Reinsurance Blogger

Guy Carpenter Publishes January 1, 2012 Reinsurance Renewal Report

2012-01-11T16:44:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again, right? The insurance and reinsurance communities scramble to pick up all the information they can about the January 1 reinsurance renewal. Today, Guy Carpenter published its take on the 1/1 renewal season.

Click here to view the Guy Carpenter 1/1 blog post >>

Pyongyang Insurance Conference Highlights

2010-06-09T12:14:00.004-04:00

Okay, you just don't see a headline like that every day! But, it's true (at least according to the Korea Central News Agency). The KCNA doesn't say much about the conference, aside from the fact that it ended "with due ceremony at Yanggakdo International Hotel on Tuesday."

The list of people in attendance is pretty interesting, including representatives from the Kumgang Insurance Company of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (also known as the Chongryon). Ezzat Abdel-Bary, secretary general of the Federation of Afro-Asian Insurers and Reinsurers was there, too, along with Roberto Quinto Martinez, permanent secretariat of the Association of Insurance and Reinsurance in Developing Countries.

As with any insurance conference, there were papers presented and plenty of talking. Marine cargo insurance, claims and adjustment was the hot topic at the Pyongyang International Insurance Seminar, in addition to the "art of adjusting catastrophe claims."

Of course, gifts were brought for the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, as the KCNA duly reported. And, as usual, this warranted its own news story, much to the delight of Cooper Gay, Radohall and Haakon, no doubt.

Here's the KCNA article:

Gifts from British Companies

Pyongyang, June 8 (KCNA) -- General Secretary Kim Jong Il received gifts from the Radohall Ltd. and the Cooper Gay Ltd. of UK.

The gifts were conveyed to an official concerned on Tuesday by

Rafael Miqueleiz, managing director of the Radohall Ltd., and Trevor John Brown, director of the Cooper Gay Ltd., attending the Pyongyang International Insurance Seminar.

Meanwhile, a gift presented to Kim Jong Il by Jacques Aigeldinger, executive vice president of the Haakon Ltd. of Switzerland, was handed over to an official concerned on Monday.

[Photo via Gawker]

Hurricane Forecasts: Common Sense Check

2010-06-08T11:54:00.000-04:00

Nothing makes me need to rush outside and light up quite like mainstream media coverage of the catastrophe bond market ... especially when it's paired with an outsider's view of hurricane predictions. Bloomberg BusinessWeek led with:

As the U.S. enters this year’s hurricane season, the market for catastrophe bonds may face its biggest test since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 brought sales to a six-month standstill.

Shall we see if this adds up? The forecasts cited involve frequency -- not severity. So, we could have a lot of tiny storms and not see cat losses hit attachment points. The specific prediction is:

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts 14 to 23 named storms during this year’s Atlantic hurricane season. The June-through-November period may be “comparable to a number of extremely active seasons since 1995,” and even reach a record, NOAA said.

Meanwhile, this doesn't square with:

“A devastating U.S. hurricane season could be a real crash test for the cat bond market,” said Niklaus Hilti, who helps manage about $2.4 billion of debt as head of insurance-linked strategy at Credit Suisse Group AG. “Cat bonds with their collateralized structure could prove to be a much safer risk transfer for insurers.”

Hilti's correct. The reporter just missed the mark. It only takes one big storm to test the cat bond market. This is a severity issue, not a frequency issue.

[via Bloomberg BusinessWeek, photo by CoreBurn via Flickr]

The Single Secret to Successful Blogging

2010-06-07T14:51:00.000-04:00

If you’re looking to launch a successful blog – or take one you have that isn’t doing much and turn it around – you really need only one little tidbit of info. It isn’t profound, and it will actually make your life easier.

So, here it is:

Good Content + A Lot of Content = A Great Blog

It’s pretty easy to screw this formula up. Why? Because most people read it as:

A Lot of Good Content = A Great Blog

You don’t need a lot of good content – you only need some good content. Having a blog where every post is amazing is like hitting a home run every time you step up to the plate or having your bag come out first every time your plane lands. It would be an incredible way to live … and I’m sure you can ask the Tooth Fairy all about it.

So, instead of living in fantasy land, maximize your potential in the real world. Shoot for one solid blog post a week. It’s the kind of thing you should want to send around to clients, if not drop a press release for it. The other three or four – don’t sweat it. They should represent quality writing and thinking, but they don’t need to change the world.

With this approach, you use the good content to lure readers to your blog and the rest of the content to give them a reason to poke around. Reader retention is based on overall quality, not any single post. And, the “good” posts carry more weight.

Are You Stuck in a Social Media Silo?

