Understanding Place Sentiment - April webinar for the High Street Task Force.

Foreign. So thank you very much for joining us and you've got me, Polly Barnfield and Sarah Bassett. I'm CEO of maybe and Sarah is our head of growth and deals with all our local authorities. Sarah, what's keeping you busy at the moment?

Oh, crikey. Open calls galore. For years. UK SPF funding. Yeah, it's keeping me out of mischief, Polly.

But please, as we go through, feel free to drop any Q&As in the session if they'd like. If you'd like to ask, to answer privately, then please just put them for us. Or if you'd like them for the benefit of everybody else, please put them for everybody and we will answer them as we go through. Just for any of you that don't know what Mavie is about, we deliver local business support at scale using our data driven social media management platform. We've worked with over 100 local authorities on UK CRF. Welcome back. And EDRTRA projects. And Sarah mentioned we're deep in providing support for UK SPF projects at the moment. What's unusual about the way we deliver support is we do it. Yes, we do it all virtually. We do it data driven, so it's very personalised and very localized. We collect the data from about 3.9 million UK businesses every single day. And with our support programs comes a sort of an outreach program. So last year we made 750,000 phone calls. Importantly, we provide Match funding. So we provide about 20 million pounds of match funding with projects last year and then the SVF projects. A lot more match funding going to those. We sent 2 million emails to local businesses and we delivered £750,000 worth of vouchers. We trained 25,000 businesses last year and importantly, the average cost to train businesses comes out about £400. And this webinar today we're going to really look at the impact on places and what that local business support does from both a footfall and a jobs creative perspective. Before we go there, just want to make clear that all the data that Mabie has is also available in the High Street Task Force Dashboard. It's a summary that you've got within that and so you can see the digital sentiment within place, the digital participation. So the difference between national and local organisations using social media, something we'll talk about as we go through this webinar, is that you see the line at the top of the graph on the right hand side is much higher than either the social media, the national or the local organisations. And our general message is the Consumers run off the pitch ball, they're living a social life. Businesses are really struggling to keep up on the dashboard. You also got digital activity against footfall and we talk a lot more about that relationship today and then how people are using different channels. You also, by default have access to a free maybe account as a local authority. So please, if you have, if you're not yet using that, do drop us a line and Sarah will set you up. But we're very much here to help you understand place and how social media connects people to it. So what we talk about today on today's webinar is we're going to share how local business that really focuses on digital inclusion, how it impacts pride in place, local foot for prosperity and jobs. We look at case studies about how local business support can create and safeguard jobs with a nice case study from Herefordshire, how it drives football, and a sneak peek at how ChatGPT can transform local business support. Hands up in QA. Who has not or any hands up for anybody that's tried ChatGPT. I'm going to do a dangerous thing today and do a live demo of something that we're working on, but I'm thinking could be quite exciting. Somebody's raised their hand. Jamie, you've raised your hand. Does that mean you'd like to speak? I don't know how we can do that here. Jamie, would you like to. Oh, you raised your hand. Brilliant. You raised your hand because you've used ChatGPT. Fantastic. Sorry, Polly's being dozy here. Hands up. So. Hands up if, if you've. Well, anyway, we're gonna have a live demonstration of ChatGPT on this call, particularly relating to how it could work with local business support. We are pretty excited about it. It's given me a lot of sleepless nights at the moment, but I'm sorry if I don't look like I'm tired, I probably am. So, without further ado, let's move on to just thinking about local business sport in a sort of digital first world. Our approach to this is that because we've got all this data, we draw a boundary around the place and then we look at the support that's delivered to that place. So the first graph on the left hand side in this example, they've thrown a boundary around a particular area. We then can see the number of local businesses in that area and can track what we do to them. So how many businesses are receiving support, how much. How many emails have been sent, how many calls have been made. And importantly, we've built out this big training hub that enables businesses to watch training on demand. And we tailor that training around the topics that we understand people asking questions about. Everything that we deliver is about making sure they can consume training immediately. I know a lot of business support programs offer webinars, which are great, but the challenge is people have to turn up from a specific time. Like you've had to turn up to this at a specific time. We make sure that this content is now available on the Hygiene Task Force webinar. You have it so you can share it with your colleagues. But actually, if you're a busy business owner, what you want is you want a five minute piece of training. There's something you need to know right now. So if I need to do a reel, I want to know about it right now. Or if I've got a problem with building an audience on Facebook, I need to know about it right now. So we believe that the whole sort of the business of changing the way people behave is all about how you can give them support at the time they need it. But firstly, make sure they know they need it, then make sure you give them support at the time they need it and then provide the tools to measure. And that's very much about the wraparound. Support that we provide is both igniting the desire to learn, but then providing tools that don't mean that they have to change their behaviour wraps around the business. And we'll look at those in more detail in a minute. I think first I'd like to play this news clip. Always makes me giggle. It took, I think, five hours to record this for two minutes of video. But it was really interesting what I learned in the time that we recorded this as well. So first we're going to play the recording that we recorded a couple of weeks ago. This is from a UK CRF project that we ran in Herefordshire. It was just under 2,000 businesses that took part in it. And this is what one business had to say. I'm going to have to leave this window. So let me know, Sarah, if I lose you. Who's just on the screen? I love what Twitter's new new emblem is here. I'm not quite sure. That's all I know.

