Invaluable insights into how social networking is changing the face of small business is at hand, as host Sean Walsh welcomes Robin Grant, MD of We Are Social, to the studio. As well as advice on social media marketing from Robin, we will also hear from Heather Gorringe, founder and director of Wiggly Wigglers. The rural England based natural gardening company recently won the inaugural Global Dell Small Business Excellence Award. Using tools such as Facebook, podcasting and blogging, it serves 90,000 customers worldwide and delivers its products across Europe.

By electing to use social media instead of traditional advertising, the company managed to cut its advertising budget by 80 per cent. Wiggly Wigglers currently boasts 898 fans on Facebook, with over 170 discussion topics. The company developed its catalogue from Wiki ideas generated on its Facebook page by experts and customers, and it presents its own podcasts from the "Wiggly sofa", which reach thousands of people every week.

If you have any questions for Robin about how social networking tools can help your business, please use the form to send them in early and we will do our best to answer them live during the show.

We will also have our regular round up of all the latest small business news from the British Chambers of Commerce.

H: Sean Walsh, host
R: Robin Grant, MD, We are Social, and member of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Social Media Council – www.iabuk.net
J: Jamie Martin, CEO Bid Media
HG: Heather Gorringe, Founder, Wiggly Wigglers
C: Charlie Broom, reporter

H: Well hello and welcome to the Small Business Advice TV brought to you by the British Chambers of Commerce and Dell in collaboration with Intel.  I’m Sean Walsh and in today’s program we’re concentrating exclusively on social media.  We’re going to introduce you to the likes of Facebook, Podcasting, RSS feeds, blogging and Twitter.  And then show you how they can help you drive sales and reduce your costs.  Well to help guide us through that technological maze, I’m joined by two experts live in the studio here today – Robin Grant, Robin Grant is the MD of We are Social, an agency which advises leading companies on how to create effective social, effective media marketing and communication campaigns – welcome to you Robin

R: Thank you Sean

H: And Jamie Martin whose the CEO of Bid Media, Jamie, welcome to the studio

J: Thank you

H: Well we’ll also have an interview with a small business owner at the very sharp end.  That award-winning owner is Heather Gorringe, and she runs a natural gardening company in Herefordshire called Wiggly Wigglers. Well Heather tells us how they’ve slashed their marketing costs and driven sales by harnessing the power of social media.  We’ll hear from her in a few moments. 

Ok gentlemen, I’m throwing the floor over to you two. Now, Social Media, we’ve heard a lot about it – in essence, what would you say it is Robin? What is it, how would you sum it up?

R: How would I sum up Social Media? I think it’s a return to our roots as human beings really, I think, you know humans are inherently social and I think you know there are lots of technologies out there on the Internet that just help us do that, help us be social with each other.  Whether that be blogs, whether that be Facebook, whether that be forums, whether that be Twitter – you know it’s all about people talking to each other and being social, being human

H: Jamie your take on that?  What does Social Media mean to you?

J: Well I personally think the Internet’s created a little bit of a cocoon effect, where people get out less, but it has created, and I do agree with Robin, a form of, of people being able to communicate with people with similar interests.  For me, social media as it relates to small business, is a fantastically low cost to market, or low route to market, where if you know what you’re doing and if you know how to get within the affinity group you’re trying to appeal to, you can move your brand into the marketplace very quickly and very cheaply

H: I mean it has a big impact, doesn’t it, in terms of traditional marketing versus new ways of engaging an audience or a target market isn’t it?

R: Yes I think if you get it right it can be a very low cost approach to reaching, you know, those people that are most important to you, people that really buy into what you’re doing and really believe in what you’re doing, and therefore with a very high propensity to buy from you.  You know it sometimes can be hard to reach large numbers of people, but you must remember it’s not about that, it’s about creating that sense of community and closeness

H: Jamie it’s not really about large numbers, it’s almost narrowcasting as opposed to broadcasting isn’t it, but hitting niche markets and relating to them?