2010-05-27T10:08:00.000-04:00

Push, push, push. It's tempting to spend all your time pumping out content and hoping that you'll get social media support from the other reinsurance people in your community. If you want to experience the benefit of others' social labor, you'll have to kick in a little help, too. Retweet people every now and then, or leave a blog comment. To get into the weeds on this issue, check out my post over at Blog-Re.

Insights on Social Media: Treat it Like the Internet

2010-05-26T10:06:00.001-04:00

Are you unsure of how to put social media to work in the reinsurance or insurance business? Even with the information that's coming into the marketplace, it can still be tough to make the leap. If you need a bit more information to help you understand this environment, check out my guest post on SocialTimes on how to go a little "retro" with social media (no, not that kind of retro). Treat social media like regular internet marketing, despite everything claimed by the "experts," and you'll get a lot more out of your environment ... and your investment.

How to Learn from Other Blogs

2010-05-17T01:00:00.004-04:00

If you’re about to get started in corporate blogging, there’s no substitute for getting your hands dirty. You have to learn by doing. Unless you’re an absolute lunatic, willing to commit endless hours to this task, and have a background in blogging and internet marketing, though, there are some things you either won’t learn on your own or won’t pick up for months or years. If you want to make a big marketing splash with your blog, you don’t have that kind of time. Fortunately, you can learn from the people who came before you.
In addition to Reinsurance Blogger, you can take a look at any established blog to see how to get more out of your content and your traffic.
When you check out other blogs (as a learning endeavor), don’t spend too much time on the content (except here, of course). You aren’t trying to learn how to right like TechCrunch or get a scoop like VentureBeat. You want to see how they are using their blogs to retain readers and maximize the value of their efforts. Take a look at the mechanics.
Start with layout. There’s no single right design answer, and some of the debates can reveal religious fervor. I, for example, despise tag clouds. I think they are ugly and can prevent bloggers from tagging thoroughly, which costs you search engine optimization (SEO) results. Yet, some people love them. Look around to see where top stories are featured, whether there’s an integration with Twitter or Facebook and how comments are handled.

Next, take a look at jumps (i.e., the “read more” links). How much content do they show on the front page? Again, practices vary, ranging from only a paragraph to up to 300 words. Some blogs run the entire story on the front page, but I think that’s just awful (it’s ugly and makes headline scanning virtually impossible – and it can cost you some market intelligence).
Finally, take a look at the links within the posts. Some will go to external sites, which you probably won’t do much on a corporate blog, but others will refer back to earlier stories or link to tag searches. This is a great way to invite readers further into your blog.
And, you’re bound to find more. Scan blogs inside and outside the industry – corporate and indy. Get a feel for how these organizations are tuning their blogs for best results. Take the best, and implement them on your own blog.

Manage It All with HootSuite

2010-05-12T01:00:00.002-04:00

One of the toughest aspects of social media marketing is pulling it all together. You have to deal with your blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, maybe Facebook … and whatever else you’re using. That means you’ll have to log in to a handful of sites to post your content, communicate with your target market and measure results. I’ve been dealing with this for a few years now, and it’s a colossal pain. A couple of months ago, I took HootSuite for a spin, and the process has become much, much easier.
HootSuite, which you can access on the web, gives you a single place from which to update our social media environment. You can post to Facebook Walls, Twitter, LinkedIn and WordPress (assuming you use WordPress.com to host your blog, instead of your own servers). The best part is that you can schedule updates. So, if you write all your blog posts a week in advance or more (as you should for a corporate blog), you can load the relevant content into HootSuite (with compressed links) for the other social media environments in which you’ll want it to appear. Then, as posts publish, they’ll appear elsewhere, too.
I’m a big fan of HootSuite, but it does have its drawbacks, specifically around blogging. In addition to only interfacing directly with WordPress.com-hosted blogs, which insurance and reinsurance companies are unlikely to use, you can’t do some of the grunt-level tweaking that you can within WordPress. I prefer to go into WordPress directly to tag, categorize and put together tag links, practice that are good for increasing traffic. But, for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, HootSuite is fantastic.
Oh, and did I mention that it’s free? There is a premium account for people who want more functionality, but I’ve been fine so far without paying a dime.

New WordPress Version Should Be a Corporate Blogger's Dream

2010-05-11T13:57:00.000-04:00

The new features that will be available in WordPress 3.0 have been announced, and I’m more excited than I’ve been in a very long time. This new version looks like it is going to solve some of the biggest frustrations I’ve had with the platform (which is my favorite) as a corporate blogger, including the ability to run multiple websites from one instance (instead of needing to install WordPress three times to run three different blogs) and extended content management capabilities, making it possible to use WordPress for your website and your blog.