I saw that. It's strange, isn't it?

Little. Yeah.

The cost of living and flexible working continues.

To expand.

That's it.

There we go.

You see every C. Okay, perfect. Here, we're going to get to play this.

As the increase in the cost of living and flexible working continues, less people are visiting Their high streets businesses like the Ledbury in Herefordshire are attempting to use social media to bring customers in. But is it working?

It's absolutely helped us and I think the opportunities for small business, especially on social media, Instagram, Facebook, all of them really is endless. If you are constant and have the knowledge and know how, which maybe have given us to explore all the different services they have to offer and to reach the maximum audience, whether you want.

A drink or something new, where you can find it here under one roof. They are one of more than 1,700 businesses in the county. He took part in a government funded social media pilot. During that time, businesses taking part had a 15% increase in footfall, whereas those who didn't take part had 7.4%. Social media specialists argue more companies need to invest in their online presence.

Only 400 businesses post something on a daily basis on social media. It's a challenging market, right. So you've got to really look to be able to expand your business today. I think there's a big misunderstanding that social media is sometimes seen as a digital channel, but actually as consumers we've got a phone in our hand all the time and it's what you see on your feed determines what you do.

Could this shake up in approach be the answer?

We have quite a big following that we're trying to grow and part of a service that maybe offers us to grow an audience that reflect other people who have been interested and enjoy the business. So that way we get to kind of maximize our reach and let everyone know what we're doing and that we'd love to welcome to the library.

And it's that strategy many in this area are taking on in order to drive footfall from online into physical stores. As increasing footfall in high streets remains a challenge for businesses across the country. Theo Chikomba, GB News. As the increase in the.

Getting back to the right window. There we go, that's the one.

