Category Archives: Videos

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The “Unintended Consequences” of the Neal Bill

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In the video below, Swiss Re has done a marvelous job using new media to help advocate its position against “The Neal Bill” (HR 3424) that is aiming to impose a new tax on foreign reinsurers — something most of the stakeholders in the insurance industry are against.

The Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS), a nonprofit organization that represents risk managers (and publishes this blog … and pays my salary), is also firmly opposed due to the fact that any tax on the reinsurance industry will only be passed on first to the insurance industry and then to insurance buyers. Taxing reinsurers will also threaten capacity and make coverage harder to find at any price.

National Underwriter wrote a good, informative piece explaining such:

Speaking for RIMS, Scott Clark, risk and benefits officer for the Miami-Dade County School Board and a RIMS board liaison, said, “The group has always opposed proposals to restrict market access to insurance capacity.”

Mr. Scott called the legislation “a great threat to insurance capacity in the United States.”

“Over the past decade it has been proposed several times, not surprisingly, by a handful of U.S. insurers which seek to gain via a protected market that would allow them to charge higher prices,” Mr. Clark said.

Honestly, the changes proposed by this bill represent yet another example of how poorly Washington understands insurance. Advocates of the bill probably think they’re helping out insurance buyers by giving U.S. insurers an advantage. They’re not. No one — not reinsures, not insurers, not brokers, not commercial buyers, not personal line buyers — will benefit here.

And Swiss Re sums that all up perfectly in 140 seconds. (For more on the issue, you can check out www.KeepInsuranceCompetitive.com)

Waterskiing in a Flooded Parking Lot is Fun, Illegal

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With all the devastation and heartache following tornadoes and flooding throughout the South, many people are looking for something to lift their spirits. Two Tennessee men recently decided to get a little leisure time in by doing some waterskiing. In a flooded parking lot. Which is frowned upon.

While providing great entertainment for the crowd of onlookers, the two police officers in attendance were none-too-thrilled with the apparently illegal activity, which led to the arrests of both skier and skipper driver. Of course someone was there to YouTube it, and you have to at least applaud the two for their ingenuity.

Fortunately for all, the police did not react like the security force at a recent Phillies game, as the mixture of Tasers and water is probably not ideal for non-lethal force. Remember: Don’t try this at home, especially if the roads by your home are not covered with a foot of water.

See their shenanagins below. (h/t @SteveAnderson)

How the National Weather Service Uses Weather Balloons to Predict Disasters

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It’s great to see FEMA embracing online video and pumping out so much interesting disaster-related content. As the agency reiterated recently, education and awareness are the keys to preparedness and, these days, there is no easier way to get the message out then with free-to-distribute online media.

Well done, FEMA.

This one is about how the National Weather Service helps predict disasters by using weather balloons. It clearly wasn’t direct by Matin Scorsese, but it is interesting and gives a nice, behind-the-scenes look at how NWS does its job.

The Risks of Social Media

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social media twitter

For our October 2009 issue of Risk Management magazine, I wrote a cover story on the risks of social media. We called it “The New Wild West” given the lawless (or at least “precedent-less”) nature that today’s online world shares with the days of Jesse James and Billy the Kid.

Our main goal was to introduce the topic of social media — and all of its many risks — to an audience that may not be as familiar with this emerging threat as it should be. Companies and risk managers are always racing to keep up with the latest tech risks, but preventing viruses and securing databases is generally a responsibility for IT. Well, even though social media exists in the digital domain, many of its risks are old-world issues. There are real compliance, legal, reputational, privacy and intellectual property concerns in addition to all the IT exposures.

In the weeks and months to come, we will be taking an in-depth look at each of these issues individually in our Risks of Social Media post series, but, to kick things off, I just want to punctuate the key takeaway from what I wrote in October.

“Employers are going to be held liable for the behavior of their employees,” said Simonson. “Is harassment going on in social media? Breach of proprietary information? Employees can easily leak trade secrets.”

These things are not new risks, per se, but it is now much easier for one foolish error by an employee to become a significant issue. Once an employee hits the “reply” or “post” button, the information is now public and, because it is digital, it is essentially engraved in stone on a server somewhere.

“Users are becoming their own unedited publishers,” said Simonson. “I don’t think the risks are all that different from the past. There’s just a much greater chance for it. In the past, controlling all published material was easy.”

As always, what your company does can hurt you. And that includes all the individual actions of all your employees. Now, many of those actions just happen to occur outside of the physical world — and they occur instanteously and with less forethought than ever before, which makes them inherently more difficult to manage.

But you can do it. First, you just need to understand exactly what these risks are.

In addition to reading my aforementioned article, I encourage you to watch the video below from a panel discussion I recently participated in. (I’m the bald guy with the beard.) We gave a 90-minute presentation for an event hosted by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), and the clip is a 10-minute “best of” video that offers some nice insights into (1) monetizing opportunities, (2) restricting employee access to social networking sites, (3) who should “own” social media, (4) the legal risks of social media, and (5) “going viral.”

You can listen to the 30-minute, audio version at the IABC Philadelphia website as well.

And, most importantly, be sure to check back here regularly to read more from our Risks of Social Media series. (In the meantime, you can also see some of our previous social media coverage here.)

For more on social media generally and how it is transforming how we interact with one another and distribute information, watch this video.