Facebook advertising the way of the future, IBABC conference told

Social networking will get “a lot more social” over the next three to five years, and the insurance industry should be exploiting media such as Facebook now, before losing an opportunity to become unique trend-setters in this area, according to author Jeremy Gutsche.
Gutsche, author of the book Exploiting Chaos and the founder of TrendHunter.com, was a keynote speaker at the 62nd annual conference and trade show of the Insurance Brokers Association of B.C. on June 17.
Gutsche’s presentation included a series of illustrations showing how innovative and creative ideas can help financial services companies can “go viral” in today’s marketing world. At the end of his presentation, he was asked what he thought about the potential of Web 2.0.
“The Internet is going to become a lot more social in the next three to five years, and that’s why it’s imperative that you need to start working on your Facebook stuff now,” Gutsche told insurance industry representatives at the convention.
He referenced Facebook’s competition with Google in the online space. He said this competition has prompted Facebook to design a series of ‘widgets’ that allow Facebook users to put little icons, comment boxes and related article features next to published items.
“What this means now is, if you go to TrendHunter.com and you read that CNN article on [Gore Mutual Insurance Company’s] paperless office that we featured, on the top, you will see [Gore Mutual CEO] Kevin McNeil’s picture and my picture [next to the CNN article reference], and it will say ‘Kevin likes this,’ ‘Jeremy likes this.’ And 12 of your other friends like this, plus 400 people. And it’s got your friends’ little faces on it.
“That article just became social. You click one button, ‘like,’ and it shares it into your Facebook feed.”
Gutsche observed that he has 15,000 fans on his Facebook page. Using these widgets, the feed referencing the article will feed from his page onto the pages of all of his Facebook friends.
“That article might get another 10,000 or 20,000 other views,” he said. “As a publisher, I never cared about comments, until it was from Facebook.”
Also something to consider, he said, is that Facebook has a lot of information about their users. That, in turn, makes the medium a potential bonanza for online marketing.
“If you think about why Facebook is going to be the future of advertising, it’s this,” he said. “I want to know who …is a young male looking for insurance that newly bought a house and just married in Toronto. Based on that, I want to put my ad for insurance in front of them.
“I want to know the person who just posted their new business, a CEO that just founded it in the last six months, because that means they are looking for business insurance. “Facebook has all of that information, so your ability to target is so much more powerful than any other ad medium…. Facebook is going to be able to make a ton of money off ads as soon as they fully figure out how to be able to use that.”