Thank you. So the point here is that the Ledbury is a very small. It's a lovely business in Ledbury and I mentioned that There are only 400 businesses in Herefordshire that post on social media on a daily basis. Now in the four or five hours I spent with the Ledbury, what was really interesting is the feedback they gave to us is that, you know, they. She also runs the Ledbury Traders association and, and she's saying there's this huge gap between those that do do social media and those that don't within Herefordshire itself and they've now got to the point where they, part of the training that we deliver enables them to learn how to use advertising better on social media. And so the really interesting thing is that they're now not using advertising on the days that they're busy because they're now over full. And so they're being able to be strategic about how and when they spend money to make sure that on the days when they're not as full or in the days they have new product arriving in their fashion store upstairs, they're being very tactical in the way they use social media and you know, that's increased, that's meant that they're increasing the number of people they're employing at the weekends because they now they can guarantee that they're going to be full. And part of the output for CRF projects was that was job safeguarded and jobs created. And the data that we've got back from Herefordshire was that it's about 0.25 of a job created and 0.25 of a job safeguarded in each participating business that adopted social media. But the hardest thing is to get people to go, I want to do this. And I think that's the really big message for us, is that digital is not just about driving e commerce sales. It has this huge impact on how people arrive at a business. The library don't have, they haven't got their shopify for their store upstairs sorted out, but their main business is selling beautiful food and lovely drinks. And they have, they have absolutely no doubt now that social media is the way that brings people through their door. Now she's now got 150 people in the Ledbury Traders association doing the same. You've got to have somebody local that you've empowered with the knowledge. And she's really getting to grips with them and encouraging them all to do it as well. The point is that local prosperity has a massive impact on local jobs because you've given the tools to pull people in. We've seen a very similar thing with a business in Stonewall, actually in Cotswolds. This business has always used Instagram, but didn't actually know how to use ads through a welcome back work. This lady is now using ads to such an extent that she's doing over £100,000amonth in sales online, in addition to being able to literally have people queue outside the store when her new items arrive. Now, in each case, their use of social media is having a massive positive impact on the business, but it's also bringing footfall to the store. This is an interesting graph. This is looking at where people are coming from to visit her store, which is something we're working on much more and we're looking at the additionality on footfall. So what is social media bringing that other activity wasn't bringing before? Keep your eyes peeled for that is something we're going to be releasing much more of this year, but also helping people to understand where to target their advertising spend. So based upon where products have come come from, how you can make sure the adverts land in the right place so the right people buy. But all of these things mean that law and company now have massively extended their workforce to deal with the sales that they're generating both online and offline. So from a local business support perspective, I think the measure of footfall and jobs created can be supported. One of the things we found from a timing perspective is often it's quite hard within the time scales of a very short program to demonstrate that additionality on jobs. But longer term there are ways to do that and we're learning a lot about the ways you survey to collect that data. But more and more case studies are being built out around how the delivery of digital activity is having a massive impact on prosperity and job creation within local business. And then going on to the footfall piece, we've done a really interesting piece of work here around social media is the place where people go for inspiration. How can you connect it to the actual physicality and what it's doing in a place? You know, how. How is that social sentiment, if you like what's being said online, impacting football? So what we've done is we've mapped the mobile phone data for each place where we're delivering projects where the budget allows to be able to say has have more people gone into that store and was that store part of the program? So we can then look at that data as mentioned in the news clip around have participating businesses increased their football versus those that haven't. And there is a really clear message and that is that it does. So does social media deliver in football? Sarah, what's the answer?

Absolutely. It was really interesting, wasn't it, that this part of this pilot with ukcrf, because this was data that we hadn't really looked at collecting before, but obviously it's an output of those projects and again an output through spf. Some of the communities in place and tourism interventions and then business support interventions as well are looking for increase in footfall or numbers and visitor numbers and so on. So this was really really exciting when we saw this. I mean we had an inkling, didn't we? It was going to be a positive picture but I don't think we realized quite what an impact the work we'd done on local footfall and something that was about 15%, wasn't it? Uplift between businesses that participated in social media training and activity as opposed to those businesses that weren't participating. And that's an extraordinary impact, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. So this orange line here is the trend in footfall for participating businesses versus the town trend which is the blue line and the gray trend which is the non participating. Obviously there are lots of, in going through this data, it was a massive task. We had to literally map the longitude and latitude of the businesses front door and some businesses where they're purely online and all those things. But you know, overall there's, there's an unequivocal proof that increasing the social media capability of a business increases the football and that by default increases the prosperity of the town because you get the additionality and we're doing a subsequent piece of work around that additionality piece. Now, is this line being driven by more local people or is it brought people in from further afield and do these people then go and spend more with the non participating businesses? So are you increasing the footfall to the non participating businesses through the presence of these business, these people? So we're doing lots of lovely data crunching which is driving me insane. But I think there's lots of things to be learned from this because if you can get a nucleus of businesses getting really good at this within a town, you will change the prospects of that town. Without doubt, what we've seen and you know, again, I don't think it's rocket science when you stop and think about it. We've seen endless stories of shopping centres that have invited or one a brand within a shopping center had an influencer turn up and you brought towns and shopping centers to a standstill. This is a business called Morph, they do that and they literally, I think they bought the bullring to a standstill and bought the middle of Birmingham to a standstill. So we're not saying employ an influencer, we're saying give your businesses the tools so they can become their own influencers because it brings people. So yeah, so it's all about enabling businesses to invite people in because without doubt it generates. Sarah, you man in the chat. I'm struggling.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I've got my on it, don't worry.

