Social media intelligence and insurance

In a 2011 report titled Using Social Data in Claims and Underwriting: Creating a Social Risk Profile, Celent looked at how insurers could leverage social networks to do a better job in claims and underwriting. Since then, we have been looking at vendors who can complement insurers internal data with external data sources including social media data and this in the frame of different applications that go beyond underwriting and claims. We notably have profiled and will continue to profile vendors active in the predictive analytics space and for which data sources are as important if not more important than pure features and functions they offer as part of their system. Using social media data in insurance has become more important over the past few years and what can be called now social media intelligence goes beyond a simple technology that taps in all sorts of social network data sources. Indeed for many people social media intelligence or what people also call social media listening purely consists in screening social networks to get data that can complement internal data to make a better business decision. Actually this definition is too succinct and does not include all key phases a proper social media intelligence strategy should include: So we define social media intelligence as the strategy consisting in:

1. Defining strategic objectives that are dependent not only on internal but external data,
2. Defining a referential or a group of topics, relevant social media platforms as well as a geographic and language scope to be considered for the analysis,
3. Filtering and analyzing social media data regularly (real time, daily, monthly but it is generally a continuous process)
4. Implementing an action plan leveraging findings derived from the data analysis to achieve the strategic objectives initially defined.

We think insurers can learn from project and use cases other industries have gone for in the Social Media Intelligence space and we are interested to better understand how these examples can generate fruitful ideas for insurers. Stay tuned as Celent will be covering this topic in more detail in the near future.