I heard Ben Foster speaking about Allstate’s efforts in social media at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference and was impressed with what they are doing. Here is a video of the panel. I wanted to learn more abut their efforts and especially the social media adoption issues they faced and how they addressed them.

I think the Allstate effort represents a best practice example of social media adoption and, at the same time, Ben acknowledged that these are new media and no one has all the answers so they are engaging in a lot of experimentation. I like their willingness to experiment in a meaningful way and to look at the results. Ben said that Allstate feels that social media are here to stay. You learn best by doing and so they want to become knowledgeable now so they will be prepared for the time soon when the social media will be even more pervasive.

I interviewed Ben over the phone and it made sense to provide the results in our own words.

Bill: What led to the creation of the community?

Ben: It started the middle of last year. Our leadership has the strategic vision of putting the customer at the center of all that we do. With this vision in mind they set up a new Social Networking division and brought in Desirée Rogers, a well-known leader at the President level to run this division originally for our financial services group and later for the entire corporation.

We started by studying consumer problems. What we really wanted to do was stay customer focused and not be a cure chasing a disease. We did not want to be just another company throwing up a Facebook site or starting Twitter because the tools were becoming popular and we could say we were doing it also. We wanted to provide value.

Once we had a strategy worked out, we started the build phase early this year. We wanted to understand what types of content people would be interested in before we selected the tools. The outcome was Allstate’s Good Hands (SM) Community site which features four components:

Making a Difference – Share your ideas about making a difference in your community

All Things Wheels – Share your ideas on how to be safe and smart about what you drive

Daily Spending – Share your ideas about managing and tracking your spending

Personal Finance – Share your ideas about protecting and planning for your future

Bill: What is the background and rationale for this site?

Ben: We wanted to share information that helps people live responsibly by protecting what they have and preparing for what might come next. The site includes blog posts and discussion forums within each of the four themes. The site allows people to share ideas about “keeping families safe, saving money and preparing for what’s next.” In addition, we have a Good Hands (SM)  Community Twitter site to surface content around the four themes.

We also have an Allstate Twitter site that is run by Marcia Hansen from our Direct Marketing group. This is the official face of the brand. She shares content and responds to people talking about Allstate in Twitter.

The Good Hands Community Twitter account is specific to content around our four themes. It is not marketing focused, that content is available on other Allstate sites. You do not directly get Allstate quotes here. Instead, we cover the issues people are facing today around our four themes and offers stories about others’ experiences.

We have bloggers recruited from Allstate who were already writing blogs or had interests in these themes. They provide content from their experiences.

Bill: Were there any issues in getting these people recruited and then started in the right direction?

Ben: Our biggest challenge was getting the right type of content that fit the themes and objectives of the site. We wanted it to be the right level of quality and be interesting to our readers. We did not say, “Write about anything you want.” We helped them focus on certain issues by posing questions raised in consumer research that they could address. This enabled them to write useful posts.

We partnered with people who had done consumer research across the organization to understand what issues people are concerned about. We used this as stimuli for content. We said to our bloggers, “Here are the issues people are concerned about. Here is the reason why. Here are some of the details.” We asked them to write content that helps people think differently about the problems. We asked them to write open-ended posts to encourage conversation.

To help get the bloggers going in the right direction, it helped to get as much customer research as possible.

Bill: I think this is really a smart approach. You were recruiting people who knew the answers. They just did not necessarily know the right questions. You were able to motivate and focus them by giving them the questions and more background from research.

Ben: Yes. Then we tracked the response to specific posts. We were pleased at the interest, for example, in some of the posts about making a difference in your community that were more inspirational.

Bill: Now let’s take the same topic and bring it over to Twitter.

The extended answers will be covered in part two of this interview which wil appear tomorrow.