Benefits and Challenges of Blogging for Insurance Industry

Discuss about the Potential Impact Of Blogging On The Insurance Industry.

Blogging technology

Weblog or Blog is an online journal displayed on a website rich in information and data in reverse chronological order (Tong et al., 2013). Blogging in recent times apart from producing content to the post, also helps in developing social relations with readers (Hu et al., 2013). The trend of writing blogs has been increased and it can be witnessed through the fact that in 2014, the average time spent writing a blog was 2 hours 24 minutes, which in increased to 3 hours and 20 minutes in 2017 (Orbitmedia.com, 2018). Moreover, in order to publish recent data, bloggers broadcast their blogs frequently and it is found that bloggers desire to post several times within a month (Orbitmedia.com, 2018). Bloggers does not prefer to post daily or more than daily as it might results in redundancy of the data (Orbitmedia.com, 2018).

Another aspect while writing blogs is the word count that often keeps in mind. Pasquale (2014) stated that longer blogs written in paragraphs only leads to poor interest in reading the materials. The Result also shows that bloggers mostly prefer to write only 500-1000 words long blogs followed by 1000-1500 words, fewer than 250 blogs and 1500-2000 blogs (Orbitmedia.com, 2018). In order to attract the readers towards their blog, bloggers use image, audio, bullets lists and other aspects. The highest preferred aspect is to use more than one image and bullet list.

The source through which the bloggers drives the traffic and make people to read their blogs is mainly through social media followed by SEO and e-mail marketing and there is a five times increase in paid content promotion since 2014 (Orbitmedia.com, 2018). The bloggers are most concerned about the data and measure their traffic. The analytics also help the bloggers to identify what information reader are liking the most and can be targeted for enhancing the traffic for their blog. 

Hsu (2012) stated that insurance companies are a commercial enterprise and is a part of financial services industry. People save some money from their income for possible future losses. Lu et al. (2014) furthermore depicted that insurance sector is composed of companies that guarantees payment for an uncertain future event to the policyholder, who have to pay a small premium in exchange of uncertain future protection. In recent times, insurance can be obtained for life, vehicle, home, health, liability, travel, pet, food, critical illness, trade credit and renters (Honka, 2014). There are some other insurance types like agricultural insurance, deposit insurance‎), mortgage insurance‎, aviation insurance, builder’s risk insurance, chargeback insurance, computer insurance, divorce insurance and interest rate insurance (Eckles, Hoyt and Miller (2014). In conventional time, people get the information of the insurance policies directly from the organization especially banks but in recent times, the process of fetching the information is mainly from internet and blogs. People easily track all the benefits and risks related to the type of insurance they want to undertake.

Absence of innovative topics 

Factors Influencing the Relevancy of Blogging Information in the Future

Chan, Chang and Chang (2013) stated that there are many people, who write blogs on similar topic. So, the challenge that insurance industry’s bloggers faces are to develop innovative topic that can attract the potential customers regarding the information that he are providing.   Bloggers can utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to find the topic that people searches more on the insurance topic; however the challenges her faced by the bloggers is that they cannot accurately determine how many bloggers are providing the same information and what they are writing in their blogs (Bork & Sidak, 2012).

Attaining more capital benefits

Perozzi and Akoglu (2016) depicted that there are lots of bloggers, who desire to monetize their blogs and the author also indentifies that most of the bloggers will also face problem to reach the goal of attaining high cash flow. There are ways through which the bloggers can reach to users and with the high internet traffic and then earn money per visitor. However, Lu et al. (2014) identifies the challenges that in insurance company, it is not necessary that all the bloggers have experienced the insurance policy and the details thus omit some of the vital points that user might want to know.

