to have at least added their website and a description but that is about it. Strategy seems simply to drive people to their site not to engage them via social media. Performance is also POOR

Maybe the largest insurance provider in Finland. Well just the same as the others sadly, no content, no following, no followers. Performance can only be described as POOR.

Well If vahinkovakuutus are the only insurance company i have heard of to have a link to their website at least. They also have the most followers but that is artificially high as i have drawn attention to thi sprofile through my actions. It was about 12 followers when i started. There are no twits and not even a description. They only follower their Norwegian colleagues. Performance is POOR.

 So what can be surmised from this. Well it is clear that Insurance companies in Finland have not understood Twitter. For the most part they see it as their own channel to drive traffic to their website which concidently is such a turn of the century strategy. They have not even tried to push out their own marketing content. BTW another prehistoric strategy. This indicates to me that they clearly and simply,

1. Insurance companies in Finland Do Not Get Twitter
2. Insurance companies in Finland do not have Twitter in any real social media strategy
3. Insurance companies have not attempted to engage customers through Twitter in Finland
4. Insurance companies in Finland are behind the rest of the world.

But Why?

Why would Insurance companies in Finland not be present actively here in this media?

Insurance companies in Finland do not value Twitter as a marketing and engagement channel.

But Why?

Well from my own experience during this experiment and when i consider my own twitter followers related to this experiement i see a trand.

Of the followers i have only around 5-10% of them are from Finland. This suggest that even though the content of this experiement was targeted at Finnish people in Finland, they did not follow me as often as people from other countries. Of course language may be a factor here but let's consider the average Twitter user.

The average Twitter user is under 40. In Finland pretty much everyone under this age can speak English despite what they may think themselves. Finns are pretty bashful when asked "can you speak English?" The usual answer is a little but then you proceed to have a fluent conversatipon.

In anycase we are left with the situation where perhaps the level of adoption of Twitter is low by both the companies and the population as a whole. In this case i will not enter into the "which came first the chicken or the egg" type conversation but will simply state that, perhaps Finlands reputation as an early adopter and innovator of new technologies is not justified based upon the populations behaviour regarding Twitter. Or perhaps it is just that Finns are not that "social" which is something that does fit the sterotype of a typical Finn.

Who knows why, but the pattern is clear and i believe is indicative of many Finnish companies performance regarding social media and Social CRM and in part explains If Vahinkovakuutus's slow and not very "customer orientated" response to my own Social Media Experiment.

Can you please just answer the questions

As i mentioned in my previous post i have strated to think that my own ROI is getting a little bit out of hand with this project. As such i have moved away from the original facebook thread and have started another as a summary of that thread.

In short i summarised the argument by cutting and pasting the relevant parts of the thread into a more coherrent conversation. All parts of the image below themselves were images and no text content has been edited or changed. The text that is shown below is as it was originally written by the party. I even included my spelling mistakes.

I have added this to the top of If's wall. I have asked them simply.

I added the following as a comment below the main image. In the new thread.

I hope that this will now bring this to an end quickly, whatever that end may be. I do not want this to consume anymore of my own resources and time. Both side of the argument have been out forward so let's see what If vahinkovakuutus think. View their answers here.

Daily Summary 8 and 9. Sorry i have been away.

Hi there faithful followers, sorry i have not been so active over the weekend. Let me explain,

When i started this endeavour i thought that if i could attract a lot of traffic to my blog i would be able to put alot of pressure onto If Vahinkovakuutus to conform to my wishes and agree to my terms.

I have been pretty happy with the amount of traffic i had generated regarding this story however to generate that amount of traffic did require an awful lot of effort and most importantly time.

This does not include only writing these posts and tweeting that they are out there. I have been spending an awful lot of time thinking about SEO and adding my blog to various blog directories (i will write about SEO for blogs when i get a chance). This is work that as a visitor is going on behind the scenes and requires a lot of effort.

Well in short the ammount of time i was spending on this especially in the evenings started to really affect my own personal home life and started to really annoy my girlfriend even though what i was attempting was in both of our interest.