Mashable ran a great guest post on the top features coming in WordPress 3.0, and there is a lot of useful stuff in there. For me, the major selling point is multi-site, followed by the extended content management features.

For a major insurance or reinsurance company, you need multi-site. Thinking back to my last full-time gig in the industry, I can imagine the parent company having its own blog, which is effectively an aggregator for the operating companies’ blogs … which implies that each of the operating companies would have a blog.

Now, imaging hosting that all from one central location – and being able to manage all that content to take advantage of cross-linking opportunities across blogs, drive up traffic, get more love from the search engines and cut the cost to produce content because you could share it more easily within the environment. Also, any other blogs you’d have – related to specific products, solutions or issues, for example, could be hosted in this same spot. It’s much easier for the IT guys.

The ability to customize content types means you won’t have to shoehorn everything into a page or a post, giving you a lot more flexibility in how you push content, especially when you’re playing across blogs and traditional websites. The custom taxonomy and new menus help in this regard, as well.

Head over to Mashable to check out the other new features in WordPress 3.0.

The new version of WordPress, which is expected come out this month, is a corporate blogger’s dream. It has everything, it seems, that’s been missing. The only challenge will be migrating to the new environment, which requires some techie stuff (though probably won’t be hard for those in the tech world). The bigger challenge will be around consolidating your blogs (not that anyone’s really running multiples per company yet), as any conversion/consolidation does involve some logistical headaches.

Marketing Implications of a Profitable Twitter

2010-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

Look, I think Twitter’s going to be profitable this year.
Twitter has eight data licensing clients (including Microsoft and Google), and the going rate for access to the “fire hose” (i.e., the full set of data generated) is reported to be “six figures,” which means a minimum of $100,000 a month. Its ad model is off the ground, and the company’s user base has cleared the 100 million mark. I’ve played with the numbers several ways, and it looks like Twitter is going to clear its annual expenses of $20 million this year. For social media market-watchers, this is interesting stuff … but why should insurance and reinsurance marketing professionals care?
Well, the ability of the social media platform to survive and grow is what makes it valuable as a marketing tool. As Twitter’s reach grows – and the company shows that it can support it financially – marketers in our industry will have to stop treating it as a curiosity and get up to speed quickly.
The chief criticism of Twitter so far has been that it didn’t look like it could turn a profit. I figure Twitter can do $25 million or so in revenue this year, which puts it 20 percent ahead of its expenses. So, it has a way to stay afloat and invest in growth, which means that its 105 million users will increase in number and richer functionality is likely on the way.
Twitter isn’t going away, and it’s no longer the domain of social media nerds (like me … and probably @reinsurancegirl and @welshwonder). Your clients and competitors are on Twitter. So are other industry stakeholders, such as auditors, consultants and attorneys – not to mention the media @reinsurance_mag and @reactionsnet, among others).
For the marketing departments in the insurance and reinsurance business, the last issue to address, given that Twitter has both legs and the muscle to keep them moving, is whether you can use it to generate new business. Frankly, this is irrelevant. Twitter is a visibility play, and if you don’t get in soon, you’re effectively seeding the space to your competitors, many of which are there already.

Soon, it won’t be sufficient to have a presence on Twitter. Rather, you’ll need to do something with it. You’ll need to put a plan together and execute it in fairly short order. Need a hand? I’ll be grabbing a cigar on my stoop on the Upper West Side; feel free to give me a shout at @tjohansmeyer … on Twitter, of course.

Blogs That Could Teach You Something

2010-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

This may seem contradictory. In the past, I’ve specifically advised corporate bloggers against modeling themselves on mainstream mass media blogs. What they are trying to accomplish is much different from what you are. But, there is still plenty you could learn from them, as long as you focus on the right lessons. Some of these may seem pretty far afield, so I’ll need a leap of faith. You might find the exercise worthwhile, though.

Gadling: This travel blog has a solid mix of reblogged and original content, as well as resident experts, such as pilot Kent Wein. Also, the bloggers do a great job of mixing in video content, either original or found on YouTube.

Lesson: Use your experts; that’s why you have them. Also, get creative with multimedia. It doesn’t have to be perfect … it doesn’t even have to be yours.

Luxist: This is the top luxury goods blog on the web, and it’s brand recognition is incredible. The “Handbag of the Day” and other major features provide some predictability for readers (translation = a reason to come back regularly), and the reblogged and original content gives them a reason to go deeper with every visit.

Lesson: Have a backbone of regular features, and build “news” around it. The mix of consistency and fresh content will translate to increased pageviews.

