By adaptive - October 21st, 2014
Lisa E. Melton, Assistant Vice President, Amica Mutual Insurance Company
Lisa began her career with Amica in 1994 as an associate account manager in the sales and client services division, assigned to the Southern California office.
In 2006, Lisa joined Amica’s corporate office where she was promoted to assistant vice president in sales and client services. Her strong experience in strategic planning, operations and customer service led to her being chosen to join Amica’s marketing division in 2012. Lisa now leads Amica’s social media strategy and oversees retention and referral marketing efforts.
What are the key drivers behind your organization’s use of social media?
At Amica, our mission is to create peace of mind and build enduring relationships. This mission is the core of our culture – our customers always come first, and we strive to provide them with the products and services that best respond to their needs.
Social media fits incredibly well into this mission, as we have an opportunity to inform, educate and provide an outstanding customer experience through social channels. Creating opportunities for consumers to connect with us online is a unique opportunity, and doing so effectively helps humanize our brand and allows us to establish, maintain and cultivate loyalty and lasting relationships with our customers. It allows us to deliver on our brand promise.
How is social media organized within your company?
Social media lives within our Marketing department, as the majority of what we do on social relates to building Amica’s brand through communications with our customers and the broad market. We recognize the opportunities to increase brand recognition and brand loyalty and even to attract new customers through these channels.
However, that being said, we do work closely with other business units within our company as there are many stakeholders – sales, claims, HR, etc. – who benefit from our social media efforts. Most notably, we have specific contacts within our customer service teams so if a customer or prospect has a question or concern, we are able to quickly get them to the right people to take care of their needs.
As a corporate user of social networks, how does your company value the networks it has a presence on?
We are currently on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn, and we value each channel a bit differently. For example, we’ve determined that a number of our customers are on Facebook, and we’ve created terrific opportunities to engage with them, so Facebook is our most active channel for engagement with our customers.
On the other hand, we don’t find a large customer following on Twitter, but Twitter offers us terrific opportunities to reach out to people who may not be familiar with Amica. We’ve found that it’s really important to understand your audience within each channel so that you can get the most out of it.
Can you outline a recent initiative that included a social media component?
We are in the process of developing a referral microsite, ShareAmica.com, and social media is a huge piece of this project. Not only does the microsite allow people to refer Amica through social channels, but we also recognize the opportunities to promote the microsite through our social channels. We’re excited to launch, which should happen in the next few weeks.
How much pressure is there to show ROI with the social media you use?
Amica is a mutual company, so we are owned by our policyholders. Because of this, our social strategy is rooted in providing an outstanding customer experience. As long as we are successful doing this, we’ve proven our ROI.
What is your advice to organizations that are beginning to map their own corporate structure with the view to embedding social media activity within their enterprise?
My recommendation would be to really think about your social media objectives and the best way to achieve those objectives. From there, embedding social within the enterprise should be clear.
How do you see the management and development of social media in your company evolving over the next few years?
In looking back over our last few years, we’ve learned and grown so much. It’s exciting to think about where the next few years will take us, as I do see us becoming much more integrated within the organization. That’s already started, and as we continue to expand our efforts it’s logical that our value within the organization will grow. Social media changes so often, and we’re ready to change right along with it.
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