FrienderBenders.com is social media and user-generated content. Visitors to the site can choose from among four bad driving characters: Texting Tessa, Make-up Mary, Johnny Distracto, or Hungry Horatio and add their own photos and choose from one of the sound effects.

Do you want to tease one of your friends about eating in the car? You can send him a Hungry Horatio complete with a picture and sound effect. The application creates a short Flash animation of a funny car crash featuring the unique bad driving character you created.

FrienderBenders is meant to be social. You can share your funny animation with your friends via email, save it to Facebook or other social networks, or even embed it on your blog so visitors to your site can see your creative talents.

If you’d like a walk-through of the application, here’s an interview I did on TechWebTV with David Berlind of Information Week at Web 2.0 demonstrating the site:

Click over to FrienderBenders.com and be sure to come back and let me know what you think. Feedback welcome!

Users of CoberTOUR(sm) can get an overview of insurance coverages in their state or dive deeper and learn even more about particular coverages. Plus, there are also example stories about how people may use particular coverages, which I think are helpful. Plus, people who are bilingual can switch from Spanish to English or visa versa.

Initial internal feedback has been positive. However, if you have time to check it out, please let me know what you think. It’s been so much fun working on such an interactive product that is also educational. I learned a bunch about insurance in the process and from the project team that transculturated the content, did the video shoot, and developed the technical pieces — they were all fantastic (and so nice about my broken Spanish).

These are flowers I’ve planted on the back patio. I’m loving the colors!

So much has happened since I posted last. I’ve accepted a full-time job with Allstate as a Marketing Manager, with responsibilities in social media, community management, and project management of interactive web projects. It’s really a fabulous job that draws on the expertise I’ve developed over the past few years.

I’ve also moved to Wheeling, IL. For those of you not familiar with northern Illinois, it’s a northwest suburb of Chicago. I’ve discovered that the people here are so nice and friendly. My mom was here for a few days to help me unpack and she remarked on it too. Plus, living here is a breeze of a commute. It’s wonderful being so close to work.

The weather was beautiful today on the last day of May. Any callers this afternoon had to endure voicemail, as I was out enjoying the day on my motorcycle. 150 miles of sunshine, lake views, beautiful houses, and waving to other bikers. I had a fabulous time.

And, it’s time to close for now. I promise not to let so much time pass before posting again. Hope you’re all doing well!

Ogilvy created the design and Lithium is hosting the site. I worked with some really talented people from both organizations to launch this site. I just have to mention the cool icons Ogilvy created. If you register, you’ll be able to check them out. However, all of Lithium’s work is behind the scenes to keep the boards up and functioning as they should.

For me personally, given my research interest in networks, this project is right up my alley. I hope to learn a lot more over the coming months about how people communicate on the boards. By the way, if you have any community moderation and management resources to recommend, please be sure to leave a comment below.

One other thing I want to mention is the Terms of Use. Usually these documents are not much fun to read and we all agree to variations of these any time we register with a new site. However, I do have to say that I’m particularly happy with the Allstate Authorized Users paragraph because it requires Allstate employees to disclose their connection to Allstate. While this point may not add much to the legal provisions of the document, I thought it important from a social media perspective, and I’m glad I was able to keep it in the final version. And, now that I’ve disclosed my connection, and even though I’m not an Allstate employee, I’ll need to add a disclaimer to my sidebar to the tune of: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Allstate’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

You can also check out the User Guidelines. I think Item #1 about not posting specific insurance advice is the one that I’ll need to watch the most as conversations take place. Because of how the insurance industry is regulated, that is a key provision of the document and something I’ll need to monitor.

More topics are planned for the year, but we really want to see what develops. Check it out if you have time, and I’ll be interested if you have any feedback for me.