J: Yes.  There’s a massive fragmentation in media and a lot of the main media companies that I deal with have felt this, because their target market, their eyeballs – so-to-speak – are now in the spare room looking at a screen rather than looking at the advertising in between the program, that they’ve paid a fortune to an American broadcaster for.  So there’s a bit of a problem for traditional media platforms.  So Rob’s coming at it from a  social point of view, and of course, within affinity groups there are niches where it does become very social, and people talk about horses or they talk about cars where there may not be transactions taking place. But if you’re a small business and you want to get a message to the people that are going to be potential buyers of your product, there are great ways to bring this across.  I’ll give you an example – talk about niche, we have a client in one of our consultancies who is a former trainer of Formula One drivers, of their mental state and how they prepare themselves for work.  And he wanted to start a business when he left a big team, within going to market to carting teams and smaller teams.  And he has used social networking very effectively to gain customers all over Europe.  And so it really does work.

H: Indeed – the ability to be able to reach out and touch your key target areas very effectively.  Ok we’ll pause it there gentlemen because in the last episode of Smallbusinessadvice.tv, the CEO of Dell Michael Dell spoke about a small firm which has used social media tools to dramatically expand their customer base.  He spoke about them in really glowing terms.  That small company is Wiggly Wigglers, as I mentioned earlier, and they supply the public with natural gardening products. Well we sent our reporter, Charlie Broom, out to the wilds of Herefordshire to find out more

Video footage

C: Can you tell us why you set your business up and how you went about it?

HG: Well we had a website since 1996 which was fairly early on, and I think somewhere around that period we made it an e-commerce site, and then we embarked on a lot of conventional advertising really, which was incredibly expensive.  We did get some editorials and we did share our enthusiasm with our existing customer base.  Expanded the product range, so at that point we sort of just did worm composting and by now you’ll have seen around you, we’ve got 1023 different products. Usually they’re things like wild flowers or vegetable seeds – anything from a farmer to a gardener, and anything to make you slightly more thinking about sustainability at home.  So we got this conventional sort of business, and then in 2005 I downloaded my first ever podcast which actually was a PR podcast called “For Immediate Release.”  And what struck me was– you know I don’t know much about PR but there was one chap in Amsterdam and one chap in Concord, California, making this show, which I was listening to on my pushbike, biking round the villages on my iPod.  And it just struck me – wow, I can make my own radio show.  And so we went to the UK’s first podcast conference on a Sunday. And we got there, and there was Capital Radio, Virgin, the BBC, and Wiggly Wigglers, and on the Wednesday we made our podcast and put it out the Monday after. And really that changed the whole emphasis of the way the business connects with its customers, potential customers, and also people that are thinking about changing the way that they garden.

C: How did the Social Media tools differ from the conventional marketing tools?

HG: We took 10 weeks of our conventional advertising budget and put it into 10 weeks of podcasts and within the first 10 weeks we had had an article in the San Francisco Chronicle asking in the gardening section, is Wiggly Wigglers podcast the best gardening podcast in the world?  And there was only 3 at that point that I could find, but even so, that coverage helped us. But then we started to get the emails back in, or the comments from the actual people that were listening to the show, and that drove that enthusiasm.  It kind of helps to – you know we thought we’d run out of things to say after 10 weeks, but they drive things that they want to know about. It’s not a – it’s not a community that has a sort of co-operative strategy to what we’re going to talk about – we’re on that journey, you can come with us.  But that instant feedback means that we’ve got no need for a focus group, they’re there on Facebook, or they’re there when they listen to our podcast, so it’s completely changed the way that we look at our customer communication.

C: Some people might say it’s all very well and good having people following you in California, but how does that actually influence your sales here in the UK?

