In the ongoing dialogue about the pros and cons of how involved to get in the social media revolution comes a real monkey wrench: Unvarnished.

In case you haven’t already heard, Unvarnished, which is currently in beta testing, is a new social networking site that will allow “people rating” — from the sounds of it, kind of like LinkedIn on crack cocaine.

Actually, from the description, Unvarnished seems to more closely resemble sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, except what’s being ranked (or ranked on) isn’t a company, it’s you. Yes, Unvarnished allows anonymous reviewers to take potshots, not at your business, but you as a business professional.

From the Getunvarnished.com site:

Unvarnished reviews help you get the inside scoop on other business professionals, providing candid assessments of coworkers, potential hires, business partners, and more.

By contributing Unvarnished reviews, you can share your knowledge of other professionals, giving credit where credit is due, and valuable feedback where needed.

Lastly, your own Unvarnished profile, which you may create yourself or claim one that has been created for you, helps you take control of and build your own professional reputation. Get recognition for your accomplishments and actively manage your career growth.

Doesn’t sound so scary — except that the reviews are “reviewer identities are hidden from reviews,” and your own profile can either be created by you, or someone who is reviewing you. When this is the case, you can “claim your profile,” and “actively build and manage” your professional reputation. Unfortunately, this seems to primarily consist of defending yourself against anonymous slings and arrows tossed by virtually anyone who chooses to do so.

And although there appears to be a set of review guidelines (reviews should be “business based,” “well written” and “honest”), these seem more like suggestions than rules. There doesn’t appear to be any moderation system, something that’s in place on even the weirdest of message boards. And with 400,000 professional profiles already loaded into the Unvarnished system, your name might already be up there.

The hue and cry has already gone up over the implications of Unvarnished. Seems to me it would be a legal nightmare (or dream, depending on what side you’re coming from), including claims of defamation, privacy violations and libel, not to mention EPL suits if an Unvarnished review results in hiring, firing or job discrimination issues.  A recent Chicago Tribune article quotes Unvarnished developer Peter Kazanjy as calling his brainchild “big and scary,” and a Harvard pundit describing it as empowering “hate, exclusion and polarization.”

Granted, some of the fluffy recommendations on LinkedIn, most solicited by the recipients, should be taken with a grain of salt. But rating a fellow human being isn’t the same as giving one star to a lousy restaurant or complaining about the dirty sheets at a chain motel. No matter how much Unvarnished may claim it’s only rating “professionalism,” the personal aspect is bound to leak in.

In the cutthroat business of insurance, where policies are constantly being shopped and switched, a couple of unsubstantiated bad reviews for an insurance agent can make or break a business. And unless you just started doing business yesterday, you’re bound to have a couple of complaints somewhere in your professional history.

I’d love to hear what you think about this latest wrinkle in social media. Does Unvarnished scare you?

It’s a growing reality that many of you may be personally familiar with: the return of the multigenerational home. And it’s also an opportunity for insurance agents.

According to a recent Pew Report as reported in the Washington Post:

The number of people living with several generations under one roof in the United States is at its highest point in 50 years, as families cope with ruinous job losses and foreclosures…

During the first year of the recession, the number of Americans living in such multi-generational families rose by 2.6 million, or more than 5 percent, from 2007 to 2008.

Now 49 million Americans — 16.1 percent of the population — live in homes with multiple generations. Many include adult children in their 20s…

Young adults are less likely to be married than they once were. The typical age of first marriage is five years later than it was in 1970 — 28 for men and 26 for women…

In a tough job market, many still live with their parents. Pew’sanalysis showed that 37 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds in 2009 were either out of the workforce or unemployed, a nearly four-decade high. The figure includes some college students.

According to the report, the multigenerational trend has been growing since the 1980s, in part because of the economy, but also because multigenerational homes are common for many ethnic groups.

