Insurance Day : Forgetting to renew

Commercial leads are jeopardised by page neglect.

The Site

Insurance Day, a news and information provider for the UK insurance industry, has a problem keeping up with its own activities.

Insurance Day’s site, IDnewscentre, includes an Events section led by a page about a series of four Insurance Day Summits “to provide knowledge and expertise in locations worldwide and an opportunity to network with your peers”. Each has a link to a dedicated summits website, but all show dates from 2008 while a note on the page says they “are currently included in the 2007/2008 schedule, which is subject to change”. The page also has a Job of the Week ad on behalf of London-based brokers that clicks through to an undated job description.

Other events in the section are previews for things that have already happened (two of the four in 2006, one in 2007). However, the summits website does feature only forthcoming events for 2009.

The Takeaway

For sure most people coming to IDnewscentre will head for the daily publications and many may never register Events let alone explore it. But the fact that no one from Insurance Day itself seems to have visited the section in a while is still potentially damaging – and not just to perceptions of its competence in keeping on top of events. Summits need to put delegates on seats – and never more so than in this ‘credit crunch’ year. We know that Insurance Day has more scheduled for 2009, but how many people will click a link attached to an out-of-date ad to discover this? Every potential delegate who doesn’t is a lead that has to be generated somewhere else.

The cobwebs clinging to the summits page also curtail the effectiveness of the job ad – has it been there since the page was last refreshed? – which, if it is current, should have the brokers who placed it thinking about filing a claim for compensation.

First published on 26 February, 2009