Kevin Features in Post Online

Posted in Press on August 29th, 2012 by Stephanie

Early on this month Kevin Taylor was featured in Post Online as he shared his views on social media becoming a helping hand to the insurance industry.

In the article he talks about how insurers could use a prospective customers social media accounts as an aid to risk analysis. As the information has been willingly put on these accounts it is considered legally acceptable to use the information. This could potentially increase a quote price but could also make a quote less expensive if the customer is of a lower risk than expected.

There are many different elements that can be looked at when considering this as an option to help make a more appropriate quote. One way of analysing a person’s risk could be by looking at their friends on public social network profiles and checking the type of language they use. This can reveal some of their attitudes and their behaviour. Insurers would need to find a way of contextualising their findings, and would need to decide whether status updates made far in the past should be considered.

Another aspect Kevin talks about is the use of telematics and social media side by side. The telematics will tell you when a person is driving and the social media sites will tell you if they are tweeting or updating their status while still in the car.

By customers constantly updating their profiles on their location this could influence the price of a home insurance quote as a home with no one in it, that is constantly advertised, is appealing to thieves. Therefore this increases the risk of a claim on a home insurance policy and in turn a higher quote.

Kevin says, “There is no doubting that social media and evolving technology are opening new doors to help insurer’s judge risk and drive profitability.”

If you have a post online membership you can read the full article here.

Figaro Digital Marketing Conference 2012

Posted in Conferences, News, Speaking Engagements on July 16th, 2012 by Steve

Last Thursday the Gravytrain team were in full force at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference. With hundreds of digital marketers all converging on one place, this was one of the biggest conferences of the year and one not to be missed. We certainly enjoyed the day, whilst the after party drinks were an added bonus!

The conference was packed full with talks from a wide range of the industry’s professionals, both agency side and client side, while the conference also included the fabled Figaro21’s – this is where a series of speakers rattle through 21 slides, each of which last just 21 seconds. It’s an intense struggle against time and it makes for very entertaining, yet informative viewing! Billed as the session to make grown adults weep, we nominated our own Head of Search, Matthew Oxley, to kick off the 21’s.

Matthew’s talk detailed the rise of mobile and tablet and how device segmentation is now key for all paid search campaigns. Matthew outlined that by the end of 2013, it is predicted that mobile web usage will actually overtake desktop web usage. Mobile is seemingly dominating our lives more and more as we have a constant need for information and data.

The mobile phone has become such an integral part of our lives and with the addition of the tablet, searching while on the go has become even easier than ever before. So, it is little surprise that mobile web usage will soon surpass desktop web usage.

Furthermore, there were other notable presentations, such as Jack Lundie, from Save the Children, who acted out a conversation with himself. The slick nature of his delivery and creativity of his presentation made for compelling viewing!

Then there was Peter Wood from Steak who deserves a mention simply for his incredible jacket! It sparked quite a response on Twitter…He did give a fantastic presentation too about the merger of SEO and Social Media, what he called “SEOcial”.

With the digital marketing landscape constantly evolving and more digital marketers becoming savvy to the rise of mobile web usage, the overriding theme of this year’s Figaro Conference truly was device segmentation and the importance of it. “Ignore mobile at your peril” was one particular quote that stood out for me!

Day Two of Internet World 2012

Posted in Conferences on April 27th, 2012 by Stephanie

This year is the 20th anniversary of Internet World and as Steve said in the last blog post, Gravytrain are attending for all of the 3 days. Day 2 was mine and Alex’s turn to visit Internet World (on the wettest day of the year, but still worth it!).

Alex and I got the venue and while we drip dried we listened to Markus Fehr from e-Spirit. He talked about integrating CMS and online shopping to an already substantial business that is offline. It was interesting to hear how many businesses are still wary about having an online presence as they feel it may discourage shoppers from their local stores. However, as the world is now largely on the internet, the amounts of visits to local shops are declining and those businesses that don’t have an online presence are realising this.

The next was a talk on email testing. Sean Duffy from Email Center showed us that by using a multivariate testing technique we could see a 45% increase from email marketing. Here we learned that an email testing plan was something to avoid as you need to be dynamic and that each test is a trial and therefore not to worry if the results are negative.

The last talk Alex and I attended, I thought, was the best out of the three. It was hosted by Luca Benini from Europe, Buddy Media. Here he spoke about “The elusive ROI of social media: Tracking connections through sales.” Luca spoke about how actually, the ROI is not elusive. He said that by interacting with consumers, many are drawn away from the customer service phone line and are more inclined to tweet or post, which is a lot cheaper to reply to and therefore, is an instant return on investment from social media. This was one of the points Luca said was a way to measure ROI from social media. The others included: Brand equity, shareholder value, “talkability” for a TV show, Web traffic referrals and sales. He gave an interesting statistic about web traffic referrals that showed more traffic was generated from Facebook to YouTube than from Google to YouTube.

This shows the complete shift in the way people access information and highlights the importance of having a presence on social media sites.

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