The Insurance Industry’s Social Network is like Facebook but for all segments of the insurance industry. You are able to upload your professional profile, almost like LinkedIn, and post pictures and your thoughts like Facebook. You can add someone as a “friend” and post events and read about industry articles posted by individuals on instouch.
The major difference between instouch and Facebook is that nothing is really private. Most of the pictures you upload
or events you create, the default is to share it with everyone. Unlike Facebook where you can privatize your profile picture and information, you cannot on instouch. But really…why the need? Instouch is for networking purposes and therefore to privatize your information would defeat the purpose of joining this new social media network.
This social network utilizes many forms of web 2.0, from RSS feed to forums. As mentioned before, web 2.0, is really about interactivity. This network allows all areas of insurance industry professionals – from brokers to vendors associated with this industry, to network and interact with each other. Brilliant!
I found out about this website from Canadian Underwriters’ article featuring instouch. I would recommend; however, is to form a group which links back to their website on LinkedIn. Many professionals from different industries and around the world, are part of LinkedIn. It would be another way to promote this new social network site and get many professionals to sign up and be active on this site. A site cannot be a success, especially a social media networking site, if members are not active. Many social networking sites have not been successful because of that. It would be the responsibility of some individuals to post new articles relevant to the industry professionals and pull them to check back onto the website.
It would be interesting to see if people in this industry will utilize or even know what a RSS feeds is.
What is RSS feed? The easiest way to explain it to you is that by clicking on the feed button (see the orange image? It can come in several colours), it allows you to subscribe to new updates from a particular website or blog. Most will require you to have an account which allows you to subscribe to multiple sites and list the latest articles posted in your account in places like bloglines, delicious, and now Mozilla Firefox browser. It’s called social bookmarking, which means you are “bookmarking” certain sites. Instead of checking back to the website and then forgetting about it, you see the latest postings in your account when there is an update. But looking at the instouch, the RSS feed is for “Latest Activities” which I can see people viewing it as ‘useless’. If they really want to pull people back in and often, I would suggest the RSS feed be for the “Breaking Insurance News”.
We’ll have to see how involved this site will become. It has great potential to bring together people from the insurance industry to interact with each other.