Hello, Everybody that said hello, any questions, please do Far away. So, so, so you know, why does this matter? Well, the reason this matters is that we all accept that social media is part of our lives and social media undoubtedly bringing people to places. But there's a real problem with local businesses and that has an impact on the sentiment of what a place says. Because if you're not popping up on Instagram and something else grabs people's attention and that is where they go. So the 3.9 million businesses that we track every day, only 19% of businesses have an active social media account. Only 9% of businesses post at the weekend and only 25% of businesses are spending more than five hours a week managing their social media. And that's all the businesses that are posting. So if you think about the average consumer spend spends over eight hours a week on social media, 25% of 19% of businesses are spending five hours a week, the rest are doing much less. So there's this enormous gap that's opening up now. Those businesses like Ledbury that embrace it, they literally can't manage the response and that has a pull along effect on other businesses. But if you can get your local businesses to embrace digital channels, it has a massive impact on the people that turn up any places. So why this is really interesting. I'm sorry to talk about Christmas, I know it's only Easter, but looking at data back from this Christmas, 85% of people were using social media to decide what to buy. That's going to get even bigger this year. If you look at how do you tend stay in touch, in touch with shops and business you like to use. Social media is the largest piece here. 55% of consumers use social media to stay in touch. So think of all these touch points and think of all of your businesses. If you know the average across the UK is that only 19% of businesses are using social media. If you'd like to know how that looks in your place, please drop Sarah note and she'll drop you your data of the number of businesses using social media number participating. You ask somebody how often do you click on or engage with content you see for brand social media? 80% of people engage with brands on social media only if they're there. 95% of consumers shop locally on a regular basis. That's really, really good. But how much more will they spend if their spend is not being sucked off somewhere else because something else is grabbing their attention? How often do you use social media to find out about latest products or services? 85% of people use social media to discover products or services. In the last three months, have you purchased something as a result of having seen it on social media? 75% have bought something because they've seen it on social media. And I think this is the last one. How likely are you to buy from social media advert that's served up on a timeline? Quite likely and very likely. Now this is the big, big part and a part of what I think any local business support should think very heavily about is that the majority of businesses, not only are they not posting on social media, but they don't have the first clue where to start with how to use paid ads. So and if you're a business and you're posting on social and you don't need to know, you know how to use paid ads, then Mr. Zuckerberg tends to hide your content. So it's really important they've got an ability to be able to boost their content. And a large part of the training that we deliver and we'd recommend that anybody else that you're working with to do local business support can do, is to really help businesses not just start to use social media, but they've actually got to be able to say, I need my content to be seen by these people. So, yeah. How big is this problem across the UK? Well, it is, it's massive. This is the top 10 business, 10 locations across the UK by social media activity. And if you look at the percentage of businesses active, these are in prosperous areas like Westminster, Surrey, Manchester, London, Salford, and you can see these percentages here and active on social media. 18%. 13%. 18%. Please drop us a line. We'll give you your percentage. We can track that, we can measure it and really help you understand the need in your local area. If you're creating local business support programs. We'd love to share what we've learned from the work we've done because it is, is quite extensive and we're all the time improving the way we deliver it. If you're creating solutions and putting tenders out, we'd love to show you, you know, any suggestions we can to help you shape them so you get the best benefit from them. What we, what we know works is that data led outreach at scale is got to be the way to do it. You've got to help businesses. You can also reach businesses through paid social media. So you got to identify a way to reach businesses at scale and that's repaid social phone outreach, stakeholder support to validate the training. So A lot of the training that we do, I'm going to show you that in a moment. We spend a lot of time creating local case studies so the businesses can go, oh, oh, if Fred can do that, I can do that. And we're then obsessive about email follow up. So a big CRM process that means that we, the minute somebody has touched us or watched some training, they then keep getting nudged to watch more training. Everything's on demand, as I mentioned before. And I'll show you how that works. Keep training virtual. Don't ask people to go into a classroom, they're busy. And keep it case study led. So it's really relevant. You need to provide the tools that make it easier to solve problems and help make more money. Make it sector led. So make it really virtual in the sense that if I'm a hotelier, I want to see hotelier type training. Support everything with one to one support once trust is established. So don't try and push one to one support until people have actually sort of said, oh yeah, I want to watch your training and then they ask for help. And the piece I'm showing you with chatgpt in a moment is very much about that whole piece of establishing rapport. Same with group training again, that works. Once you've got rapport, maintaining an always on approach to support you, literally, we recommend you can. You must be able to deliver answers to questions 24 7. The training must add revenue to their business. You'll be able to show them how to generate more cash. That's the only way you get their attention and make sure there's a scalable measurement and reporting system in place so that you can demonstrate your outcomes and outputs appropriately. Things that absolutely don't work is expecting businesses to come to you feet on the street. It doesn't get the results the same way as if pouring your heart and soul into digital outreach and phone outreach, putting training classrooms, there's a place for it, but I don't think with businesses it works. Sarah, would you agree with that? Oh, you're speaking beautifully.

