What do you get when you mix personal blogs with other blogs, websites and social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter? The answer is a powerful way to build and extend agent and broker brand messaging.

Interactive blogs are a potent means of expressing opinions and advice on wide-ranging insurance and risk management topics. In the never-say-die world of the Internet, blogs also live forever, serving to educate, inform and arouse the curiosity of readers well after publishing. For agents and brokers, blogs further serve the purpose of creating and maintaining another personal form of engagement with customers, fostering improved client relations in an effort to improve satisfaction and retention.

Not all blogs are alike. Some, such as those featured on PropertyCasualty360 (propertycasualty360.com/blogs) provide deep content on risk and litigation trends, loss prevention strategies and more industry-specific data like mergers and acquisitions. Other blogs, like RiskConversation .com, are more tactical—focusing on a specific area of risk affecting a particular market segment, such as fine-art exposures for high-net-worth individuals, cyber risks for media broadcast organizations, or managing the risk of wildfire for homeowners in fire-prone regions.