Gawker: It may be everything that your executives fear about the blogosphere, but there’s a lot you could learn from Gawker. Don’t focus on the content, which can be rough on the people covered. Instead, look at the commentary. Gawker is providing insights on the issues that matter to its readers – that’s why they keep coming back.

Lesson: State more than the facts. Interpret. Tell your readers what a particular industry development or reinsurance rate change means … and how they can act on this information.

VentureBeat: When Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag was folded into Gawker as just another column, I was upset and left looking for a new favorite. I found VentureBeat, which now has two of my favorite bloggers from Valleywag, Paul Boutin and Owen Thomas. This blog is plugged in. Most interesting, though, are the guest posts. VentureBeat gets solid experts who provide practical advice that is easy to follow.

Lesson: Recruit guest bloggers who provide the sort of on-the-ground information that your team cannot produce on its own. Co-promote their services, as long as it doesn't come at the expense of your core business.

Business Insider: This is the top business blog on the web. It's writers are fast, dealing with curren stuff and breaking news. They put out a lot of content, fantastic insights and excellent charts and slide shows. Business Insider know how to attract, retain and entertain its readers.

Lesson: Content wins. Period. You have to have the best information first. If not you, someone else will.

Disclosure: I write for Gadling and Luxist. I've contributed a guest post to Buiness Insider. I’m a huge fan of VentureBeat.

Be Disciplined with Your Content

2010-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

I’m writing this now, but you won’t see it for several weeks. Well, now you’re reading it, and my thoughts are several weeks old. This is exactly what I intended.

Except for the timely material I post here, I try to write my articles weeks in advance. Since I probably crank out more than 200 posts a month for close to a dozen blogs, I don’t have any choice. I need to plan rigidly and stick to it. Sometimes, like tonight (well, a few weeks ago), I’ll be tempted to take three or four articles and throw them up in the same week. I’ll write a few pieces that really interest me, and I’ll want to share them (on the, I hope correct, assumption that you’ll find them interesting, too). Instant gratification comes isn’t free, however. If I succumb to the urge to push everything out at once, I’ll have to work even harder, and I’m running out of hours in the day.
My goal for Reinsurance Blogger is pretty modest: I like to publish one fairly long original post a week. If I see something interesting in the news, I may reblog that here. Occasionally, I’ll write something juicy for BloggingStocks and find it worth mentioning on this blog, too – in which case I’ll reblog it. But, those are opportunistic. My primary aim is one solid post a week. Fortunately, I’m focusing on reinsurance social media topics for my “big post,” so timeliness isn’t really an issue. I can sit on my stoop on the Upper West Side on a Sunday night, light a cigar, maybe have a glass of cabernet from the restaurant next door and crank out a handful of articles.

It’s a process that works … and discipline is what holds it together. This is where you’ll find the universal lesson.

Especially when you’re just getting started, you’ll want to see the results of your hard work quickly. If you do this, you’ll blow through your backlog and find yourself scrambling to fill content every week. You’ll get frustrated and give up. Frankly, that’s a loss for the industry, not just you or your company. We need more reinsurance bloggers.

Pace yourself. Even if your goal is to publish at least three times a week, make sure one is a strong feature, and try to get as much done in advance as possible. Build a backlog – and fight the urge to cannibalize it. You can give yourself some latitude once your blog has been up for a while and you’ve become more comfortable. At that point, though, you’ll probably have seen the value of discipline and recognized that it’s central to your comfort.

http://twitter.com/tjohansmeyer

[Photo by lowjumpingfrog via Flickr]

The Writing Matters

2010-04-26T01:00:00.002-04:00

When major insurance and reinsurance companies put out any sort of thought leadership piece – from blog posts to bylined articles to those hefty reports – the target market assumes that the information will be solid. You don’t attain top spot in the industry by coming up with shoddy insight or tenuous claims. Pick up a major piece from any major reinsurer, broker, consultant, etc., and you know the substance will be good. So, what makes someone devour it?

It all comes down to the writing style.

Too often, the writing is an afterthought, not even warranting the same attention as design. Well, anyone who has picked up a dense or poorly written report knows how much of it will be read. I’ve been in every position there is with thought leadership; I’ve seen it from all sides. I’ve consumed it (in my management consulting days), created it (in my reinsurance days) and covered it (as a blogger, which I am now). How it’s written, which was my middle role, makes all the difference.

Consumer: This is the person you really want to read your thought leadership – mostly clients, but also other industry stakeholders, such as regulators, consultants and attorneys. If you don’t make your piece easy to read, most of it will be irrelevant, as they’ll just put it down.

Journalist/Blogger: Writing can influence coverage. When a major piece comes out, I prefer to read (and cover) the whole thing, since most of my “competitors” are likely to work from the press release, unless it’s something huge (like 1/1). If the writing sucks, I’ll have to decide whether it’s worth my time to push through it anyway (usually it isn’t) and probably wind up writing short post from the release – which means you lose valuable coverage.

