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.