Is social media really suitable for all brands? Irrespective of its growing popularity, there are any number of low involvement categories that don’t really seem to fit the social mould. The insurance industry is one of the first that comes to mind. As Forrester’s prominent social computing analyst, Jeremiah Owyang writes on his blog “social media isn’t great for everything, let’s use our heads, not everything is a nail . . . in general, most financial and insurance industries are going to fall ust behind the curve of mainstream adoption when it comes to social media tools, they rightfully will wait and vet out what works and what doesn’t”

But one Australian insurer is bucking that trend with its latest campaign on Myspace. Hosted by Jabba, Just Car Insurance, along with Intel Centrino are behind the Myspace Road Tour, a nation-wide mission to find Australia’s most extraordinary Myspace user. There are 10 “top” users, but judging by the comments it seems like Skarlett has it tied up so far. The Road Tour profile boasts 1437 friends with 70 comments (the promos just started though). There’s video content, an itinerary, an overview of the top 10 as well as Jabba’s top tunes to listen to and download.

I think this is a brilliant way for a car insurance company to dive into the social media space. There are obvious synergies between road trips and car insurance, and even if the campaign doesn’t directly result in acquisitions (social media rarely does), it’s still a fantastic way to build brand awareness and equity.

Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 5:05 pm MySpace. Follow repsonses to this entry through the RSS feed, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.