In earlier posts i wrote about what was the ROI on this endeavour for If Vahinkovakuutus. Perhaps i should have thought about what is the ROI on this for me personally. Yes i have learned alot by doing about social engagement, yes i have been able to engage If vahinkovakuuts publically and have managed to cause them public embarassment and pain but at what price. Even if i was able to change If' vahinkovakuutus's policies and protect their other customers from having this experience. Even if i was able to get If vahinkovakuutus to agree to pay my costs caused by their miscommunication then this would still have been a huge layout in terms of my personal time and my own ROI. I guess then that this has made me an activist. I have never thought as myself as one before but i guess when you fight for something for the good of others way above your own personal good then this makes you an activist.

I guess in my naivity i thought that having read a lot of stories about how social media can go viral and spread and grow at unbelievable rates. I had thought that this would have happenned also to my story. I had thought that if i could trigger this kind of viral spreading then the resolution i was looking for with If vahinkovakuutus quickly and due to popular demand. Well as this has not happenned and i have not been able to engineer this then i will no longer spend a large part of my day attempting to do so.

However i have established a steady daily traffic of visits from people who are interested in this story so i can continue this endeavour by adding content here and finishing the story.

In any case, in this blog,  If vahinkovakuutus will have a permanent record of how this customer service story was handled and long after i have stopped and this story ends there will be a constant reminder to If vahinkovakuutus and to anyone who finds this story that something was tried that as far as i can see was never tried before and that it may even have been succesful.

Why Excellent Customer Service is Essential in the Insurance Industry

When we think of most companies they sell physical products and when i think back to my school day Geography classes something that we were drilled with then were the three main industry types, Primary (mining in particular), Secondary (manufacturing), Tertiary (Selling consumer products and the service industry).

Well for most of us as consuners we only ever have contact with the tertiary industry as part of our daily private lives.We buy, we use and we experience.

Most companies sell physical products. If i buy a TV i watch it, i use it, i experience it on a regular basis. The buying experience is a very small part of the overall equation and user experience. The products is used everyday or at least on a regular basis. For the most part, the manufacturer or the provider of the product is not involved in this at all. The only time that they may become involved is when something goes wrong. In many cases though this is the responsibility of the retailer to handle the end customers service request.  As such for Sony or Samsung or LG the most important thing is the daily function and performance of the product and not so much the customer service.

If we think about the service industry such as a reastaurant they are selling a produc,t the food but, also an experience which is strongly affected by imeasurable factors such as ambience or atmosphere in the restaurant. The customers themselves contribute to this. However the company are able to nurture this in the design of the restaurant and most importantly the customer service they offer. People come back to restuarants because of the experience. The product i.e. the food, the ambience and the customer service. In this case all three are important.

This brings us to the Insurance industry. Despite what they like to think they do not sell products. The policies and the insurances you purchase are not products in themselves. They are not physical they are not affected by ambience. What insurance companies sell is piece of mind. You know, believe and trust that when something goes wrong they are there for you.

In If vahinkovakuutus's slogan they state "don't worry, we help". This is the core of what they do.

Unlike in the other industries there needs to be trust for the "product to work". Without trust there is no product and no customers.

As a customer you only ever really experience your product personally when something goes wrong. Day to day you experience the insurance product simply as piece of mind. Why else would you contact the insurance company. As such the essence of what an insurance company does and when you experience their product is when you need to test that piece of mind. As such as an insurance company it is essential that this is recognised and that the absolute most effective service for the customer is provided. In order to serve their customers an insurance company should focus their resources on customer service and supplying the customer with a superb experience.

When a customer approaches an insurance company it is when something bad has happenned to them personnally. This is a very personal and often painful and stressful time for them. They need help and for them they are experiencing some kind of emergency. Granted this iswith differing degrees of scale. Someone has died, their house has had fire damage, they are stranded abroad or ar sick or injured or they have had a road accident. These are incredibly stresful and worrying times for a customer and this is when they NEED a very professional, accurate, caring and personal service experience to help ease their pain and certainly not to add to it.

Well here are some facts about If vahinkovakuutus's customer service.

1. You cannot get face to face service related to claims in an If Vahinkvakuutus office. In Finland (You can in Denmark)
2. If offices in Finland only sell insurance. At least o me this indicates they care more about sales than service.
3. When you call If's emergency number representative you may be speaking to a third party (Elisa)who do not know If's policies and can cannot give you accurate information even about whether or not you are covered.

