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Insurers tap new tools to reach the high-tech generation     (Copyright Thompson’s World Insurance News     Not to be redistributed by individual recipients.)     There is more to mastering new media than setting up a web page and a Facebook account, incoming Insurance Brokers Association of B.C. president Richard Pindral said at the group’s annual general meeting in Victoria.     Indeed, the Internet in general and social media sites in particular are essential for communicating with ‘Generation Y’ both as clients and as staff.     “That’s an issue that I see as a big problem,” he later told Thompson’s.     Working on his own website, Mr. Pindral found it wasn’t easy to transfer to the virtual world what he called “the soft skills” of brokers dealing face-to-face with clients.     “When we’re talking to a client it’s normally in real time,” he said. “I don’t want to set up a 24-hour call centre in some foreign country dealing with my clients.     “I’d like to be able to express something in real time to them (or) if not in real time, in a user-friendly fashion.”     Some brokers — or the consultants they hire — see a website as a vehicle to entice customers to visit the bricks-and-mortar office while others insist the site should be a stand-alone virtual store where the transactions take place.     Mr. Pindral says it must be a bit of both.     “We’re going to have to have a hybrid where we can tempt people to come into the office store to communicate with us.     “But — and I know this from my son — the younger generation does in fact buy online.”     Meanwhile, The Co-operators is ramping up its use of social media for its agents who wish to have a presence on a networking site. The insurer has developed a Facebook template for them.     “Right now we’re encouraging any agent that wishes to invest the time to have a Facebook presence,” the insurer’s Leonard Sharman said. Much more in our July 5 2010 edition. If you are not a regular reader, go to www.thompsonsnews.com and click on subscribe on the right hand side of the page.        Thompson’s World Insurance News P.O. Box 1027,  Waterloo, Ontario,  Canada  N2J 4S1 Tel: 519-579-2500 Fax: 519-745-7321 mpub@sympatico.ca THOMPSON’S WORLD INSURANCE NEWS , Canada’s only independent weekly for p&c insurance professionals, has been the industry’s most trusted news source since 1988.