Challenges concerning relevancy

Lee et al. (2014) stated that insurance industry have to gain the trust of their target audience and convince them to invest their money to them. Thus blog is an effective place that demonstrates the knowledge and experience of the insurance company. Liu and Park (2015) also portrays that due to changes in policies in order to gain the competitive advantage compared to the other competitors, an organization make random changes in the policies. The problem that the insurance industries will face in this case is lack of trust due to frequent changes in the information given in the blogs. This problem can also rise due to the fluctuations in the monetization of a nation and changes in interest rate due to market risks.                                                                                            

The future impact of the relevancy regarding the blogging information is selected in this section.

Luteran (2007) stated that Lessig’s modalities of law indicate that people have to behave in a way that obeys the law; otherwise it threatens punishment on disobeying the same. In this case, bloggers should have to disclose the fact that they are being paid to promote a certain brand according to the regulation developed by Federal Trade Commission (Problogger.com., 2018). The bloggers have to label information clearly, do not claim to be an objective third-party falsely and ensure clean with affiliate relationships (Problogger.com., 2018). Bloggers have to pay attention to law of contract, property, copyright, defamation, and obscenity. Thus, all the works should be marked copyrighted everything including original copies, podcasts, links, videos, images and HTML, VRML codes. The blogger also put the genuine link of the owner if they use some other’s work to can also buy royalty-free images (Problogger.com., 2018). Moreover, according to the Washington Post blog policy, accountability, accuracy and tone in which bloggers are conveying message (Mashable.com., 2018).

One-Day Conference for Recruiting New Members for Writing Insurance Blogs

According to Luteran (2007), social norms represents the threaten punishment if not obey the regulations. Social norms are imposed by community and not by the government. Thus, in this case, if the blogger does not follow proper rules and regulations, then the final result can be poor customer base, low internet traffic and lesser profitability. Insurance company in such situation has to disclose all their offers and the underlying benefits. Pasquale (2014) depicted that the insurance companies never post about their drawbacks and risk and this is the reason in recent times also people prefer more to went to the financial institutions for getting proper information rater than opting an online blog for fetching the information.

Luteran (2007) depict that regulation by markets due to which the price of the business operation can be regulated illustrates the Lessig’s third modality of regulation. In addition to that, both the law and social norms are considered to regulate the markets constrain for individual and collective behaviors. Insurance companies associated with the blogging technique need access through ISP and a password for allowing users to access the internal and important documents. Austin (2018) stated that fulfilling of these aspects allow the insurance weblogs with increased advertising revenue and breaching of the same results in penalty.

Insurance company can utilize a safe environment for writing the blog through effective software and hardware (Luteran, 2007). The software technology used to write the blog should include passwords constraining access, encryption technology and constraining eavesdropping (Leenes et al. 2017). Pasquale (2014) on the other hand depicts that interaction between law and architecture has to be maintained in the regulation of cyberspace. Thus, ethics of make the policies details and document sample should be made more accessible and abundant.

Usually, insurance industry opted for third party providers for writing blogs. The process comprised of give advertisement online and then asks for quotations for writing blogs for writing blogs for the company. The quotation along with the quality of the blogs is assessed to evaluate whether or not the company is knowledgeable about the insurance policies and financial concept. In this way, the blogs for the organization is written and published. The problem arise in such process so that the company always have the fear that the blogger can disclose their internal data to other people and this leads to improper sharing of data to the bloggers which furthermore resulted in inappropriate data in the blogs.

Event- One day conference will be conducted with involvement of internal and external stakeholders to make the process of recruiting new members for writing the weblogs for the insurance policies and benefits regarding the insurance that the organization is providing to their users.

Tasks- In the conference, the details of team extension in the insurance company will be broadcasted. The news regarding the selection criteria of the insurance bloggers and the recruitment dates will also be broadcasted through the conference and the social media sites. 

Actors- The internal event managers and the people from new channels are the stakeholders are the actors in this case. However, the actors in the recruitment process are the working personnel from HR department and candidates.

Outcomes- The news regarding the team extension within the insurance industry will be effectively broadcasted among the communal. Moreover, the recruitment process leads to the outcome of selection of effective bloggers, who does not only have knowledge in insurance policy on different products but also can write in effective language to communicate with the user in a better way.