Think about it when you have a car accident, if someone dies or gets injured or your house burns down. In these most important situations.

Do you not want to be able to speak to someone personally face to face, would this help you?
Don't you want to know that the information you receive is accurate and correct and you can act upon it.

This is the essence of experiencing the insurance product and as such,

An insurance company's product can be measured by their customer service experience. In fact NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.

When you do not get this you may find that you have been sold "piece of mind" but with this kind of service you may get home and discover that your television box is full of rocks or your restaurant food has come straight out of a garbage can.

Without a great customer service experience can you really trust an insurance company?

So as to help IF improve their customer service experience this is what i have asked for.

Read the full thread

Let me/If vahinkovkuutus know what you think. Post here or on their own wall.

If Vahinkovakuutus Respond: Sorry NO you Cannot Control Social Media

Well If Vahinkovakuutus have replied again and i think this time it seems even clearer to me that If vahinkovakuutus do not really understand the purpose of social media other than THEIR OWN marketing channel. Sorry Facebook is a forum and you cannot control it. It is not your website where you can control it.

You may have initiated the conversation but you are just a contributor! Here is their and my response.

What do you think? Feel free to post your comments on IF Vakuutusyhtiö's wall or here, wherever is appropriate for you!

If Vahinkovakuutus Story End of Day 7 Summary

Well End of Day 7 and sorry for not posting this last night as i had a cray day yesterday and the blog had to take a back seat so that i could actually spend some time with my girlfriend.

So the main thing today has to definitely be that after two days away If vainkovakuutus have re-engaged me. I wonder why this is. Did they realise i would not just go away? Where they thinking about what to say? Did they get annoyed by my action and decide to re-enter the forum. I guess i will never know.

Well i will post the discussion from yesterday here again and let you decide for youselves how to interpret it. My thoughts are discussed in this post.

I especially like my link to how to deal with upset customers on social media.

That made me smile ;-) Here is that link for anyone who is interested.

In other News.

I am sorry but i did add advertisements to my blog. I am sorry if this annoys you but the purpose is not to profit but to present viewers with advertisements related to the blog such as insurance offers from providers other than if (although i did see one If advert appearing yesterday). You can read the entire story from this post.

As for the other time i could spend on the blog yesterday i have spent it trying to SEO (Search Engine optimise my blog) i.e. make it appear higher in search results and also have google index it in a more accurate way so as more insurace adverts will appear on the site. Man is this a time consuming endeavour and frankyl i am not sure that it is worth it in terms of hours spent agains benefit especially for a blog that is not going to be active forever. BTW this blog will end with the story i you had not guessed that already. Of course the existing content will still be there though. I will write a post about SEO later when i get a chance.

Well that is all for now. Keep reading and feel free to comment whether you agree, disagree or are impartial this is a totally open forum.

Using Advertising as a customer empowerment strategy.

Some of you may have noticed that i have this morning added advertisements to the blog.

As a first impression you will probably think i am trying to profit from this endeavour and social media experiment. Although i must admit that would be nice, we all dream of being millionaires ;-)

Unfortunately I don't think it is going to happen. Just to be clear profiting from this endeavour is not the goal of the experiement.

See below.

I think that you can see from the above that this is not a profitability strategy.

As such why would i add advertisements to the blog?

There are a couple of reasons for this. Partly i am curious and want to learn what this is all about and how it works but also and more importantly as alot of you have seen Google have changed their privacy policy recently. The idea of which is basically so that they can target you more accurately with advertising.

Now as i understand it the advertisements that will appear on the site are going to be targeted at visitors based upon their previous history of searching google, other web behaviour, their referring source destination to the blog and the way in which the site has been indexed by Google themselves. In this way google adsense should target visitors with relevant advertisements.

This is something that companies of course have been doing for years and i have seen already that If Vakuutus are doing this themselves. As such the question is.

Can I use existing advertising in the Insurance Industry to apply additional pressure to If Vakuutus? 

What i mean with this is,

Wouldn't it be great if one of my site visitors upon landing on the site was presented with a Tapiola or Pohjola advertisement to take insurance from them. As i am getting alot of traffic from If's own facebook pages. I am able to effectively place advertisements specifically for If's own customers or stakeholders. I am sure that If vakuutus in particular would not like that there own customers are firstly visiting my blog but then also being presented with advertisements for their competitors products.

