Is social media a 'hot' insurance topic any more?

For the last few years, there has been standing room only at conference break-out sessions dealing with social media.  I doubt this is the case any more.  


This is fine as long as you don't have to speak at a conference (C5 Data Risk, Cyber and Network Security Insurance) next Wednesday on the subject of social media insurance exposures, like I do... 


Now I am not saying social media isn't fascinating, nor that it's time has past (I don't think we have reached the end of the beginning yet, never mind the beginning of the end) but I think (and hope) that the hype with which the insurance industry has surrounded social media has subsided to the point where we can look at it objectively.


Like many 'new things', our industry was spooked by social media when it first burst on the scene.  Now generally, if something spooks us, it probably spooks our clients too and this is a good thing because spooked clients buy more insurance.  It is just scary to sell coverage for something that spooks us as much as it spooks our clients and so coverage for spooky exposures is a 'hot' topic until we realise it wasn't quite as spooky as we first thought.


And yet...


I think we got spooked about the wrong part of social media.  'Media' worried us more than 'social', where we were spooked by the new scale and scope that 'social' brought to 'media' exposures like IP infringement, breach of confidentiality and invasion of privacy for example.   This spooked us because we understand that media exposures are very real exposures and we further assumed that if they were going to exist on a hitherto unimaginable scale, this was a very spooky thing.


The thing is though that media related claims just haven't materialised and anyway,  customers just don't seem to be as spooked about this exposure as we thought they would be and so haven't been buying as much of the coverage as we hoped they would.


What they have been doing though is getting involved with 'social' in a big way - a much bigger way than anything we have so far seen in the insurance industry.  For example, 'social' has moved way beyond transforming how businesses market their products to fundamentally affect core business processes and models.  


I am not sure our industry has fully grasped the implications of 'social'.   It is not simply a question of thinking about specific policies for new spooky exposures but how social will gradually come to affect nearly every type of policy we sell.  


'Social' will inevitably change (I think fundamentally) how both insurance buyers and sellers understand and transfer risk between them and so that is what I have decided to talk about next Wednesday.