It certainly wasn’t weird for my family. My parents were married right after World War II, and due to the lack of jobs and housing, went to live with my Italian grandmother in her two-flat on Paulina Street in Chicago. Turnaround is fair play: when my parents moved to the suburbs, Grandma came with and lived with us for many years. At one point, so did my Uncle Jimmy and my cousin Millie. It was pretty fun having a childhood in what amounted to a boarding house. Likewise, after I married and had kids, and my mother died, my father came to live with us. 

But the recession is what’s really driving the current trend. One of my best friends currently has her late-20s son, his wife, and two toddlers living with her and her husband. Other households include unmarried, recently graduated children in their early 20s who can’t find jobs.

For independent insurance agents, this trend is just another way to solidify your relationship with your customers. With so many of you now writing personal lines coverage — or doing so to round out a favored commercial client — it pays to ask some probing questions come renewal time.

Things to think about:

• How many additional drivers are on the client’s auto policy?
• With more people living in the home — including the elderly and small children — should the customer increase his/her homeowners’ liability limits?
• Is anyone living in the household running an at-home business (child care, consulting, etc.)? What additional insurance coverages are needed to protect the homeowner and the consultant?
• Is the home being used for the storage of additional property, such as furniture, cars, or “toys” like boats and motorcycles? Is additional coverage needed to protect these items?
• Is everyone in the household covered under some form of health insurance? If not, can you advise them about changes in the healthcare law that will make coverage available to them? And for now, are there options available to them under COBRA or other sources?

The creative agent/broker can come up with many more.

What are your customers telling you about changed conditions in their living situations? And what other coverage questions come up in relation to a multigenerational household?

There’s a heated discussion about a cold subject going on at the AA&B LinkedIn readers’ network.

It all started when a reader posted a link to a blog entry by sales consultant Steve Kloyda about his unpleasant experience with a salesperson who cold called him, then lied that he’d already spoken to him — when Kloyda knew he hadn’t.

It sound innocuous enough, but the posting started a debate among several readers about the ethics — and efficiency — of the practice of cold calling, and the right and wrong way to do it. The debate essentially boiled down to what exactly is acceptable in cold calling, and morphed into  a discussion of more controversial cold calling practices, such as dropping in on prospects unannounced, or following a script on a phone cold call that’s clearly fake. Even AA&B columnist Chris Amrhein got in on the controversy, defending the practice of the drop-in while reviling the fakery of an aggressive canned pitch, a la the “boiler room” denizens in David Mamet’s masterful play (and movie) on the sales mentality, “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Agents and brokers understandably pride themselves on being professionals, on acting as “trusted advisors” to their customers. Producers practicing overly aggressive cold calling run the risk of compromising that perception and casting the profession back into the image of the hand-gripping, fast-talking used car salesman.

Everyone agrees cold calling is a part of any sales job. But my question to you is, how cold is your cold calling? A sale is a sale, and these are tough times. Would you go as far as the salesman who called Steve Kloyda and lie in your pitch? Do you consider “drop-in” visits to prospects acceptable or anathema? Have you ever crossed the fine line between cold call and telemarketer?

In short, what’s OK in this area and what isn’t?

To paraphrase the late, great Rodney Dangerfield, independent insurance agents don’t get no respect.

It’s bad enough that a recent career survey ranked your profession below janitors, bookbinders and even editors (see my related blog, ”At least you’re not a roustaboust“). Now, the latest Forrester Research consumer survey reveals that your customers don’t even find you fun.

The survey, conducted over the Internet last October, gave independent agents an overall score of “okay” from 4,600 consumers who had interacted with a variety of companies. Forrester asked consumers to rate insurance companies on three areas: “meets needs,” “easy to work with” and “enjoyable.” Several insurers, including USAA, Liberty Mutual, Progressive and The Hartford, were ranked “good” by respondents. But when it came to being “enjoyable,” consumers rated independent agents “poor,” while giving them “good” ratings for “meets needs” and “easy to work with.”