And this just leaves …

Producer: This is the person (or team) who writes the thought leadership piece. The writer involved – and you should have a real writer, not a analyst who took an English composition class a decade and a half ago – should have the singular job of making your thought leadership piece readable. You need to hire a great one, give up any shred of ego you have about pride of authorship and do what this person says. The results will speak for themselves.

Yeah, it’ easy for a writer to say this, but it does make a difference.

Here are some tips you can use right away to make your thought leadership more accessible, read by a wider audience and ultimately more powerful:

1. Be direct
Flowery language and metaphors have no place in insurance and reinsurance thought leadership. This may seem like a no-brainer, but there’s a lot of it out there … and it has to stop. Now. No negotiations. While you’re at it, be short. If it takes you 100 words to say something, you could probably do it in 50. If you don’t think so, call me, and I’ll find fat you never knew you had.

2. Start with impact
Lead with a description and you lose. Think about any piece on reinsurance rates. Your reader wants the number – then the reasoning. It’s a fact of life. Compare these two approaches and decide which is more effective:

a. Catastrophes in Chile, Haiti and Europe may have depleted capital, but not enough to cause rates to turn. Worldwide, property-catastrophe reinsurance pricing fell an average of 5 percent.

b. Property-catastrophe reinsurance rates fell 5 percent worldwide, despite the losses from catastrophes in Chile, Haiti and Europe.

Not only does (b) start with what matters, it closes the deal in only 17 words, rather than the 28 required by (a).

3. Keep your sentences under control
Nobody likes to read long sentences, but everybody seems to love to write them. Police yourself on this. There’s a free tool you can download called the “Bullfighter.” It plugs right into Word. The Bullfighter was developed during the dotcom boom to identify the overzealous use of buzzwords (like leveraging your synergies). I also has a nifty feature that shows you your average sentence length. If it’s over 25, it’s time for an edit.

4. Avoid passive language
There is plenty of room for improvement around the world on this one, but I’m going to pick on the UK in particular. Maybe it’s because I’m a product of American public schools (nothing to brag about, I promise you), but I just can’t stand the UK obsession with variations on the verb “to see.”

“The market saw rates …”

“Rates were seen to …”

And so on.

Again, this one just irks me, and there is plenty of linguistic laziness on my side of the Atlantic, but “to see” illustrates my point. You need to put your reader at the center of the action. Nobody “saw” rates. Rates did something. The markets moved. Your company isn’t an onlooker – it’s a driving force!

Okay, in fairness, the American-ism that I simply despise is to end a sentence with "at" -- especially if the word "where" is in the sentence. I truly can't stand to see it or hear it.

5. Be conversational
Relax. Use a few contractions. Address your reader directly. People actually respond to this! Break some of the rules you learned in school. Your readers will reward you by giving your hard work the time it deserves.

[Photo by tnarik via Flickr]

Reinsurance Blogging Tip: When to Publish

2010-04-21T01:00:00.002-04:00

When should you publish? It doesn't sound like one of the hardest decisions you'll make, but timing does matter. I've always been partial to 1 AM. This means that my post will be up by 6 AM in the UK, so anyone who likes to scan the headlines first thing in the morning (like me) will be able to do so. When the United States wakes up, the post will already be there. For the corporate blogs, it also means that the media folks will be able to see you first thing in the morning, so you won't have to worry about age impeding a pickup.

Social Media Lingo

2010-04-20T14:53:00.002-04:00

Social media is moving faster than the language needed to support it. Some people get left behind as a result, and they say things that may sound a little strange. I want to fix that, at least in the insurance and reinsurance social media community. There are two big ones that bug me:

You don’t write a blog – you write a blog post. The post is the article (or story, etc.). The blog is the thing the story is put on.

Are you twittering? Probably not. Instead, I bet you’re tweeting. You tweet a tweet on Twitter.

The video below, will help you out.

Keeping up with Twitter: Six Tidbits You MUST Read

2010-04-19T01:00:00.006-04:00

I don't even know where to begin. A rush of Twitter news came out last week around the company's developer conference, called "Chirp." SocialTimes did a great job of keeping pace with the "fire hose" of news (to steal an expression from the Twitter ecosystem), so I'll just run through the top stories for you here and give a brief summary of why they matter to social media folks in the insurance and reinsurance world. For the sake of simplicity, I'm listing them in reverse alphabetical order, which is how you'd see them over on SocialTimes anyway.