Imaging what would happen if If vakuutus started to lose customers as a result of this advertising. In this experiement this has much more value as a pressure tactic than a profitability technique.

With this in mind how can i influence which advertisements are being presented on My blog? See my later post regarding SEO (search engine optimisation) and Google's affiliate network.

Let me know how succesful i am, let me know are you getting insurance ads? Once again i will update you as to how this pans out later.

If Vakuutus have re-engaged me!

Well thank you If vakuutus. I had almost given up on you. After two days since their last response i have had a new response from them. I do not know really why they have chosen to re-engage me, you would have to ask them, but i am grateful as it means i can still believe in them.

I have been a little critical of their approach in my blog and i have also adopted a strategy of interference on their own Facebook group. I have also added content to If Insurance's other local Facebook groups in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Latvia. Perhaps this has influenced them? Or perhaps it is the growing influence of this blog?

In any case this is what they have to say.

View the entire conversation on Facebook

I think this is quite self explanatory they have agreed to my earlier request to review my feedback which is positive and indicates that they are listening. They are still refusing to settle the claim or reimburse me for the additional costs that i incurred caused by their mis-communication.

Most importantly though now that they have implied that they are considering my feedback it means that perhaps we can actually help protect the other If vakuutus customers from this happenning to them again in the future.

I think that this is the biggest measurement of success of this experiment and if we can achieve that then i will be extraordinarily happy. We will have proved that customers engagin through social media can influence a company so as to change their behaviour. Also from If vakuutus's point of view it will mean that they can still sell and spin this as a success story for themselves. I am once again optimistic and hoping that If will live up to my expectations.

For those who cannot remember my original demands here they are. You can access the entire thread from here.

View the entire thread on facebook

Well amazingly i have now had another response from If Vakuutus. Correct me if i am wrong but i think that this is the first time this has happenned. Here is the new post from If Vakuutus and my own response.

View the thread on Facebook

To be fair If vakuutus are being pretty apologetic but they still refuse to act in terms of settling the claim. However they do seem to be showing some movement in their attitude to re-evaluating their customer support practices which is part of what i want to hear.

I would also like to hear about the request that i made for If Vakuutus to change their terms and conditions so that If vakuutus are responsible for customer costs resulting from their incorrect or misleading information and not their customer.

BTW i should state that the requested phone call conversation was held entirely in Finnish between If and my Finnish girlfriend. We wanted to make sure there was no miscommunication as the phone call was very important to us. I am of course English so thought it was better if the conversation took place between native Finnish speakers. Shame If were not so dilligent in ensuring the competency of their 24hr emergency service number.

Let's see where If Vakuutus go from here. It seems to me that they are trying but without action they are just digging a hole for themselves.

End of Day Summary Day 6: Still no word from IF Vakuutus

Well as i posted earlier today the main news has been that IF vakuutus seem to have stopped communicating and engaging me. They still have not answered my requests and it is still sitting on their facebook wall.

If Vakuutus's Wall Comment

Read the full thread

Today i wrote about this as IF vakuutus's lost opportunity. This was based upon what i wrote as IF vakuutus's opportunity in the first post on the subject when the blog began.These are fast becoming the most popular posts on the blog.

I have not toally given up on If yet and hope that they choose to engage me tomorrow.

Development of Strategy

Well some of you may have noticed i have learned and have improved the look of the blog by adding more user friendly buttons from addthis.com the advantage of which are they are nicer for you and will give me some better statistics about their use and traffic generated from them. I can recommend this to others as they are really easy to use and setup.

If you are visiting this blog from Sweden, Norway, Denmark or Latvia then you probably arrived here from If's Facebook group pages in those countries so welcome to you.

I am not going to try and damage these If country's reputations or either try to interfere with their marketing as i am not their customer and i am not attempting to engage them directly. Comments from them are of course welcome also.

I have posted on these pages as i think that people visiting those pages may have an interest in seeing what is going on on If Finlands pages. Below  is what i posted onto If Swedens Facebook wall.