What does this mean? Evidently it’s not an ease-of-use issue; respondents ranked agents “good” on meeting customer needs and being easy to work with. And it’s not just a carrier issue, either. Savvy carriers know, and slower carriers are discovering, that it’s not enough to simply provide ease of use through technology and real-time services — in fact, that’s just the starting point (see this related article on Deep Customer Connections’ recent survey on agents telling carriers they need more ease of use).  

From just looking at the numbers, the problem seems to be with the agency system itself, as several carriers got high marks from consumers as being enjoyable to work with. Granted, the results may be skewed because of the focus on personal lines insurance purchasers, but this dissing of insurance agents shouldn’t be the case. It all boils down to the perception of insurance agent as unnecessary middleman, useful perhaps, but more likely just another roadblock between the customer and the underwriter.

The irony is, agents are in a much better position to deliver real customer satisfaction — and yes, even “fun” – than any insurer ever could. In our monthly agency success stories, we speak with agency owners, especially those in small towns or rural areas, who don’t think twice about emergency customer visits, of knowing the names and ages of teenaged drivers about to be added to a family’s auto policy, of engaging customers in intimate conversations to discover their plans for the future and how insurance coverage can help protect those plans. These agencies and their employees are also connecting to their communities through charitable work, recruitment at area schools, and other ways to create engagement with customers and prospects. It’s a testament to the level of service that every independent agent should be providing to valued customers, especially at a time when every customer counts.

And inevitably in today’s world, part of that customer outreach is through intelligently developed and executed social media planning. Maybe that’s where the smart carriers have an edge on agencies — they have the financial wherewithal and staffing to plunge right in. (Luckily, you don’t need these resources to make good use of this new tool: check out ACT’s recommendations for creating a social media policy for your independent agency). 

With more insurers, including traditional direct writers, using multiple distribution methods, the stakes are higher than ever for agents to prove themselves invaluable to their customers — not just by meeting their insurance needs in a smart and timely way, but by engaging with them on multiple levels.

What’s your agency doing to build your brand perception with your customers?

In George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm, the collective’s credo was ”All animals are equal” — until the leaders change the credo to ”All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

The same might be said for regulators’ handling of contingent commissions.

In one of my first blog posts at “Agent for Change,” I threw out the question of whether contingent commissions should be an industry practice, considering the controversy surrounding them. At the time, N.Y. AG Cuomo was reexamining the issue and the consensus was that contingent commissions were bad.

More than a year later, the tide may be turning — at least for some. This week, state regulators and AGs in New York, Illinois and Connecticut have allowed Willis, Aon and Marsh to bring back contingent commissions. The thinking goes that the three brokers and their carriers have implemented enough transparency to free them from the settlements they signed in 2005. The new agreement also reduces the brokers’ disclosure requirements in all 50 states to that required in the New York agent/broker disclosure regulation, released last week. 

This rankles Main Street agents, who are bothered by the fact that the New York DOI felt it necessary to promulgate its new regulation as a condition of the big brokers’ release, said Wes Bissett, senior counsel for the Big I. They’re so bothered that IIABNY plans on filing a legal challenge, both to the “substance of the regulation and the manner in which is was promulgated,” Bissett said in a phone interview. “It is ironic and disappointing to us that thousands of innocent Main Street agents are facing a series of costly new burdens and mandates so that the world’s three largest insurance brokers can be freed from settlements they voluntarily entered into five years ago,” he said. “The result is thousands of Main Street agents will be paying the price for what they did.”

Calling the New York regulations “unnecessary” and a “hypothetical, law-school approach” to transparency, Bissett said smaller retail agents required to follow the regulations can’t simply use a boilerplate approach to compliance, and often need to work with outside counsel to develop the right approach, making the process time consuming and expensive at a time when agencies need to watch every penny.

And relying on a ruling from a regulator rather than going through the legislative process is wrong, too. “Public policy should be left to lawmakers, not regulators,” he added.