1. Will Twitter get its own data center?
This may seem pretty boring ... who cares about wher the technology sits? Well, if you've ever logged in to see the "fail whale," this is an important development. If Twitter's in control, it'll be able to do a better job of managing its environment. Now that the company has major ad revenue coming in, this is crucial. The side effect for marketers using Twitter is that the environment will be more reliable.
Read the article >>

2. Using Twitter gets business results
Some research from eMarketer suggests that companies with 100 to 500 followers on Twitter can pump up their leads by 146 percent, as long as they impement it along with a blog (reinforcing what I'v always said -- a corporate blog must be the fundamental component of your social media marketing strategy). More than 500 followers, however, doesn't deliver much more punch. The article also goes into the effects for B2B (versus B2C), which are worth noting. If you haven't deployed your blog/Twitter combo yet, it's time. It's defintely time.
Read the article >>

3. Twitter to share the wealth with app developers
Again, this one may not seem to matter much to the insurance and reinsurance world. You need to think past the immediate effects, though. The announcements swirling before Chirp didn't favor the Twitter application developers (like HootSuite). In fact, it was pretty clear that the key to Twitter's growth was in taking over the spaces owned by its application development partners. The response was ugly. So, Twitter is making nice by splitting its ad revenue from "promoted tweets" with application developers that actually display them. This should help fund innovation around Twitter and give you better tools to use when promoting your company.
Read the article >>

4. Twitter acquires Tweetie
This was a move that showed just how serious Twitter is about taking over the space owned by independent application developers in its ecosystem. It wasn't much of an acquisition, but it sent a message to Twitter's application developers, and it wound up dominating Chirp.
Read the article >>

5. Twitter tells the truth
... about its numbers. I've covered them in another post, but you can see where I picked up the data over on SocialTimes.
Read the article >>

6. Twitter gets another busines model
The real-time searh deals that Twitter has struck (with Microsoft and Google, among others) are good for enough revenue, I suspect, to get Twitter close to profitability this year. Meanwhile, we were all waiting for the search-based ad model, and it was released last week. This means that Twitter not only has revenue coming in, but it has a good reason to make its platform more stable, which benefits those of us who use Twitter to market our businesses.
Read the article >>

http://twitter.com/tjohansmeyer

The Latest Twitter Numbers Are Out!

2010-04-16T21:44:00.001-04:00

The last time data came out on Twitter’s reach, the stats were impressive. The company boasted more than 60 million users. In conjunction with its developer conference, Chirp, the company released new info, and it’s astounding.

Here’s the potential that Twitter offers:

105 million registered users

180 million active daily users (I assume it includes repeats, like me)

300,000 or so registrations every day

3 billion API requests daily (e.g., for the third-party applications like UberTwitter)

Now, even more of Twitter’s action comes from outside the website. The previous data put off-site Twitter activity at around 2/3 of the total. Now, it’s up to 75 percent.

My news recap from Chirp will be up on Monday – enjoy the weekend!

http://twitter.com/tjohansmeyer

[Source: SocialTimes]

Four Steps to Better Blog Headlines

2010-04-14T01:00:00.001-04:00

I hate clever headlines. The momentary smirk they elicit comes at a price. You lose search engine visibility, and you’re betting on a reader’s curiosity rather than his or her thirst for information. Since insurers and reinsurers aren’t really in the business of entertaining, that bet’s a long shot. A clear headline inspires action (i.e., clicks to read more), gets better love from Google and puts your brand in front of your target market more (remember, each pageview is an impression).
Basically, a great headline can pump up your readership and increase the return on all your hard thought leadership work. Here are four techniques to help beef up your headlines:
1. Say what you’re writing about
If your piece is on cat bonds, mention “cat bonds” in the headline. It’s really that simple. Google will pick up the keywords, and your readers will know what the article is about.

2. Numbers are great
People love lists. The web is crawling with them, and blogs try to run as any as possible. Why? People read them. They forward them. They retweet them. This is behavior you want to encourage. On your blog (you don’t have one yet?), try to run list a week.

3. Ask a question
Readers are drawn to answers. Ask a question in the headline, and the clicks will tick up, because people want to know. This is a curiosity bet – but it’s a safe one. To make it work, combine this technique with (1), above.

4. Go a little long
You’re not writing or the tabloids. If you need seven or eight words to make the subject of your article clear, take them.

5. Don’t try to be cute or funny
Anyone looking for information on Solvency II probably isn’t expecting a laugh. Clarity is better.

[Photo by Matt Callow via Flickr]

Case Study: How Merely Having a Blog Can Make a Difference

2010-04-12T01:00:00.002-04:00

I don’t need to remind you that I’m big fan of blogs and social media. Obviously, I eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. So, my bias is salient. Now, those of you who’ve been reading my work for a while (or just know me) remember that I don’t just blog about insurance and reinsurance. I play in a lot of spaces, and one of my favorites is cigars – probably because I love my sticks and smoke a few every day. The advantage for the industry is that I can bring an outside perspective and make it relevant to your needs.

