Comic mascots pay off for insurers in social media campaigns

The huge popularity of comic mascots in social media has “paid dividends” to insurers who have invested in and executed them well, says Celent.
In its report, Leveraging Social Networks: An In-Depth View for Insurers, Celent explores the applications of social media that have met, so far, with the most success by insurers.
“Perhaps the most surprising result is that spending effort now in seemingly frivolous activities on social networks can drive real business value,” the report says.
In the United Kingdom, for example, comparethemarket.com’s campaign ‘compare the meerkat’ has used extensive social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and a mock Web site www.comparethemeerkat.com.
A fictional meerkat character, Aleksandr Orlov, was created and has appeared in television, print and online media advertisements. A team of people are operating Twitter and Facebook accounts in this name, providing commentary on world events and replies to people on the Internet. The “amusing” content has been shared widely and spread quickly throughout social networks.
Celent also noted that content was updated and linked between the various sites — for example, a ‘tweet’ on Twitter would appear as a Facebook status update, and links to YouTube videos would appear on both Facebook and Twitter pages.
When the meerkat social media campaign was launched in June 2007, comparethemarket.com scored less than ‘1’ on Google Trends’ search volume index.
In the search volume index, data is scaled to the average search traffic for a specific period of time (represented as 1.0), explains Google.
Within nine months, comparethemarket.com’s search volume index doubled, and eventually reached approximately ‘6’ by August 2009 (meaning that traffic was six times the average).
In the United States, the most popular U.S. insurers’ page reviewed by Celent (in terms of combined Facebook fans and Twitter followers) is Nationwide’s “World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World” campaign.
It has roughly 40,000 combined Twitter followers and Facebook fans, whereas Allstate’s campaign, the second most popular, has roughly 25,000.