HG: Well gardeners and farmers aren’t renowned for taking on hi-tech really quickly – they’re not early adopters.  So that is a criticism, but in my experience we’ve taken technologies that are very simple to use.  You know I can’t even turn over the telly with a remote control without my son in the room, so you know I can use podcasting and I can use Twitter, and I can use Facebook, so those are the things that we’ve adopted and I can blog, and generally if people can use those technologies then they can listen.  Now as far as sales go, of course lots of people in California, New Zealand, Japan, China, Sweden – aren’t going to buy from us, but we are on a mission to change the way people garden, and we’re on a mission to raise awareness of if you can change your space to be more biodiverse and more useful, then we’ve got a connection of wildlife corridors. So it’s all a balance, but what I would say is we do get orders from all over the world, and often they’re for delivery within the UK, you know we’re a global community now, we’re all talking to each other and if you’re a blogger, I don’t care if you’re in New Zealand or Afghanistan, as long as you’ve got something of interest for me to listen to.  We do a weekly podcast which is just audio, so that goes out, and we make it every Thursday morning and it goes out every Monday morning.  And we’ve found that’s important to people to have a regular slot, so we’ve always thought of podcasts as being you can do them when you want, but actually we’re creatures of habit, and so if you’re listening to my podcast in the gym, you want to know when it’s there ready.  And then we do visual, video casts too.  We’ve done three of those so far, and we’re going to stick to doing ‘how to’ videos, so how to set up your worm composter, how to set up your Bokashi bucket, how to compost your waste, those sorts of things that need a more visual content to them

C: Did you expect to do as much travelling as you’ve done when you set this company up?

HG: I didn’t imagine I would be travelling as I am these days at all.  I mean we had a great opportunity to go to Berlin with Dell and receive the UK award, and then we flew out to New York and spent a few days there, but the great thing was it was election night, so we were there for the Obama election, which to me was the epitome of using social media, you know the first president ever elected with funding from people that a lot of it was gained via social media online.  Well you know for me to be there that night was just brilliant.

C: And of course when you were in New York you picked up the Dell Small Business Global Excellence award as well didn’t you?

HG: Yes I’ve no idea how we won the global small business excellence award, but I’m very pleased we have.  None of the people here could believe it, we had gallons of champagne, big cakes to celebrate and we still couldn’t believe it so we went to the pub!

C: So the winning of the award, that must have been a true community celebration?

HG: The population of Blakemere is 63, and we employ 18 people.  10 of those are from within a 5 mile radius, so it’s important we keep balance within our community.  So it’s pretty important.  You know we made the local village news with this award!

H: Well some very interesting points raised there gentlemen from Heather’s comments. Robin let me start with you first of all.  She’s talked about a lot of different tactics that she’s using – podcasting, twittering, a variety of different approaches there.  What would your advice to a small business be – should you be trying to espouse all of these or should you just perhaps pick on one and concentrate on that and get that launched first?

R: Well I think, I think it’s important to concentrate on why Heather’s been successful in what she’s been doing, and I think it’s less to do with the individual technologies that she’s used, and more about the fact that she’s been genuinely conversational, i.e., she’s spent a lot of time nurturing her community, you know she talked about she listens to reader’s comments, she responds to them.  So that’s – I think what she’s done is she’s built a community of people who are interested in her business and what she has to say and feel part of that and feel like they know her.  So there are a variety of different tools you can use to do that.  I think probably one of the best ones to start with would be a very simple blog – virtually no cost to set up, you obviously can update them as frequently or infrequently as you want, and it’s a very good way of – very low cost way of sort of dipping your toe in the water, if you like.  I think if that becomes successful then some of the other techniques that Heather’s using – podcasts or doing ‘how to’ videos are really good.  But you may find other things that work for you too.  I think it’s about finding your feet and trying things out

H: Jamie your thoughts on that?  One tactic to go with and then develop your strategy?

J: The user-generated content is what people are coming to look at. From a practical point of view, I would employ as many channels as I can and I’d spend about an hour a day – especially as a small business, nurturing those channels. And then things like Googlebot are going to pick up more and more and more all the search words around your product and you’re going to get more and more people in.  You know, rule number one of marketing for me is know your marketplace.  So one of the ways that you as an owner will get to know it better is by talking to your customers, so –

H: How long should I be carrying out this trial?  Do I try it for a week, a month, 3 months – to get the feedback from the market?