View If Sweden's Facebook wall

Actually i just noticed they removed my If Sweden vs If Vakuutus Finland post. That is ok i do not mind. I wont put it back. Interesting they left the other post though.

I have also expanded my own use of social media channels to include my own YouTube channel Unfortunately i have not uploaded any rant videos directed at If Vakuutus Finland like the one i have previously posted here on the blog. but i am linking to If Finlands own YouTube advertisements where i now also have a presence. People can link to the blog via that media also.

I describe this type of content as a "Piggyback" Strategy as described in my earlier post today.

You are probably thinking about what i will do if If continue not to engage me. I will keep that under my hat for now but i think it is doing them more damage than good as described in the previous post today.

In terms of attracting interest it has been another record day on the blog today and again we have increased the twitter followers substantially and again have been replublished several times. Thanks to everyone contributing. You know who you are (i try to twit everyone to thank them, sorry if i missed anyone).

BTW i read a great blog today about how not to engage your upset customers via social media. So i will end with this. Seems that If broke most of these rules. Stay tuned! I have added this link to the relevant links section at the bottom of the post.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/10-ways-to-deal-with-upset-customers-using-social-media/

Piggybacking as a Social Media Strategy

In this experiment i have discovered that the best way to get reliable traffic volumes to my blog has been through two main channels.

1. Gaining regular twitter followers who regularly visit the blog as well as promoting it.
2. Piggybacking on If' vakuutus's own social media.

By placing my story directly onto If vakuutus's facebook wall i have managed to get a lot of traffic of theirs to visit my blog. This is great in this situation because i have been able to really get attention of people who actually care about If insurance, what they do and their practices.
These are actually the most valuable visitors to the blog (sorry to my faithful twitter followers). The reason for this is that If actually care about those people they are their customers, employees and shareholders primarily. They are not so worried about a social media nerd (such as myself) sat at a computer, in his mother's basement in the back end of nowhere, Dakota USA.  Sorry anyone fitting that description ;-)

As such as this has been such a succesful channel for me to gain attention and to steal and gain support of real If vakuutus's own followers. I have now expanded the use of this to other social media channels utilised by If.

If vakuutus's Youtube channel

I am now present on If vakuutus's youtube channel and all Finnish If videos. People who look at those comments can access my blog.

I have also set up my own Youtube channel as a distribution channel from If vakuutus's own video content to my blog.

There are a couple of problems with doing this on YouTube. Unlike on the If's facebook group it is difficult for me to add my own valuable content. Some of the videos do not allow your comments to incude links so people must first click your profile to get to your channel and then to the blog.

The second problem is that for the most part If vakuutus embed the videos from YouTube into their own pages. In this way the comments are not visible unless the site visitor clicks through to YouTube.

As such this is not a particularly good channel for generating traffic to my own social media but it is still a valid channel for interfering with If's marketing message and an annoyance to If vakuutus themselves.

Other If Vakuutus Facebook Groups

As i mentioned in my "Fun Post" If Finland Vs If Sweden the Finns are fiercely competitive with the Swedes. As such i have added to the Swedish If group the following.

Click to Visit If Swedens Facebook Group

Previously there has not been much traffic from Sweden so it will be interesting to see what happens now.

I am now also on If Insurance Denmark's, If Norway's and If Insurance Latvia's Facebook group pages.

I will update you if this pattern changes in a later post.

A Bit of Fun: IF Vakuutus Finland vs IF Insurance Sweden

One thing about the Finns is their love hate relationship with Sweden. For a long period of it's history Finland was ruled by Sweden and of course this explains alot.

Like England and Germany's relationship this is usually most apparent on the sports field and being Scandanavia most importantly on the ice hockey rink. To summarise that relationship so far.

World Champiosnships                                                   Olympics (Gold, Silver Bronze, Total)

Finland 2,6,3,    Total Medals 11                                       0,2,3,     Total Medals 5
Sweden 8,17,15 Total Medals 40                                       2,2,4      Total Medals 8

The Finns wont like that at all but it is the truth. However nicely for the Finns in the world championship victories they did beat the Swedes which adds extra satisfaction!

Coincidently

Britain World Championships Ice Hockey 1,1,1, Total 3 Medals!! Amazing don't have a clue how that is possible.