In order to maintain several blogs on the insurance policies and benefits the company needs to develop an in-house department of such writer, who can write about their schemes. Thus, changes in human resource recruitment procedure will occurred due to incorporation of blogging in the insurance industry. Luteran (2007) stated that the HR needs to assess the financial knowledge of the candidates as well as the writing capabilities of those people. This can be evaluated through the written assessment and personal interview reading the financial knowledge.

Reference List

Austin, C. (2018). Online and Automated Dispute Resolution in New Zealand: A Law Reform and Regulation Perspective.

Bork, R. H., & Sidak, J. G. (2012). What Does the Chicago School Teach About Internet Search and the Antitrust Treatment of Google?. Journal of Competition Law and Economics, 8(4), 663-700.

Chan, K. C., Chang, C. H., & Chang, Y. (2013). Ranking of finance journals: Some Google Scholar citation perspectives. Journal of Empirical Finance, 21, 241-250.

Eckles, D. L., Hoyt, R. E., & Miller, S. M. (2014). Reprint of: The impact of enterprise risk management on the marginal cost of reducing risk: Evidence from the insurance industry. Journal of Banking & Finance, 49, 409-423.

Honka, E. (2014). Quantifying search and switching costs in the US auto insurance industry. The RAND Journal of Economics, 45(4), 847-884.

Hsu, K. T. (2012). The advertising effects of corporate social responsibility on corporate reputation and brand equity: Evidence from the life insurance industry in Taiwan. Journal of business ethics, 109(2), 189-201.

Hu, N., Dong, Y., Liu, L., & Yao, L. J. (2013). Not all that glitters is gold: The effect of attention and blogs on investors’ investing behaviors. Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance, 28(1), 4-19.

Lee, H., Wright, K. B., O’Connor, M., & Wombacher, K. (2014). Framing medical tourism: an analysis of persuasive appeals, risks and benefits, and new media features of medical tourism broker websites. Health communication, 29(7), 637-645.

Leenes, R., Palmerini, E., Koops, B. J., Bertolini, A., Salvini, P., & Lucivero, F. (2017). Regulatory challenges of robotics: some guidelines for addressing legal and ethical issues. Law, Innovation and Technology, 9(1), 1-44.

Liu, Z., & Park, S. (2015). What makes a useful online review? Implication for travel product websites. Tourism Management, 47, 140-151.

Lu, W. M., Wang, W. K., & Kweh, Q. L. (2014). Intellectual capital and performance in the Chinese life insurance industry. Omega, 42(1), 65-74.

Luteran, J. D. (2007). The Application of Lawrence Lessig’s Four Modalities of Regulation in a Virtual Society: An Examination of the Legal Structure of the World of Warcraft.

Mashable.com. (2018). Ethics Basics for Bloggers. [online] Available at: https://mashable.com/2012/08/13/basic-ethics-bloggers/#VqclG87w_Gqr [Accessed 03 Jun 2018].

Orbitmedia.com. (2018). Blogging Statistics and Trends: The 2017 Survey of 1000+ Bloggers. [online] Available at: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogging-statistics/ [Accessed 31 May 2018].

Pasquale, F. A. (2014). IP Law Book Review: Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Every Day Practice.

Perozzi, B., & Akoglu, L. (2016, June). Scalable anomaly ranking of attributed neighborhoods. In Proceedings of the 2016 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (pp. 207-215). Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Problogger.com. (2018). 6 Laws Every Blogger Needs to Obey so they Don’t Get Sued. [online] Available at: https://problogger.com/6-laws-every-blogger-needs-to-obey-so-they-dont-get-sued/ [Accessed 31 May 2018].

Tong, S. T., Heinemann-Lafave, D., Jeon, J., Kolodziej-Smith, R., & Warshay, N. (2013). The use of pro-ana blogs for online social support. Eating disorders, 21(5), 408-422.