J: Well it’s all down to sensory acuity which is – so you know one has to try and find out where one’s going wrong.  You’re not going to get it right straight away.  I would give a trial at least 3 months, at least and certainly – I wouldn’t even look at it as a trial, I’d look at it as an essential part of your overall vista within your overall marketing strategy.

H: It’s interesting you say that, we’ve just had a question in from Steve.  Steve writes “social media sites get replaced by new technologies so it’s important to keep on top of latest developments and trends.  My view is that social media alone cannot replace traditional marketing and communications methods, but simply compliment.”  What do you guys think?  I mean what are your thoughts?  Can you set aside your traditional marketing budget and then plough that into social media?

R: I think it’s definitely sensible to have a look at you know how you’re allocating budgets and I think you do need to make room in your overall budget for social media, but no I do agree with Steve, I don’t’ think it replaces all forms of advertising and marketing – absolutely, it’s now becoming a very important part of that mix, whereas previously it wasn’t part of that mix at all.

H: Jamie, how much of your traditional marketing budget would you advise someone to be spending on now on social media?  Do they put everything into that pot?

J: I would say to divert 15% would be adequate initially, but you’ve got to look at this as what’s actually really happening.  There only used to be one or two channels of media, and take a brand like Coca Cola, it’s taken them 200 years to have the brand awareness.  I’m a massive believer in word-of-mouth.  Do a customer a good turn they’ll turn 20 people.  Do a bad turn, they’ll tell 40 people.  You need to have your brand out there and you need to have people talking about it who buy those things or who are critics around you – you know wherever your product is.  We have a client who has a business that has exclusively sold horse rugs only through blogging within the Arab community that it actually, you know that these rugs sell to.  And there’s been no advertising at all, and that’s created a significant revenue stream. So it does depend massively on your product, and – as to how much success you’re going to get, but it also depends massively on how you personally interact with your customers.  You’ve got to like your customers, you’ve got to like what you’re doing.  If you’re passionate about it, that will come through in your blogging.  If you’re not, people will smell it and it can work negatively for you. 

H: Credibility is a very important factor in utilising these new Social Media isn’t it?

R: Absolutely, I mean it’s about being open and honest and being real. Being the real person that you are or being the real team that you are, if you’re a team of people doing this, and I do encourage, you know to involve lots of different team members if you have them available to you, you know in these activities.  It is about being genuine, it’s about that individual affinity between human beings that’s important – make sure potential customers and your customers feel that linkage to you.

H: Indeed, it’s almost buying from your familiar corner shop –

R: Yes that analogy I think is a very good one, I think in the olden days, you know you did business with people that you knew, you know you went to the local grocers, not just because he was the only one in your village but because he was a friend of yours and you liked doing business with him.  You know and this is the same thing again, I think Heather’s demonstrated that very well with her activities.  That’s why people are doing business with her because they feel like they know her, and they like her

H: So we’re getting into reputation management almost

J: To give you a strange analogy as to what the internet is doing, there is this, you know the local corner shop guy is now dead - yes in a way that has happened because of the large supermarkets, but it has been replaced by niches that now supply through the Net, so there are those relationships out there, you just have to go and find them.  And your customers can only find you if you put up social networking.  So it’s almost a responsibility of a business to have a decent Internet presence in whatever way, shape or form that may be.

H: Indeed you can’t win the game unless you’re in it

J: Without the Internet, forget it

H: Ok gentlemen, let’s pause things there for a moment because let’s catch up now with the latest business news headlines, and cross over to the newsroom and Sara Beirne

“Thanks Sean.  Here are the latest headlines.  The number of people out of work in the UK rose by 137,000 to 1.86 million in the three months to October – the highest level since 1997.  The ONS figures show that the unemployment rate is running at 6%.

The British Chambers of Commerce is calling for the MPC to slash interest rates by another full percentage point to 1% in January.  David Cairn, the BCC’s chief economist says that with unemployment set to rise sharply in 2009 and inflation likely to plummet, the case is strong for the MPC to follow the Feds bold move earlier this week to bring rates down further. 