So, you’re going to see how a cigar guy did what you should be doing … and how it worked for him. It’s the sort of case study (from outside the industry) that you should not only read but share. Don’t treat this subject lightly, because it’s the sort of intelligence that could make a big difference for you in the marketplace.
Just having a blog can get you more (and better) media coverage, and Eddie Ortega has probably figured this out.

I got to know Eddie back in February, when I was on a cigar trip to Esteli, Nicaragua. He’s the man behind the 601 line of cigars (manufactured by Pepin Garcia), which are really worth a try if you cut and light every now and then. Of course, we both play in a number of worlds and have no shortage of professional and personal contacts, so social media was a natural way to stay in touch. Via one of Eddie’s tweets, I became aware of his blog. I don’t read it as much as I should (just as every reinsurance executive doesn’t read the trades, blogs and reports as much as he or she should). But, the fact that it exists solves a major problem for me.

Sometimes, there isn’t as much out in the major news outlets for me to blog. It happens – slow news days and such. On a day like this, I’m ready to go deep to look for material. This happened over the weekend, and I saw one of Eddie’s status updates on Facebook. He had an interesting blog post, and I knew I could use it. Just by having a blog and writing something fairly interesting, he was able to get coverage on Luxist, the largest and most famous luxury goods blog on the web (and to which I contribute regularly).

The lesson here for the reinsurance industry is pretty simple: just taking the time to have a blog can score you a press pickup when you least expect it.

Know Who to Follow in Reinsurance Social Media

2010-04-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

Whether you're new to social media or are looking for more people in our space, you need to check out Mairi Mallon's latest blog post (and I'm not just plugging her because she mentioned me on it!). It offers a wealth of social media sources for the reinsurance industry, including the top bloggers and Twitter users in the space. It's a great starting point, not to mention an easy way to find any gaps in your existing community. While you're over there, help her out. If you see anybody missing, drop a comment for her.

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Corporate Blogging Tip: An Easy Way to Get Photos for Your Blog

2010-04-07T21:56:00.000-04:00

I'm awful at selecting artwork (as you've probably noticed already), but the bigger challenge, even for the aesthetically-enabled, is to find image that you can use. If you don't have a budget for a photo account, turn to Flickr. You can use anything licensed under the Creative Commons, as long as you cite the source of the photo and provide a link.

Four Reasons to Join a Reinsurance Group on LinkedIn

2010-04-07T01:00:00.001-04:00

No? You must be the only one! There are many reinsurance groups on LinkedIn. Some are company-specific, while others focus on general industry issues. There is definitely a group for you on LinkedIn, so it’s worth logging in and looking around for a bit. Several of them have rather large membership bases and lots of interaction (I suggest those run by Mairi Mallon, as she’s mastered the LinkedIn environment for the reinsurance world).

If you aren’t sure what the upside is for you, take a look at the five reasons below:

1. You’ll get on-the-ground information
No, this isn’t a haven for insidery stuff or hidden secrets. But, you’ll see from articles posted which topics are most important to people in the reinsurance industry, and the comments left by other members can be insightful. Also, dialogue on non-client matters related to the industry can be helpful. I’ve seen a lot of activity on how our industry is using social media, and I’m glad I took the time both to read them and to add my own thoughts.

2. The crowd will consolidate the good stuff
How many trade mag websites do you read every day? You probably sift through several, not to mention the alerts from the Insider that are hitting your e-mail inbox. You bear the responsibility for scanning it to see what’s interesting to you. Go to a LinkedIn group with an active membership base, and the best stories will be posted. Instead of going to several websites, you can hit one group. Life gets a lot easier.

3. Like-minded people are helpful
The other members of the group are just like you. They’re watching the same trends and trying to decipher the same clues as to industry conditions. Even if you’re hanging out with competitors, you all want the same information. Since nothing you see will involve sensitive company or client information, this is a safe place to get the pulse of the industry.

4. Your absence will be notice
As more people join LinkedIn – both inside and outside the reinsurance business – the expectation that you’ll be there increases. After a while, not getting involved will have an impact on your credibility, as you’ll look out of touch. And with the information and insights you’re missing, you will be.