PIA National agrees, calling the New York regulation “burdensome, unnecessary and unwarranted.” Through amicus briefs, public testimony and other action, PIANY has continued to oppose the reg — even though it does not ban contingency commissions, something PIA members have members have vehemently supported, maintaining that Main Street agents are not mega-brokers and contingent commission income is critical to their ability to serve their clients.

Not surprisingly, more sanguine on the subject is CIAB, whose spokesperson in an e-mail stated that, “We’ve been long-time supporters of transparency, and long believed that intermediaries should have the benefit of the same regulatory and legal environments, with the freedom to determine their own business models.  Now that they do, we believe it’s time for the industry to put this issue behind us and move forward – it’s been a distraction for far too long.”

Unfortunately, the end of the issue may not be in sight. With consumers still smarting from financial services bailouts and excuses, overturning some brokers’ transparency requirements could very well bring new public attention to a practice that’s contentious at best.

If you watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech last night, you’ll know that although priorities may have shifted, he still supports both healthcare and financial services reform — the most recent permutation of which includes the elimination of insurers’ antitrust exemption. Unfortunately, to politicians and people in general, ”insurance,” “health insurance” and “financial services” are three dirty words that mean the same thing: bilking the public.

You might say that ever since the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act,  banks seem to have gotten the better end of the association with insurance.  And a study released this week suggests that banks are banking on insurance — specifically, agents and brokers — more than ever. A recent report by Michael White Associates LLC shows that insurance brokerage fee income for more than 7,000 savings banks and bank holding companies hit $3.05 billion in third-quarter 2009, a 11.7% increase over last year and the highest level in the last five quarters.  These fees include commissions and other fees earned from selling insurance products, as well as referrals for credit, life, health, property-casualty and title insurance.

The top 3 gainers for brokerage fees in the first three quarters of 2009 were:

1. Wells Fargo & Co., $1.38 billion, up 5.34% from the first nine months of 2008
2. Citigroup Inc., $771 million, down 19.27% from the year-ago period
3. BB&T Corp., $699.9 million, 11.8% gain from the year-ago period.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” to paraphrase Seinfeld. We’ve interviewed many agents whose businesses are affiliated with banks, and most seem very happy with the arrangement. But in the course of the last year or so, as “financial services” has become synonymous with shaft, trickery and deceit, maybe it isn’t such a good thing to be lumped into that category.

Just this week, PCI CEO David Sampson warned attendees at the group’s annual executive roundtable that property-casualty insurance could very well get caught up in the “wave of political populism” that’s crashing down on banks, health insurers and other financial services institutions. So far, agents’ enviable position as trusted advisors to their customers has helped them dodge that wave. Let’s hope it’s a position we can retain through the rough times ahead.

The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud‘s recently released interim survey of state insurance fraud bureaus includes some predictable stuff, and a couple of surprises. For instance, it’s no surprise that the bureaus reported that all types of insurance fraud were up, and that their operating budgets were down.

What did surprise me, though, was that agent fraud is the third most prevalent form of fraud being reported by the bureaus, right behind bogus health insurance and drug diversion:

Suspect cases involving insurance agents increased substantially year-to-date in 2009. A total of 69% of respondents said agent cases were up slightly higher or much higher so far in 2009, while a quarter reported no change. Only one bureau said the number of cases involving agents had fallen in 2009.

We contacted CAIF’s Dennis Jay, who minced no words:

Let me be clear upfront: The vast majority of agents are honest and committed to their clients’ best interests. But a small and disturbingly growing minority are painting the entire profession as a bunch of crooks. .

Survey results and CAIF’s own database of agent fraud cases culled from news stories and other sources shows a steady increase in agent cases since 2007 through 2009. “This suggests agent fraud cases may be rising, but also may reflect increased crackdowns by insurers, fraud bureaus, state AGs and other fraud fighters to better detect agent scams,” Jay said. “Or it may reflect both trends. At bottom, agent scams are a significant consumer problem, and constant headache for insurers and state regulators alike.”