I'm here, I'm here. I was busy, busy firing data over.

So while you were chatting.

So I'm afraid I missed the question.

What was the question I was asking Sarah? Sorry, I said things that don't work. Putting training in classrooms and sort of feet on the street. Outreach is not what businesses want to be.

I mean we. Again, one of the beauties of the UKCRF gave us a real opportunity to a B test all the different ways.

That.

Business Support can be delivered and what does get the biggest uptake and absolutely getting businesses into a classroom and feet on the street. Well, I'm sure everybody on this call has been through the pain I've been through in the past of stepping up and down high streets and telling them about an amazing train you've got on offer. And actually all they want to talk to you about is business rates and parking. It's a really hard job to get people to engage. And what we've been able to do is really work out through these pilot projects exactly what works and what doesn't and that that bite size on demand training supported both with. We have live daily training sessions every day at 10 o' clock and across different range of subjects where we have experts on the call. Literally businesses can bring their own problems to if they want to. So it's very much an interactive support process. People can bring one to one suggestions or ideas or how to's or I'm stuck with this or that or the other or could you explain something for me? And they get great engagement. So it's that everything's recorded, everything people can dip in and out and actually we find a lot of this small everyday businesses, you know, they're, they're opening the shops at 10 o', clock, they're closing at 5. A lot of them are coming in engaging with this training content at say 8, 9, 10 o' clock at night or first thing in the morning, you know, just before they're getting the kids out the door for school. So it's that is that piece of making everything accessible and also delivering content that they're interested in. Because a whole day in a classroom learning about Twitter when actually you just want to understand how you can send a direct message on Twitter or how you can what type of content you should be putting on Twitter or whatever it is, you know, it's just that people are just want, they love the bite sized bit, don't they? The fact that they can get the answer that right there, right now and then obviously with live chat. And ours isn't just a chat bot, we are real people. So you can, people can literally type into the chat function within the platform and say I need some help with this and one of the teams back with them within minutes. So it's that interactive piece, isn't it? It's that right now piece that works.

