Case study of social media adoption and lessons learned at Allstate.

1. Social Media Usage
& Lessons Learned
Virginia Association of
Museums Conference
Patty Lewis
Strategy Consultant
Strategy & Innovation Services
Allstate Technology & Operations
Virginia Association of Museums
Conference, March 14-16, 2010

2. What I’m going to talk about
 Who am I?
 Who is Allstate and why are we using social
media?
 Portfolio of Allstate social media tools
 Lessons learned
 Innovation Engine case study
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3. Who am I?
 Background
– Stanford University, Bachelor’s in American Studies with focus on
American history and art history
– University of Chicago, Master’s in English with focus on visual
culture
– Twenty years experience in business and IT communications
 IT strategist
– Social media strategy and adoption
– Innovation strategies
– Collaboration consulting
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4. Who is Allstate?
 The Allstate Corporation is the nation’s largest publicly held personal
lines insurer.
 A Fortune 100 company.
 Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance, including auto, property, life
and commercial. Allstate also offers retirement and investment
products and banking services.
 Allstate is widely known through the “You’re In Good Hands With
Allstate®” slogan.
 The Allstate Corporation encompasses more than 70,000 professionals
with technology operations located around the globe.
 Allstate is reinventing protection and retirement to help individuals in
approximately 17 million households protect what they have today
and better prepare for tomorrow.
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5. Why is Allstate using social media?
Internal use External use
 Workforce already using tools  Traditional corporate
and wanting to use them in the communications can be
workplace perceived as monolithic and
 Need to attract and autocratic
accommodate multi-generational  Traditional marketing is met
workforce with cynicism and suspicion
 Desire to make the culture more  Need to figure out how to carry
collaborative the brand promise into
 Need to make information and emerging channels
expertise shareable and findable
 Need to get started: Significant
learning and adoption curves –
couple of years from roll-out to
effective workflow integration
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6. Portfolio of Allstate social media tools
External Internal
 Facebook (pages, employees)  Idea management tool
 Twitter (dozens) (hundreds of ideas)
 YouTube (multiple channels)  Document sharing (hundreds of
 Blogs (dozens) thousands)
 Discussion boards (dozens)  Wikis (thousands of pages)
 Microsites (several)  Profiles (thousands)
 Agency community on Ning  Blogs (hundreds)
(ALL Blue Blog, 2,400+ users)  Microblogging (Yammer:
2,200+ Allstate users)
 Communities (dozens)
 Discussion boards (dozens)
 Shared bookmarking (hundreds)
 Virtual worlds
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7. Social media adoption:
Lessons learned
 Make it safe
 You won’t get it right the first time
– Make it cheap
– Make it small
– Experiment internally before exposing
your brand
 Find mavens, blaze a trail with them
 Don’t reinvent the wheel; build on
current processes
 Don’t invest a lot of money until you
have clear goals
 Many channels, one voice
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8. Case Study:
Tapping into Employee Brain Power
 “Ideation” / idea management software
 Enables business leaders to tap into employees to solve
business problems
 Augments traditional brainstorming methods
 Social media tool with gaming engine
 Sophisticated ranking and scoring algorithms
 Allows employees to discuss, vote, review, form teams
 Makes idea development more transparent by pushing
conversations out into the open instead of inboxes
 Corporate idea repository
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10. Engaging, easy-to-use idea posting
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11. Widget power: transparent status indicators
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13. The Idea Funnel
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14. Site Statistics
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15. round table
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16. Allstate
employee
badges
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17. Beware the Slippery Slope argument
A B C Death
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18. Structure helps provide focus
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19. Assessing the value of social media
 What has changed as a result of the effort?
 Problems solved, time saved
 Better outcomes through collaboration
 Strategic stories
 Transparency Dividends
 “A-ha” moments and knowledge accidents
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