Stealing premiums without buying the promised coverage is one of the most common forms of agent fraud. “It’s easy to commit, and can leave clients dangerously uncovered when they have a claim,” Jay said. “Some agents are selling bogus health coverage, which is spreading rapidly around the U.S. We’re also seeing producers selling overpriced life products clients may not need, want or understand. Seniors especially are frequent victims of annuities scams. ”

Crooked agents also are selling “shady investments in non-insurance areas far out of their insurance expertise, and often without a license,” Jay said. “Smaller businesses in high-risk operations also have been sold fake liability coverage or had premiums stolen. They’re vulnerable because liability premiums tend to be high and coverage isn’t always easy to find.”

Agent fraud is the Mr. Hyde opposite of the Dr. Jekyll of agent-as-expert-consultant, with wise guys using their industry knowledge to exploit the average Joe, Jay said. “Dishonest producers coldly exploit their position of trust. They’re authorities in a highly complex, technical arena that most people don’t easily understand. So average, trusting consumers tend to believe whatever agents tell them. This is especially true of seniors, who’ve built up larger portfolios that crooked agents try to drain. The profession’s leadership and carriers also keep urging the public that agents are professionals that people can trust. So when people believe the marketing messages, trust their agent and then get swindled, that leaves a bad taste in the public’s mouth.”

To avoid public backlash, Jay recommended that the industry get behind some serious housecleaning.

The agency community’s associations across all lines should be challenged to aggressively help weed out the bad actors before state legislators take punitive actions and the agency profession’s public image among customers plummets lower. If people think they can’t trust producers, their first temptation might be to try direct writers. There’s so much at stake competitively that the entire agency community, especially the leadership, should aggressively clean out its closet.

In our December look at agency Internet marketing, the first question in our reader survey was, “Does your agency/brokerage have a Web site?” The response was 81%. Why not 100%, you might ask.

Another person asking was Duke Williams, a blogger and consultant on agency Internet use. Last month, Duke decided to conduct an informal survey of “feet on the street results for actual agency Web presence.” His methodology was simple: he used the “find an agent” feature on many insurance carrier Web sites, and Googled the term “car insurance city name state name.” He used the SuperPages, YellowPages and about a half dozen other lists online.

In individually searching several locations in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, he found:

• 248 independent agencies
• 49 Nationwide agencies
• 19 online-only agencies
• 51 State Farm agencies
• 26 Allstate agencies
• 7 Farmers agencies
• 7 Alpha agencies
• 2 Farm Bureau agencies
• 1 GEICO local agency
• 1 Direct General agency (rregional non-standard auto insurance carrier with owned agency locations)

While these results seem to indicate a strong presence for independent agencies, a closer look tells another story. Of the 248 independent agencies that came up in the search, only 64 — a paltry 25.8% — had a Web site, and only a fraction turned up in the Google “local results” search.

Delving deeper, Duke discovered that the agencies with Web sites weren’t consistent in functionality, even in non-real-time. For instance, 51.6% had quote request forms, but only 12.5% had “request a policy change” forms, and only 20.3% had “report a claim” forms. Not surprisingly, Duke reported that all the national direct writers had very high functionality.

While you could argue that Duke’s results are atypical — focused on a limited geographic area and a single line of business — you’d be missing the point. In every way, direct writers are making it easy for consumers to find and use their products and services — and it isn’t all about price.

Woody Allen once said that “80% of success is showing up.” When it comes to Web pages, the odds are even better if you show up with a functional product that makes it as easy as possible for people to use what you have to offer.

With all due respect, I think the researchers at Careercast.com must be, as the Brits say, “having us on.”

That’s the only conclusion I can come to after looking at their much-touted “Best Jobs for 2010” list, just up on their Web site.