Absolutely. And so the other pieces that we've learned is the collecting the results piece. The whole business of being able to report back is that you need to if you're building programs like this. I very much say that the brief means to say you've got to collect the feedback by surveys, but also make sure it's part of the program, because just waiting at the end is really hard. We also learned that it's great because we've done so much outreach, the sort of 750,000 calls we've made, it's key that whichever provider you're working with, that you also make sure that you provide them as a council, with some support. So on your website it says we are working with this business and that you enable that legitimacy, because otherwise it can be hard. And speaking, this is speaking from our side, defence. If you're delivering the support, but there's no support from the council side, it can be hard. People actually know it's real and you've got to know your local data. So make sure that you're working with a provider that's got the data. We worked incredibly hard to get the data, 3.9 million UK businesses, so which means we can deliver outreach at scale. But if you don't have that data, it makes it really, really hard. And, yeah, it's a data to deliver local business support at scale successfully. It's got to be a data driven methodology and it's got to be the training. The training is absolutely critical. So I'm going to give you a little dive into what Sarah was so eloquently explaining a moment ago, which is the training and the tools element of what we deliver. But the fundamentals are that business, I think Covid has changed us all forever. And not only that, but we're all busier, we need content on demand. And so, as I said at the beginning, it's about saying which area, saying who's being supported. But then what CRF has enabled us to do is invest in creating this pool portal that literally, literally lets you have social media success stories on demand. You've got videos about anything you want on demand you can watch. So if I want to know how to set up a Twitter account or how to set up an Instagram account, the video is there for me. If I want to do something more detailed, how to. How to create an ad account, the video is there. It's literally five minutes long. How long is this video on our plate with some jazzy music. There you go. Three minutes. In 3 minutes and 43 seconds, you'll learn how to add your business manager. And if you want to ask a question, say, I need some help with my Facebook ads, it will come up and offer me some articles to read. But one of those lovely people at the top here will also jump in during office hours and give me an answer. So. Oh, I haven't. I'm. I'm in a. I shut my world out. So I put my email address in. There you go. So it can come back to me. Oh, Polly, no, no, it's you again. And not reply because it's me. Oh, look, maybe here we go now I'm going to show you now how we're taking ChatGPT and taking this next step further. So you see how here it says in the meantime these articles may well help you and I can go and read those. So I, you know, I very quickly now, if I've done this at 1:00 clock in the morning, I've very quickly been served with everything I need to know. But one of the things that we have learned is that everybody's got a different question, everybody needs to know a different thing. There's always something else that you need to know. So this is really good. But we think we're very excited by what we're seeing with ChatGPT just before we go on. There's also, there's also, I think whatever you supply from local business support perspective is also important that you not only have the training, you've also got tools. So we work at making sure all the businesses access the tools they need to do do the thing we're telling them about. So part of the match funding is that we provide access to all of these tools so they can schedule content and see where customers are. They found out working, they can got all the reports around who are influencing conversations ready and available for them. But, and this is the thing that I think is incredibly exciting is that ChatGPT will enable us to take this to the next level. So we're taking all of the knowledge that we've created through the programs we run to date to create a completely live environment. So Sarah said it's not a bot at the moment. It's not if you're a people, what we're looking to deliver so that we can support the growth hub function that is possibly being lost. And you know, what we know is that businesses desperately need support around social media. But actually it's not just how do I do it, it's what do I post. So this is very much in its knickers. So hands up live demo. This is very scary, but what we're endeavoring to do is say, well, you know, in order to make sure that every local Business across the UK has got access to support they need. Let's say I'm a butcher and I'm a livery. So can you help me create a recipe? Post as a butcher. As we say, an Easter recipe effect. An Easter recipe doesn't mind my bad spelling. Post as a butcher.

Come on. I'm on pins now.

Library or Instagram? So the question that our team get time and time again is what should post? Should I post now? But this, if this doesn't, if this plays up, I apologize. So here you go. Okay, just give me some hashtags. Okay, that's nice. Oh yeah. Okay, that's great. Can you make it great? Can you make it great? Can you make it funnier? Can you make it funnier? And add some emo. He's right. I've got Now I would like you all to become now. Now it's time for audience participation. Come on. Can somebody chuck some questions in here? Let's see what happens now. So literally we are, what we're doing is because chat. What's interesting with chat GPT for those of you who haven't used it is this new. It's a new clever AI, but it only knows anything back to 2021. So what we have done is we're taking the, we're taking the calendar so the seasonal events, whether it's National Tartan Day, National Bringing Dog to Work Day and blending it with local data, their own data and so that we can create a social media help system. So let's say, I say, I say great. Let's say how do I now let's say great. How could I turn this into a real, real eal or real on Instagram? Because what we've got to deliver, I believe to help businesses catch up is live reel on Instagram is help like this. Now I think this, I think this is game changing would love feedback. Come on. Can somebody ask me to try to ask you to do something clever? I'm going to do something which I think is mind blowing in a moment. Sarah knows what I'm doing. Here we go. Fun, engaging really Instagram using the recipe shelf ingredients. There you go. It's telling me how to create a real love that. Okay.

You know what my question's going to be, don't you go and then.

Ask it, ask it.

Well one of my, one of the questions I'm asked constantly and taking London boroughs for example, but it was, you know, same across the UK is that, you know, Newham for example, there's over 250 languages spoken in Newham. So how can you deliver support that's accessible for all? And this is what I think is really clever about this, is that you can, let's say Herefordshire, ask them to translate the post into Welsh, for example, because that she is probably being on the Welsh borders and so on, but you can translate it to Chinese and translate into whatever.