In terms of love for the Swedes

This is most apparent in the amount of interest here in the Swedish royal family. Especially since the baby arrived.

Ok so the Match UP is IF Vakuutus Finland Online Marketing Vs IF Insurance Sweden Online Marketing

Finland and Sweden are countries of roughly the same size population (a couple of million difference) so the numbers can be interpretted in that way.

YouTube Performance

If Insurance have both a Swedish and Finnish advert. Both are identical except the language. See my Youtube channel for all the content described here.

The current one contains a girl getting out of the pool. Both of these adverts have approximately the same numebr of views and in fact Finland is slightly winning that competition. As such we need a tiebreaker.

Lets take a look at a slightly older advert. Their "Toy Shop advert" also on YouTube of course.

Swedish Advert views 3 756
Finnish Advert views just over 1 169

In this case there is a marked difference. Why?
The swedes applied a trick which worked amazingly well. They uploaded a video of the advert but also with info about how they made it. In the video the toy shop is destroyed and they explain how they did it.

Swedish: how the advert was made advert 73 576 views.

This is amazing they managed to get people to watch the whole advert first (nice one) and then they got to see how it was made. This undoubtedly is a big reason why the Swedes out performed the Finns. Why didn't Finland copy this? They usually do.

If Insurance Sweden win Youtube contest hands down

Twitter

Swedish Twitter 239 Tweets 135 Followers
Finnish Twitter 0 Tweets 27 followers including me (it was about 12 when i started)

Enough said If Vakuutus Finland have not adapted to twitter at all.

IF Insurance Sweden win Twitter competition hands down.

Facebook

In this one group membership is roughly equal.

Finland 5051 members 224 Talking about
Sweden 6504 members 169 Taling about

Finland win talking about, Sweden win membership (Did i affect this?)

Facebook Result Score Draw

LinkedIn

Well only IF Sweden have a profile that i could find so it can only go one way.

IF Insruance Sweden win the LinkedIn Competition.

Final Score

I Insurance Sweden Social Marketing 3 If Vakuutus Finland Social Marketing  0

Epilogue

When groupon came to Finland suddenly there were about 5 copies of the same business idea. That is once the Finns saw it worked.

The large volume of copies of foreign television shows and the lack of original Finnish made shows in Finland is testament to that also. Finns like to copy stuff that works generally and in terms of marketing especially original campaigns and marketing concepts are few and far between.

In my opinion Swedes are much more extravert and this generally leads to a more independent creative environment. Finns are a fairly homogenous population that strives to keep everyone the same. They are more introvert. Finns are not encouraged to be different and are actively encouraged to conform to the norm or to follow the rules i.e. expected norms of behaviour. In this way for professional fields that require creativity, independent thought and looking at and doing things in a different way that may be against the normal way of working, Finns are not culturally suited. This ultimately means they do not excel in fields that require alternative thinking or ways of working outside of the traditional or established means, roles and structures.

IF Vakuutus Seem to have lost their opportunity.

As i mentioned previously If vakuutus had a great opportunity when this case was first started. They could have turned this into a true success story of customer engagement.
However they have chosen not to take that route. Their line is simple this is how it seems to me.

Yes we admitteldy made a mistake but those additional costs you incurred because of our mistake are your problem not ours.

They are sticking to the line that our terms and conditions tell us not to pay when airlines go bankrupt. This is not in question and never was, even though i do not agree with that policy.

There current strategy seems to be: We are not going to talk to you now and hope you go away.

What does this strategy mean for If Vakuutus?

1. IF are not participating in the engagement process this means that they lose all control of the conversation they are unable to defend themselves.
2. IF further dilute their own messaging as i will continue to dirsrupt their own social media marketing channels. They have lost control of their own media.
3. They will continue to incur costs for having to deal with this claim which are actually way above the original costs of the claim.
4. They risk alienating their own customer base themselves through their own actions or inaction in this case.
5. There is day on day damage to their brand image and reputation. The interest in this story is growing day on day.

This is a very nice strategy well done ;-)

What does this strategy say about If Vakuutus?