Not so much that they rank the job of insurance actuary as No. 1. After all, the rankings are based on a combination of “environment, income, outlook, stress and physical demands.” The fact that actuaries make good money, wear nice suits and sit at a desk would obviously rank the profession higher on the list than, say, anything seen on the “Dirty Jobs” show.

Nor do I take much umbrage over most of the other top 10 jobs, including the predictable computer software designer and analyst, accountant (they’re in demand in all economies) and dental hygenist (although I beg to differ with the “stress” element of that job — when my son was young he once threw up on one).

But guess what: ”Insurance agent” came in at an unenviable No. 103, right between “telephone installer/repairer” and “artist (fine art).” While the job of insurance agent might well include elements of both those jobs, I find it hard to believe that the job outlook for insurance agents is only one step above that of an aspiring paint-flinger. (It’s gotta be the stress level: 63.322 compared with 51.994 for artistes.)

Another position that handed me a laugh was that of “publication editor” (in the immortal words of Bozo the Clown, “Hey, that’s me! Wha-ha-ha-ha!”). Ink-stained wretches actually beat out insurance agents for job viability, coming in at No. 65. And although the fine print did concede that the hiring outlook for editors was “very poor,” this relatively high ranking completely ignores the fact that more U.S. print publications went down the tubes in the last two years than in the history of publishing.

I also had to laugh at other job entries that beat out insurance agents on the list — including “historian” at No. 5 (hey, all you business school students — ditch the MBA and start focusing on the Punic Wars!), “author” at No. 74 (riiiiight…), “janitor” at No. 83 and “bookbinder” at No. 91. Although ballerinas, astronauts, cowboys and pretty-pretty princesses didn’t make the cut, this list suggests that even your wildest kindergarten career fantasy would have been a better choice than what you’re doing now.

Still, you can take some comfort in the fact that you’re not in the career that came in No. 200: “roustabout.” No, not in the circus, but on oil rigs. Careercast.com describes it as a job with good earning potential, but with long hours, dirty and dangerous working conditions, isolation and high stress. Oh, wait…sound familiar?

When the countdown ends on 2009, it also brings an end to the first decade of the new millennium. It’s hard to believe how much our world has changed in those 10 short years, from global terrorism (still happening) to the financial meltdown to the ascendancy of the Internet. Let’s look at just a few:

Everything tech. Yes, the Internet was around at the turn of the century, but it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. Since then, a whole generation has grown up with this technology, and that generation is our future employees and customers. While all this has made our lives a lot easier, it’s also phased out a lot of what we were confortable with and raised the bar on customer expectations. A mixed blessing, to say the least.

A world of new risks. The world is smaller, and the risks you underwrite are not like anything that’s been insured before. Acts of terrorism, environmental exposures, professional liability related to new technology standards and expectations — they’re all in the mix, with new risks coming at us every day. The challenge for our industry will be to keep one step ahead of anything new that comes along.

A bigger, smaller agency universe. The agency/brokerage M&A boom may have slowed to a trickle, but the activity of the past 10 years has altered the landscape forever. Big brokerages have gotten bigger by increasingly targeting the midmarket customers that have long been the bread and butter of the average agency. Conversely, the latest IIABA Agency Universe numbers suggest that smaller, startup agencies are on the rise, thanks in large part to the availability of sophisticated automation systems that allow them to compete with bigger players.

More eyes on the industry. Public/political scrutiny of the insurance industry is nothing new, but the seismic financial upheavals of the past 10 years — from the Enron fiasco in 2002 to last year’s subprime mortgage meltdown and AIG bailout and current healthcare debate — have put this most risk-averse industry in the spotlight more than ever before.

And while nobody can predict what the next 10 years will bring, it’s a safe bet that the trends we saw begin at the dawn of the century will continue to play a significant role going forward. And while 2009 was a good year in that we dodged a lot of bullets — from natural disasters to truly bad legislation — it’s inevitable that we’ll stand to take a hit from these and other problems in the future.

What were your biggest concerns in 2009, and what do you predict will dominate the headlines in 2010?