So I just asked it to say, what about a post for a butcher for Chinese New Year? Sure. Here's a post for a butcher for Chinese New Year. Happy Chinese New Year from your local butcher. Celebrate the year of the Ox. Delicious beef stir fry. Slice up some flank. There's a recipe. Don't forget red. Love it. Okay, could. Could I have this posted? Chinese, What do you think? Anybody, does anybody on the call speak Chinese? Hands up here.

What's the best place to buy Easter eggs in Ledbury?

Oh, that's a good question. You might be asking it beyond its learning age at the moment. Let's give it a try in a minute. Oh, oh, no, go on. No, go on, you can do it. No, We're training it at the moment. Like having a child. It gets very tricky at the moment. No, please, can you translate. Translate the post into chime. It should do this. It should do this, shouldn't it? Sarah? You've seen it do this.

I have seen it do it, but.

I was bound to do this. I knew if I. It's like, it's like, definitely like working with children and dogs and animals. What question we got? We've got a question about Easter eggs and leopard. Look at that. There you go. Boom. Okay, great. Let's do it in another language then. Because that could. I don't know about anybody. I don't know. Many of us I don't know. Great. Can we have it in French too? Great. Can we have.

And actually for big, you know, for teams that. Or businesses that are looking to reach out to more new markets, but also export markets, which is another key part of UK spf. This is just such a valuable tool to be able to reach out in different countries and share your message with the worldwide. There you go.

Boom. So, so we're really with. This is for us, we're very excited about this. We're looking to integrate it into everything we do so that not only support but training can be delivered in any language. But also, you know, if you're the business owner and you want your social media to be able to be in multi languages, you've got the tool to be able to have a great social media manager that can also deliver multilingual support to your customers. I think it's, I think it's really exciting. Really, really exciting. I'm going to try Easter eggs and Ledbury. I'm going to refresh the chat because otherwise you'll think I'm still a butcher in Ledbury. I think you're probably asking me a question. We haven't taught it yet because we haven't put the maps into it yet. So. But we'll give it a go, see what it does. What was the question, Sarah?

What's the best place to buy Easter eggs in?

So just, just, just to, just to warn you, I may have not given a very good brief on this is that this is designed to be your social. Social media assistant. Not.

Yeah, not you searching for things. Yeah. It's not consumer facing, it's a, it's a business facing tool.

This is designed to live as a training. It's designed to make sure every business has got what they need. But look, I could be, I could point out what's the best place to buy Easter eggs in library. I could be a business owner. Desperate need for Easter eggs in the. Oh, I can't even type today. Sorry. I did warn you inside lead. That's it.

You got it.

See what it says. But let's. We're. Then I'm going to ask you a question a minute about how to assess which platform I should be used. Check out how should it go. That's fantastic. I didn't never do that and it already give us the link in a minute. That's amazing. I had no idea. That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah. So we've got a guide for Ledbury. The link's not in there. I'm just take a screenshot of that and tell you how to do that. Thank you. Love that. Another question about social media please. How. What's the best way to create. What can you create? Can you create a place for this? Anybody ask me a question?

I do think everyone can tell how excited we are about this. I mean this is brand new out of the box and we're all still playing with it. But it's so exciting. It's going to make such a difference. It's that creating content that people find so hard. The how to is one thing but the what can you create some post suggestions for an Easter guide for a retailer in debris. Okay.

Well we're very excited about this because this means you're giving local business support immediately. The great thing is that it's, it's we can box it so that it is, is, is localized and you can overlay local, local, local information on it too. So. Well, we're excited. We hope you are too. I think it's, I think it's a moment, I think it's a watershed moment for local business support. I think that blending it with the footfall data as well means that it gives you the ability to measure how the impact you're having. And there we go. Post ideas. Okay, great. Now Sarah, you sat on calls with businesses. How, how blank is the sheet of paper sometimes?