1. They do not care that their customers have to pay for their mistakes. That is a nice message to send out. They are also promoting this message themselves on their own social media by not responding to the claim.
2. They do not think that they have to engage with their customers on social media even on their own Facebook group in particular. That is great Social CRM.
3. They do not see what i am doing as a risk to them. They do not understand the power of social media. I thought Insurance companies were all about risk.
4. They risk being perceived as childish and stubborn. If Vakuutus refuse to even outline their case what else can it say? I am happy to engage them in discussion why are they afraid to do this publically?
5. Do they know what to do? Does their crisis communication strategy include social media channels.

I actually welcome this strategy because it reinforces what i thought about them. They do not care they do not help despite what their slogan says.

End of Day 5 Summary: Where are If Vakuutus?

Ok so it is the end of Day 5 so where are we. Today is a day of two topics. Growth of support and then an absence of input from the other main player the big IF.

Lets start with the BIG IF

Well in the last reply i received from If Vakuutus they seemed to have accepted responsibility but did not want to act upon that. The customer is responsible for their errors apparently. As such this is still waiting and is once again at the top of their facebook group wall. I will not go away. Social media is easy it does not require much effort unlike standing outside their office with a loudspeaker. It also reaches alot more people. If have questions to answer and i want them to answer them publically.

Tomorrow i think i will write a little bit about what i think they are thinking but, for now that is where i will leave it. BTW this is the first week day that If Vakuutus have not responded. Does this mean that they have stopped communicating. Let's see.

Growth of Support

Over the last few days and again continued today we have seen growth in the number of followers. In this experiment i have also been learning by doing and as it is not a normal thing to try and get alot of folllowers quickly (at least for me) then i have done some things that i see are mistakes.

The biggest mistake i have made so far is to assume that if you follow a person they automatically follow you back or at least a large proportion (i am just nice like that). This is total rubbish and may work if you follow one person but when you follow many and have only a few followers you just appear as a "junk follower" it is just as bad as spam mail when you see twits from these people. As such i stopped and stopped following anyone who i didn't know or didn't follow me. You will now see my follows and followers are roughly in balance.

Furthermore to try and help to reach out to people in Finland i have also started to use Finnish language hashtags. One thing that i have learned through email marketing analysis is that people respond much better to content in their own language even though the body of the message may be in another language. Finns are pretty good at English although they often wont admit it so i am not worried on that score especially as those who are active in social media tend to be younger anyway. As such it means that my tweets are often tweeted now with English and Finnish tags.

Well this has meant that today i have now managed to reach 100 followers which i am honestly quite proud of because i have never had 100 followers before :-)

On the blog we have had record traffic today and with the exception of a slight blip on one day where we did not grow (i was not able to spend time at the computer that day and add that much content) we have continued to get more hits day on day.

The traffic is coming from all over the world but mostly Finland roughly 50% (the domestic market so to speak), the UK and the US (English speaking countries and very active with twitter in particular) and then a mixture of countries. We have also appeared on Russian blogs but i cannot read anything there so have no idea what they are talking about.

Today i also for the first time posted some video content. It was quite funny to watch but actually makes a serious point. This is not the first time this has happenned to If Vakuutus. They have been publically humilated and attacked previously and this is one of their videos. There are others.

I would love to hear from the guy in the video to hear his story and how that went. If you are out there make contact. I will look into that and get back to you. Interestingly this video received the most hits on the blog today and the most retweets. Comedy never hurt anyone. It may also have helped that the content was in Finnish though?

To continue with the video discussion, i can also say that i have now made my presence visible on the If Vakuutus YouTube channel where there televesion marketing material is held. They have quite a large push with television and radio advertising in Finland at the mo so check that out if you want to. As i was unable to add links in the comment boxes i have commented as my own YouTube channel which links to the blog and  @IFinsurancetwitter but that is currently being used only as a through channel and i will not actively promote it. You can get to the IF videos from it though if you are interested. I want IF to know that there is nowhere that they can hide in Social Media and if they will not engage me and answer my valid questions on Facebook then i will engage them whereever they are present in the electronic jungle.

Note i am NOT attacking them I am trying to Engage them. I have not bad mouthed or slandered them. I am just trying to bring this conflict to a justified end within a public space. I still want a resolution and my demands are in place so as to protect their other customers with ammendments to their terms and conditions and a review of some of their practices.

They must air their dirty laundry in public even if they do not want to.