“You have to embrace it and engage with it.” That’s what Esurance says it does with negative commentary on the Web, noted the brand’s chief marketing officer, John Swigart, at the Nov. 5 2009 A.M. Best Insurance Marketing and Advertising Summit in New York.

The auto insurer in 2004 created “Erin Esurance” (a cartoon character fighting off villains to insure her car) to deliver the message: it’s easy to quote-buy-print your auto insurance policy. Esurance’s brand and advertising icon are well known in the 30 states in which the insurer does business, primarily because of $94 million of TV advertising in 2008. What’s more, according to TNS Media Intelligence, Esurance has pumped up its TV ad buy by 45% thus far in 2009.

But TV advertising isn’t enough, curiously. Esurance also has made a commitment to use social media sites to follow up with customers after the sale, Swigert said. He cited an example of a Esurance customer who complained on Twitter: “@Esurance is saying my policy with $55k coverage doesn’t cover my roommates things. This is not going to be fun.”

To make a long story (about a month long, it turns out) short, Esurance’s eagle-eyed social media monitors replied to the customer via Twitter, then got in touch by e-mail and resolved the issue to the customer’s satisfaction. Esurance got a public thank you, noted Swigert, from the customer: “@Esurance Thank you for everything! You really came through. Guess I’m a customer for life now.”

That’s a nice ending to the story for Esurance.

But there’s also some good news in this story for independent insurance agents and brokers: Even the big ad spenders need to work one-on-one with customers. That kind of personal follow-up and response to consumers is what independent insurance agencies do every day of the week.

The big-ad-spender brands have to perform on the same nitty-gritty issues (read: claims) as do independent agents and their carriers. The difference today is that social media has made the process viewable to others, if and when any given consumer chooses to make it public. There’s a new public record, and it’s called “social media.”

Independent agents who are active in social networking have had this epiphany. Here’s what Nibby Priest of Vaughn Insurance Agency Co., Henderson, Kentucky, said in an Insurance Journal Webinar in September:

Q: In opening up your business to Facebook fan page, you are obviously opening up your business to negative feedback. How do handle negative comments?

Nibby Priest: “That’s a great question. Sometimes people don’t want to be a part of social media because they don’t want somebody to say something negative. You know bad things are not always bad; sometimes you need to know about them. So many times a client will leave you and you don’t even know what you did wrong. So, at least this gives an avenue and gives you, as business owners, the opportunity to go in there and correct it.”

Enough said.