I’ve been asked to submit an outline for the eInsurance Symposium for an hour long session on a topic related to insurance agents and online marketing. While I really enjoyed covering the topic of search marketing as a whole at the High TECC conference in Vail, CO last year, I realize now that telling a room full of insurance agents “hey, just do some SEO and PPC” is, well, pretty near pointless.

I mean sure, some of the agents are going to try it, grasp it, and hopefully succeed with it, but most will quickly become overwhelmed and fall back to the traditional forms of marketing they’ve been using throughout their careers. So for this conference I was looking for something that might be more applicable for insurance agents of all sizes, and it quickly dawned on me…online reputation management.

As regular readers might recall, Kristi and I had our personal experience with the consumer side of online reputation management a couple months ago when a auto glass installation place pissed us off, and we took out our frustrations with the company over the Internet. Like most insurance agents, the auto glass place had no idea there was an issue, that is until it was too late and their online reputation was tarnished at best, and pretty much destroyed at worst.

Our experience of putting online media to work to express our unhappiness with the auto glass company might not be the norm right now, but in the future I think more and more people will think to go online when they have an issue wit a company, and if companies aren’t prepared for that shift, their online reputation could get gobbled up before they realize what’s hit them.

After doing a bit of research today on the topic of insurance agents and their online reputations, I was both enthused by the opportunities and a little freaked out by the potential channels of destruction already in place for insurance professionals.

On the plus side, as far as I can tell, there is a ton of opportunity for agents to brand themselves and their agencies and grab a hold of the market they work in. I mean, there is no WineLibrary.tv in the insurance space…yeah, I know that is kind of simplifying the whole thing, but the point is that insurance agents aren’t putting a whole lot of effort into branding themselves and their businesses online.

On the flip side, the infrastructure for total online reputation destruction is already in place. I’m not just talking about sites like the Consumerist, I’m really more focused on the dozens of directory type sites out there, like Citysearch, Yelp, and Google and Yahoo! Local which allow user submitted reviews. Right now, most insurance agents who are listed don’t have any reviews, but I think as time goes on, that will change. And as my experience has shown, the first person to think to leave a review for you isn’t going to be someone who loves you to death, if you know what I’m saying.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to diving deeper into this subject. I think online reputation management is going to be one of the many fields that is created by the emergence of user generated content, user participation on the web, and the increased reliance of people on the Internet as a resource and source of objective reviews and opinion.

I’ll speak about this topic more as I dig deeper into it, but for now, maybe do a couple Google searches tonight to see what your online reputation is. Google your name and your companies name. If you’re surprised with what you find, you’re not alone. Just know there are ways to get a better grasp on your search results, and in coming posts I’ll tell you how.