Q1 Catastrophe Bond Results

2010-04-05T15:05:00.000-04:00

I just took a look at the publicly available cat bond data over at the Artemis.bm deal directory. Only $300 million in cat bond transactions closed last quarter, down 48 percent from $575 million in the first quarter of 2009. Is this a bad sign? Eh, I doubt it. The first quarter is always slow for the cat bond business, and Q1 deal flow in 2009 was supported by the silent Q4 in 2008, as many of the deals that would normally comprise the December flurry of activity were kicked to the next quarter.Two transactions closed in the first quarter this year. One was Hartford Fire Insurance Company's $180 million Foundation Re III, and the other was the latest Successor bond from Swiss Re.

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Reinsurance Blogging Tip: Page Breaks

2010-04-05T01:00:00.001-04:00

When you’re launching a blog for the first time, it’s the big issues that will suck up your time. You’ll deal with the technical underpinnings when you collaborate with your IT department to get the hosting set up. And, you’ll doubtless spend lots of time with your executives and legal departments going over issues of risk and process. As you address all the major challenges, though, don’t take your eye off the little stuff. With a lot of new blogs – and, for that matter, a lot of older blogs by people who should know better – I’ve seen that the entire post is popped onto the front page. So, you get the whole story without having to click.

This is actually a pretty big problem.

I’ll give you the obvious first: unless you’re putting up a short burst (250 words or less), you’re making readers scroll for a while before getting to your next headline. If a reader shows up at your blog for the first time and wants to poke around and see what you cover, you aren’t making it easy. All the major blogging platforms now have a button you can push when creating the post to include a page break (or jump, depending on the lingo you use). When you do this, the reader will see on the front page of your blog everything up to the jump and will be given a link to click to read more.

This will tighten up your home page and help turn window-shoppers into investigators. If the first post doesn’t turn the reader on, you get several more bites at the apple.

While ease of use and general aesthetics are important, the next reason will appeal to your business sensibilities, thus making what I’ve just written moot. With the jump pages, you can collect more intelligence … and this is exactly what you want from your blog.

What follows is only useful if you have a web analytics solution (like Google Analytics or Omniture SiteCatalyst) hooked up to your blog. If you don’t have an analytics tool in place, stop reading this right now and go get one. You need it.

Your web analytics platform tells you not only pages are being viewed, but which pages are being viewed how many times. So, if you want to check in on the popularity of a property-catastrophe reinsurance rates story, your analytics tool will have the info you need. It will also tell you which companies are looking at your content. So, you can see what interests your clients (and your competitors).

If you don’t have a jump page, visitors can read every story in full on the home page. This delivers no intelligence – how can you tell which of the full stories your visitor read? If the visitor has to pay for the rest of the story with a click, you may find out that Cedent Co. is interested in multi-year cover for its health business. That’s an insight you can take over to the guy in charge of selling to Cedent Co.

The use of a simple button in your blogging software may not seem terribly important, but it can deliver specific intelligence on your visitors. You’re not just communicating with the market anymore – the market is telling you exactly what it’s thinking.

Reading the April Reinsurance Renewal

2010-04-01T22:03:00.002-04:00

Score one for the former reinsurance marketing guy! Despite the hype around the Chile earthquake and Windstorm Xynthia, all three major reinsurance brokers have come out with their April reinsurance renewal reports ... and they all say basically the same thing. Reinsurance rates fell in a manner consistent with the January 1, 2010 renewal, and the Q1 catastrophes are likely to have an earnings impact but didn't have enough force to move a market that was (at a minimum) sufficiently capitalized.

Pardon my horn-tooting, here, but it's not usually the marketing guy who makes these kinds of calls. But, when you look at how insurance and reinsurance companies talk to the market, you can usually get a sense of where these things are headed. By October, I can usually read the January 1 renewal results from what the press releases are saying, and I saw the same thing going on in March this year. It all just made sense.

Let me refresh your memory. On March 14, 2010, I wrote:

"On the one hand, I can’t shake the belief that the April renewal will follow the January renewal. It has every year I’ve been involved with the industry … but we haven’t seen such heavy Q1 cat losses in my experience. I’m sure it happened, but I’ve only been playing in the business for a few years, so I don’t have the benefit of the ol’ timers. Nonetheless, I almost get the feeling that the market wants to ape 1/1 pricing. I know it’s strange and unscientific, but we’re talking raw instinct here."

Granted, I got help from some great sources along the way. On March 22, 2010, I learned that the cats hit only around 3 percent of the industry's global capital -- that's not enough to move the needle. Ultimately, however, it came down to just paying attention to what people were saying ... and a little bit of common sense.

I'm not making any bets on Florida yet, though. That's still two months away, which is plenty of time for listening.

Read my coverage of the Guy Carpenter renewal report on BloggingStocks >>

Read my coverage of the Willis Re renewal report on BloggingStocks >>

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[Photo by kevindooley via Flickr]