This is the second part of my interview with Ben Foster speaking about Allstate’s efforts in social media. I think the Allstate effort represent 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. In the first part we discussed how they got started and their experiences with blogs on the Good Hands (SM) Community site. Now we turn to Twitter.

Bill: Let’s take the social media topic and bring it over to Twitter. With blogs you are writing in ways that people are more used to doing, as you tend to write in paragraphs. Now with Twitter it is a new communication channel with the 140 character limit. In looking at your Twitter feed I see that it has a lot of useful information with many links. How did you get to this point?

Ben: There are three people who run the Good Hands Twitter feed: myself, Amit Wadehra, Strategy and Content Manager and Jennifer Jankowski, who is the Good Hands (SM) Community Manager. As my grandmother said, the only way to learn something is to do it. That applies twenty fold in social media. Amit and I have our own Twitter accounts. We experiment on our own personal accounts to see what works well and what does not, what gets retweeted and what gets clicks.

We try to focus on a framework for the use of Twitter. For example, you would be surprised how many people just retweet something without checking it out. We stress that you need to look at the link and make sure it is worthy. We have a checklist that asks, “Is the link something that consumers will value?”, “Is it coming from a reputable source?, etc.

Bill: So you experiment on your personal account and then apply the lessons learned to the Good Hands (SM) Community account?

Ben: Correct, but we also experiment on the Good Hands (SM) Community account. For example, is it good to do a #FollowFriday. Does this help or hurt with readership? We know it is a common practice. We know people do it on personal accounts, but is it appropriate on a company account? We do not want to appear “spammy”. We try to look at the impact of actions using things like hashtags, for example, so we try to make informed content decisions, not just guess.

Bill: How do you look at the result of actions?

Ben: One way is to note the number of followers before and after an action. This is not an exact science but it helps. You also look at the number of clicks on links. For example, right after we tweeted on something from @FrugalDad we got a number of new followers. We gave some context to the FrugalDad tweet and it worked. We also experiment with such things as best time of day to tweet on topics.

Bill: You mentioned some experiments you have done. Let’s look a little closer at the results. Let’s take the hashtags for example. What lessons did you learn?

Ben: They are very useful for experienced users but not necessary for new users. If you just search for “Personal Finance” for example, you will get different stuff than “#PersonalFinance” which can contain a lot of ”Hashtag Spam”. However, lots of people have queries set up that rely on hashtags. So you really have to do both. However, we realize that some of our community members are not the most Twitter savvy so we do not want to throw them off with something that looks like computer code, like “#PersonalFinance” which can create confusion. We want to properly address our community and this requires experimentation.

Bill: I found that it depends on the topic. It works well for locations so if I put in a hashtag Boston I am likely to get some results or even hashtag the Boston NBA team, the Celtics. These are things people are likely to follow. It does not work as well for some other things.

Ben: I agree. We also try to monitor how frequently we tweet, especially on a common topic, so we do not appear to be spamming. We want to engage in a dialog but not clog the channel.

Bill: What are some of the other lessons learned?

Ben: One thing that works well is to have multiple people involved. They each bring their own perspective: we each subscribe to different blogs, we talk to different people, so there is a broader perspective. We have also found good content through StumbleUpon. We want to avoid RTing something that others are doing. The randomness of StumbleUpon often brings novel content. Another thing is finding a url shortener with great metrics. Bit.ly works well for us as it gives good stats. It can tell us the number of clicks per hour, per day, and locations. We are a US focused company so we want to see the location. It also gives the total number of clicks, as well as the number you generate so we can look at overall popularity.

We are also looking at our follower/following strategy. We are looking now to follow people who are not only interested in our content, but also provide us with useful information to share with our followers. We are not following people simply to generate more followers for ourselves. So we carefully follow those who follow us. If they feel like they would benefit from our content or if they surface great content, they provide as much value as those who follow us. To find people to follow we look at resources like WeFollow. It has people listed by topics. We look at the top people in the relevant topics and figure out if their tweets are relevant to our community. We decide if we would we want to retweet their feeds and gain insights from them that would be useful to our followers. We also look at the number of clicks on their tweets to see what people are interested in. We are moving slowly here because this is an experience where we want to learn the best strategies by doing them. We also follow some of our agents who are putting out interesting stuff.

Bill: Thanks for sharing your experiences and experimentation. Has this experience been helpful and what has been the benefit to Allstate of your social media activity.

Ben: It has been very helpful. It provides another channel to connect with customers and other consumers and this connection is aligned with our strategic vision, as I mentioned at the start. We are able to hear from them their concerns, either directly or from others who are also listening to consumers. We also feel that social media are here to stay so we want to learn about it as much as possible so we will be better prepared to make effective use of it as the usage becomes more pervasive.

Bill: How has it been received within Allstate?

Ben: We have great support from senior management. They recognized the value of Social Media and began this effort by setting up the new division with a Presidential level leader. This was a clear signal of support to the organization, and that support has continued. I think this senior level support is essential for this type of effort and it is much appreciated.

Bill: Thanks for sharing your experiences and I look forward to following your next steps.