He's the Senior Consultant for Social Media at Nationwide Insurance.
Nationwide Insurance hired a full-time guy to oversee their social media. That's huuuuge. Shawn's job (according to his linkedin.com profile) is "establishing the enterprise social media strategy and advocating social media within the organization." (Watch your back Shawn. I want that job.)
Shawn recently held a Twitter 101 seminar for his Nationwide associates and was kind enough to post his slides on a (what else?) social website dedicated to sharing presentations.
Slide 12 should be of special interest to any of you with 'boring old insurance accounts who cut all their advertising budgets this year...' It's a screen filled with some logos of corporate entities who are using Twitter. Among them: State Farm Insurance, Allstate, and of course Nationwide.
For any of you who've wondered why I send links to companies and articles and examples of businesses who are embracing new media as an option to traditional advertising -- THIS is the reason. Because, although they've reduced their spending on traditional media advertising, they are embracing and investing time AND MONEY into developing their social media efforts.
Become an expert in social media and apply the concepts of effective marketing principles to this new way of communicating to your audience and YOU will be the expert to whom they turn when they decide to reallocate advertising dollars to social media dollars. YOU can be the social media expert who gets rewarded for helping these companies strike up a dialogue with the audience that already loves YOUR brand and communicates through YOUR traditional media and social media tools.