And finally, MEPs have just voted to end the UK’s opt out from the Working Time Directive. These are the laws which limit the working week to 48 hours. The BCCs director general David Frost believes this will seriously erode the UK’s competitive advantage and is urging Gordon Brown to ensure the vote does not mean the end of the UK’s opt out.

 That’s all for now. Back to you Sean”

H: Thanks very much indeed Sara.  Well back now to Wiggly Wigglers and part two of our interview with their founder, Heather Gorringe.  Our reporter Charlie Broom asked her about the benefits of Social Media marketing tools, in today’s challenging economic climate

HG: Well we are in the same position as many businesses.  You know are sales are questionable next year, our margins are much tighter because our costs have gone up.  Our overheads have gone up. So Social Media doesn’t give you a magic answer, but what I would say is that we cannot afford to advertise in the same way that we did years and years ago .  It’s not as effective for us as it could be.  Social Media means that we can invest from within the company, so it takes a little bit of time to blog, takes a little bit of time to make our podcast or a video, but very little actual cost, except for our time. And so it gives us flexibility, and it gives us a very low cost way of reaching people.  Our customers have become advocates, and so they spread the word online via their blogs, via their Facebook pages, via their podcasts, so they do a lot of the work for us because they become a Wiggly community, and you can’t pay for that. My job is to get us at least a thousand to 1500 prospects every month, and so over the last 3 years I’ve gradually decreased our advertising spend, so that now we spend 20% of what we did.  At the same time we’ve kept that level of prospects, and that customer base, so we’ve grown our customers now to over 90,000.  Our Facebook group has grown to 1088 people that are part of our group, and our podcast listenership is literally thousands every week.  So whilst you can’t exactly measure the direct sales, for sure you can measure the increase in interest and the feedback from those customers too.  And the proof’s in the pudding and we’re continuing to grow so hopefully we’ll see how it will pan out

C: Using Facebook and audio and video podcasts was very innovative – what future plans do you have for your communications or is that top secret?

HG: We’ve just put on our website Deal of the Day, which I’m particularly proud of.  It’s a little RSS feed and I go there every few days and put in little special things that only are available if you go to Deal of the Day and subscribe, which I think is quite sweet because it makes our website more sticky.  My next step is Twitter.  I have to get to grips with Twitter, I’m following lots of Tweets but I need to get to grips with Twitter where I think we should be, encouraging our customers to know when their orders are going out, etc.  And then thirdly I am fascinated by Squidoo.  There’s so many different tools and people say oh they come, they go, but to me usually they’re replaced by a better tool, so we need to be looking out for them, and the Squidoo pages seem to be brilliant for Google and great for putting ‘how to’’s up online, and all these thing are incredibly cheap.  We’ve just set up our first project on BaseCampHQ.com, and we’re looking at sales force, so we’re continuing to move it forward

H: Well a great range of tactics there and ideas to sort of get our creative juices flowing.  But I can hear a lot of people at home maybe shaking their heads saying yes you guys are great advocates for this, but how do we know it works?  What about empirical measurement?

R: Well I think, I think there’s a – you know there’s very early stages I think, especially if you consider the history of measuring advertising effectiveness over the last 50 or so years, but there’s data emerging all the time.  There are already free peer reviewed academic papers looking at the linkage between the level of conversation online and the impact that has on a brand’s sales.  One done by some scientists at IBM and Google looking at the linkage between sales and music online, and the conversation about that music, showing a very positive correlation between that level of conversation and sales.  Again another one done by the New York Stern School of Business looking at book sales in this instance and again showing the same thing.  So I think we’re starting to see that data emerge, but probably more importantly you know if we listen to Heather’s own experience of how it’s transformed her business, I think we can clearly see that although it’s hard for her herself to measure it, even though she’s doing it herself and running her own business, she instinctively feels that it’s working and then she’s been able to reduce the rest of her advertising, marketing spend over that time period.

H: Jamie have you got any evidence to back this up?  Have you seen dramatic improvements in sales?

