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.

Following Someone in the Hope they Follow You Is Not Good!

When i started the Twitter account four days ago i realised that i needed to try and get a lot of support quickly. One of the strategies i employed was to try and follow as many people as i could who i felt would be interested in the story, would support it by following themselves or even retweeting or were members of the Finnish media who may be interested.

If i had taken the time to read other blogs on the subject as i have done now i would have realised then that..

I was totally wrong!!!

All that i have done is reduce my own reputation on Twitter. It really does not look good to follow many more people than follow you. I think of the many people i have followed only a few have started following me.

Social media must be entirely voluntary, for people to follow you you must offer content that is valid for them and let them find it for themselves. All you can do is try and write content people are interested in and make it available to them on their terms. If they find you and want to follow you that is great. If they want to participate for themselves even better.

As such i as a policy will not follow anyone who does not produce content that i am interested in for this experiment or has followed me.

NO MORE JUNK FOLLOWING!! and SORRY

Please bare in mind i am learning as i go as i have never tried this kind of thing before and never had to generate large interest in something quickly.

P.S. let me know what you think about anything i am here to listen also!

Guess i am not the only person disatisfied with If Vahinkovakuutusyhtiö

View this from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjVBdkT_7r0

The more i read about IF the more i realise why i am having to fight this battle. It is clear that i am not the first to try and fight IF.

Channel Performance Analysis

Well after four days i thought i would write something about how succesful the channels that i have been utilising in this endeavour have been.

As a recap the main channels i have created are:

A dedicated Twitter Account @IFinsurance (surprised i was able to get this user name)
A dedicated Facebook Group IF Vakuutus Social Experiment
This blog, no link required ;-)

The pre-existing channels that i am utilising are:

IF's Own Facebook Group. If Vahinkovakuutusyhtiö I am particularly trying to draw attention to mine and If vakuutus's conversation there.

As described earlier i plan to expand upon the utilisisation of If vakuutus's own social media later. Read on to understand why.

Twitter as a Channel

Prior to this experiement i was a Twitter user and had been for a few years. However admittedly i was that kind of user who was just a "follower" i was not a contributor other than the occasional retweet of content i found interesting. In all honesty i think that summarises most Twitter users. I used it as a way of getting up to date info about the things i was interested in, when i wanted it. On twitter there is always something new.

With this in mind i understandably did not have many followers around 50 of mostly people i already knew based upon around 300 tweets of my own (sorry retweets, the occasional tweet from services i had subscribed to and those that i had connected other social media to) Unsuprisingly then that my followers were low.

Just as a quick point i just do not get people who post things like "I just ran 30minutes hard via heia heia" Quite honeslty who cares! I don't even care about what my "real friends are doing". Anyway back to the point.

Well having started the new Twitter account @Ifinsurance for the sole purpose of publising this blog and story i am pleased i have been more succesful. For a while i did ponder if i should carry this out through my own @daniel_miles account but decided against it. I decided to have a campaign specific twitter account for people who just want to follow the story and not my other tweets. I also was afraid that i would annoy some of the followers of my personal Twitter account with the changed content of my account. So having balanced this against the advantage of already having a starting base of followers i decided to start from scratch.

So how has my new Twitter account performed.

Well with Just 100 tweets i managed to gain 75 followers in less than 3days merely by tweeting the story. This is 50% more followers than my personal Twitter account in roughly 1 3rd of the tweets and in 1% of the time. In this sense then i would certainly consider this a success if you were to measure this against my prior performance.

This has well been publisised else where in the blogosphere but Content is King, contributors get more followers! As well as just publising my story i have also tried to add content that may be relevant also to people who simply follow social media. Hence for example this post which has nothing really to do with the story with IF directly.

I have also managed to have the blog republished on other news sites each day. I have been retweeted countless times and have had several @mentions. I have also gained a couple of followers who seem to be pretty closely following me and retweeting a lot of what i tweet thanks for that!!

In this sense it seems i have managed to at least generate some interest among the twitter crowd. Further more by looking at the traffic statistics to the blog i can see that around 45% of the traffic has been coming from the shortened bit.ly type of link which indicates a lot of traffic from Twitter. More about the site traffic in the other sections.

On the whole then i have been pretty happy with Twitter as a channel, well at least based upon my previous experiences.

My Own Facebook Group.

This has been less of a success in terms of gaining members, i am now at 4 :-). I desribed my reasoning behind this in a previous post so won't go into it in too much detail here.

Generally though i felt that facebook groups needed to be known about and were better suited for companies than individuals as a channel to garner support for something.

In any case lookin at the traffic coming into the blog I can see that the top contributor for traffic has been facebook so although the Group has not gained members perhaps it has contributed to traffic. However i believe that the biggest contributor to the referring site was probably If Vakuutus's own Facebook group. See below.

If Vakuutus's Own Facebook Group

In my opinion this has been the best channel to utilise, even more so than Twitter. This is why,

1. By Utilising If vakuutus's own social media and existing following you are able to piggy bag on If vakuutus's own success.
2. By Utilising If vakuutus's own social media you are able to reach out to their own stakeholders. Who else would be on their social media?
3. By having a constant presence there and maintaining your position at the top of their wall you are able to get a regular stream of traffic to your blog and to your story.
4. By placing your content directly to If vakuutus's own facebook wall you are able to disrupt or interfere directly with their marketing messaging, branding and campaigning. This dilutes the power of their own social media as a tool and increases the risk and pressure upon them to act.

40% of Traffic is coming from Facebook and most likely alot of it is coming from If vakuutus's own group page.

The Success of My Own Blog

Well as i tweeted early i have now had more than 1000 visitors to the site so in that respect i am really happy.

The blog has been tweeted and shared directly from the blog in all, around 100 times so roughly 10% of visitors have spread the word further. Of course i cannot really tell how many times outside of my own social media the word has spread. I am sure though that for the 1000 visitors i have had many more have had some contact with the story even though they may not have visited the blog.

Coincidently i would like to know if If vakuutus's own traffic to their Facebook Group page has increased. I did note previously that they got 250 odd new members there after i started. This trend seems to have slowed now though.

Anyway i see the main strengths of the blog as:

1. You can have a media that you can control and tell your own story.
2. You have a single location where you want to drive traffic to (admittedly it is nice to drive traffic to the converation with IF also)
3. If If vakuutus's decide to start boycotting me or deleting my posts from their social media then there is a complete record of the story outside of their control including the Facebook conversation with them. Deleting it does not make it go away. 
4. If vakuutus cannot control this media, they can only contribute. BTW they are free to do so). It would be nice to see them trying to tell their story on my blog.
5. Long after this story is dead people will still be able to find the blog. It will be a constant reminder to If vakuutus of this event. And who knows from time to time it will get retweeted, shared or even posted back on If vakuutus's wall. In this respect If vakuutus particularly should be aware and think how they should act. The degree to which this occurs i feel is dependent upon how If vakuutus react to it postively or negatively.

Summary of Basic Stats to Date (First 4 days)

1. 1100 Blog Vistis
2. Blog republished 4 times in other online news papers (that i know about, i was tweeted to be told)
3. 40% of Traffic from Facebook and mostly likely If Vakuutus's own Facebook group.
4. 45% of Traffic from Twitter or bit.ly type links
5. 10% of Traffic from Direct Links implying they have saved the blog to their favourites
6. 75 New Twitter Followers on the new account (gained 25 on my personal) 150 people following my Twitter media related to this then.
7. Countless retweets and mentions and several avid supporters
8. 45% or so of blog traffic coming from Finland despite the English Language.
9. Only about 10% of Twitter followers are from Finland though interestingly.