Oh, just completely blank. They just don't know where stuff. And also, you know, there's this kind of block in, in people's minds that being on social media, it's about selling online and actually it's, yes, it can be brilliant for that, but it's about driving people into your store. I mean, you know, we had, we had lockdown and then as we came out of lockdown, the high street started to reopen. We were very much, we were very risk averse. We were very much shopping with intent. We wanted to go and buy a thing, we'd find out where it was, we'd go there, we'd come back. Now we're feeling, you know, we need to get our consumers to engage in our high streets and to engage in events and engage in shopping and eating and health and beauty and professional services and community and all of those wonderful things that make up the heart of our high streets and our communities and our economic prosperity. So using social media as a tool where obviously the consumer is hanging out to entice them in, to come into a place as a whole because of all the different content that's been generated by it, you know. Oh, look, look at that lovely, look at that lovely publisher. Oh, I know. Oh, come on, darling. I'll, I'll. It looks like the barbers is going to be open. You're desperate for a cut. Well, you can go and have your haircut and I'm just going to pop to the lake, to the, you know, the beautician down the road. You can go and go to the barbers and we'll go out for lunch. How wonderful. Oh, and there's a, there's a craft fair going on in the village, you know, in the town hall. That's what it's all about. It's about creating that experience and not only for local consumers, but he know, regional, national, international consumers. You know, we want visitors to come to our places. But what they, if they don't know about it and they don't know what we've got on offer. They're not going to come, they're going to go to the places that are shouting about all the wonderful things they have. You're still engrossed in playing, aren't you? Love it.

Well, I think I just. Yeah, I just. It's every. It's every business's best friend, I think. So. Thank you all very much for your time. A lovely question here from Frank, actually. Frank, you're saying can you. Yes. So this, this will. This will be embedded within the maybe platform so that literally a business can have an assistant working for them there and then they can ask it a question about anything. So it's not just creating content, it can be how to create a profile, it can be how to, you know, do a. Do a thing on social media. So all of our knowledge base will is, is being. Is being added to it. So not only have you got all of chat GPT but you've also got specific social media knowledge and it will link to businesses account so it will tell them what worked well last month and therefore suggest what they should do better next month so it becomes a business coach for them. I do think that there's been a sort of leap forward in AI over the last three months and I think there's a real opportunity to embrace it, to do something extraordinary. Watch this space because you'll be hearing much. It's the first time we've aired it to anybody, so you, you, every on the call you've seen something that I probably shouldn't have shown to anybody. So I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you. Keep watching and we'll have much more to show you in the weeks to come. Why? Why does it matter? Well, there are 8 billion people on the planet. 5.4 billion of them are have a mobile phone, 5 billion billion of them have the Internet and 4.7 billion use social media. So each of your places has the opportunity. Each of the businesses in your places has the opportunity to reach a global audience. But if fundamentally they're stuff mute, it has a massive impact. Remember those football figures? Participating businesses football up by 15% but it has a pull on an effect on all other businesses too. Thank you very much. I'm concerned only 90% of businesses across the UK are acting on social media. Really? Really, really. We really want to help you understand how to change it and if there's anything we can do to help you do that, please do get in touch. We've got data, we've got tools that you can all have access to by virtue of the High street task force. And if you would like any, any, any assistance with local putting forward, putting together local business support to proposals and tenders or anything you want to pick up reins on, please do. Because we are, we're in this, we're living it, we're going through the pain of what works and what doesn't. I'm very happy to share that learning and obviously would be very keen to be part and tenders but, but more importantly, make sure we are. You're asking for the right thing because there is an opportunity right now to help an awful lot of businesses very fast and we want to make sure that the precious funds that are out there get used in the right way and the pre appreciate that with growth hubs futures at risk that there's a lot of businesses that could go unsupported. So very happy to discuss how that can be remedied if you like. My soapbox digital activity contributes to plan in place and economic growth. If you invite these people here, they turn up. If you don't, they won't. So thank you very much. If you've got any questions, Sarah's Your lady, she's saravytech.com and is there anybody else, any further questions that we should have answered?

Well, this is really nice because Marian is quite something. She's a real advocate for Mavie and supports Kent and Victor Chamber to deliver business support both through Mabe, but also to help businesses claim their Google my business listings and so on. And I'm really pleased about this because she's just given us a lovely compliment to say this AI looks amazing. Thank you.

Thank you, Marion, really appreciate that. It's a lot of work and it's very scary actually stepping off the edge and saying we're doing it, but it's amazing. Fair, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, I'll keep you posted. Marion.

Yeah, you heard it here first.