J: We’ve got a couple of clients who have seen sales come through this, so once someone clicks on the Paypal button and has paid their £50-odd for your product, having said in the feedback, I read the blog, I decided to go for this, now I’ve got the product it’s great, it works – the biggest measurement is there are large corporate companies suing people as we speak, for putting up Facebook groups, negative groups about their brand, that proves that it works, otherwise they wouldn’t spend the money on the lawyers if it was insignificant.

H: Now both of you have mentioned Facebook - whatever happened to MySpace?

R: I think Social Mmedia changes all the time.  New tools, new products come along, you know and people’s uses have changed.  I think MySpace obviously was one of the very early Social Networking sites, and I think, you know Facebook has come along, especially within the UK, and you know not necessarily replaced it, but certainly taken a massive lead over them, and that’s because it has better features and functionality that its users find more useful, therefore they use it more.

H: Indeed, a question in from Andrew.  He says “With so many different applications out there, how do we keep on top of it all, and is there a balance to strike between being too proactive with your social media efforts?”  Is Andrew right?

R: I think so yes.  I think experts like me need to spend all of our time chasing you know what different new forms of social media are.  I think small business owners can only afford to, you know, take a bit of a step back and look at what are the main tools that are useful to them, and I think we could list them now.  You know, that would be blogs, that might be looking at enhancing those blogs with other forms of contact, like audio content, podcasts, videos, and then look at using some of the major social networks like Facebook again, you know a Facebook group costs you nothing to set up so why not do it?  You know I think some of the things that Heather mentioned, I mean obviously she’s considering using Twitter now, some companies are finding some success using Twitter, I know Dell for example have made over a $1 million from letting people know about special deals via Twitter, and I think that might be a good use for some business owners.  But you know I have to say Twitter is not mass market yet, especially within the UK, it may well be in 6 months to a year’s time though.

H: So there’s an opportunity maybe to get in on the ground floor?

R: Absolutely.

H: Jamie, what are your thoughts?

J: My answer to Andrew is it doesn’t actually matter what vehicle you’re using provided your main objective is to be on the front page of Google, and once you’re on the front page of Google you then steer them to the blogs that you’ve put up.  It doesn’t matter how many highways there are as long as your customer’s on your road.

H: Yes I mean now even talking about pocketcasting - podcasting from your mobile phone as well – that’s a new departure

R: Yes I mean it’s something we actually sometimes use in campaigns for our clients in terms of creating that content, there’s a service that allows you to broadcast in real time from a 3G phone

H: Yes

R: And there are other various different technologies like that, but I think it’s – you know it boils down to being interesting to your target audience and therefore making them come back and feeling that affinity towards you

H: Right we’re quickly running out of time.  Jamie what are your two or three key points that you’d like to get across, your top tips for 2009?

J: Know your marketplace, content, content, content.  If you get your content right people will come back again and again.  Keep it fresh, keep it new, keep it interesting and that’s the main advice I would give anyone who was looking to increase their sales through their small business, through the Internet.

R: I would say it’s very important to do everything Jamie said, but I think on top of that it’s about being, it’s about being human, it’s about being a real person, and real people have conversations, you’re not just broadcasting at people, so it’s about leaving comments on other relevant blogs or forums or Facebook groups that are in your business’s area of interest and becoming part of that community

H: So really building confidence and I suppose at the end of the day people buy from people?

R: Absolutely

H: Gentlemen we have to leave it there, thank you very much indeed for your time.  And that’s all we have time for today on this live show, I hope you’ve found this discussion helpful and do explore our website smallbusinessadvice.tv where you can find out more about social media and a wealth of other important business advice.  Our next show is in three weeks’ time, that’s after Christmas and after the New Year.  That’s at 1pm on Thursday the 8th January, so make a note in your diary, 13.00 hours, 1pm on Thursday January 8th.  I hope to see you then, thank you very much indeed for watching, have a great Christmas and let’s hope 2009 is a prosperous year for all of us.  Goodbye