Facebook Insurance

Are you on Facebook? If you're anything like me, you've thought of Facebook as a place for the kiddos. Only slightly better than MySpace. The website my teenager spends a lot of time on. But I finally took the plunge late last year, primarily as an easy way to share photos of the kids with all the relatives. And now it seems that the grown-ups are taking over, to the point where my teenager claims that no one (her age) hangs out there anymore. How much of a drag is it to get a friend request from your parents when you're in high school? But I digress…

So what's the hook to insurance or analytics? I would love to study the statistical relationship between a person's loss experience and the loss experience in toto of their Facebook friends. I'm fairly confident there would be a predictive relationship there. Birds of a feather and all that. Now, I have NO idea how you'd get it past a regulator, but it's fun to speculate.

A new type of affinity grouping. Take your best slice of customers, and offer premium incentives to their list of friends, or some type of referral bonus to your customer to refer their friends to you. That could be attempted without an actual hook into Facebook.

I would also cross-tab the study by the number of friends you have, expecting that people with huge numbers of friends would not be as ideal for this project, because their relatively indiscriminate friending would dilute the expected benefit. I think your sweet spot would be folks with 150-250 friends, enough to be engaged, but still limiting friend-accepts to people they actually know and relate to in some meaningful way. (I do find it fascinating that the amount of F/B friends is a topic being studied by actual smart people, publishing in journals.)