Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm Melanie.
And today we're joined by Jay Blake, the connoisseur of Connexion and the village chief. Welcome, Jay.
Good morning. It's a real pleasure to join you today. Thank you for having me on.
So that's a bit of OK, so the connoisseur's connexion and the village chief, where does that come from?
What I love about both is that I didn't choose either of them. So connoisseur's of connexion is something that was said about me and the village chief was born out of having created my digital village. And it's really important that people understand that it is my digital village, that therefore it's not Jay Blake digital village, it's my digital village. And the reason I love its name is because the moment you say its name, it becomes yours.
OK, and where is this village? Oh, apart from being digital.
This village is exactly where you are. So it's on your safe . It's stuck on your knee when you're lying in bed, it's on your laptop. It's on your desktop. It works on a mobile device. But it does prefer being on a laplot of desktop generally because of the platform that we make use of.
So who would be using this platform? I thought I'd intercept at some stage, you seem to be making this a pattern now. I see you now, you know, making it the Esther, you know, guests. So here I am.
Welcome, Melanie.
Thanks for joining us, Melanie, it's great to have you here.
So...She's gone. So tell us, Jay. Who would be buying this or do you buy it or is it free, what is it for?
It is. It is for people who want to make a connexion. It is about relationship first and business second. I know a lot of very good digital communities that are business focussed and web people as a result of doing business sometimes make sense. That's not what the village is about. The village is, I don't know whether you've ever walked into a village and walk past the village at all, and you've looked at the board outside the hall and you see, "wow, they've got pole dance on a Thursday night. They've got the Women's Institute on a Tuesday morning. They've got all sorts of things and there is the most amazing cacophony of events and things going on for everybody. So there's a business shopping centre that happens on a Wednesday morning. There's the book club that happens on a Friday afternoon. Absolutely. And in the digital space what I'm generating and creating so that there is literally something for everyone.
Sounds like clubhouse.
Yeah, I guess you could say it sort of is like clubhouse and lots of things have been created and grown over the last little while. And this is happens to be the community that I'm drawing together. Trust is my drug of choice. I talk about it both within my personal life and within my business life. And I operate my village where trust is the currency. People exchange goods using pounds and Euros and U.S. dollars, but actually on the currency of the village is trust. And that's where I get my greatest excitement.
How long's it been established, Jay?
The idea was born in the spring of last year. So I looked out over the green fields and the pond and I went, you know what? One day there's going to be a village here. And I'm now saying here you can see the two of you can see that I'm out now sat here looking out into the village pub, which is called "the Welcome in" onto the High Street. You can see village of UK, which is our resident artists shop, and you can see all of the different shops that are available on the High Street. We've now got about 25 shops on the High Street, and it's here. And I can I can smell it. I can hear I can see it. We've got events going on in the welcome in and we've got the village hall that's got all sorts of things going on. And it's just a very exciting place to be.
And how do you make that switch from meeting in person and making your connexions in person to being able to make real connexions digitally?
I think that if you'd said that to anybody back at the beginning of 2020, people would have gone "nah" I mean, I was introduced to Rhema, which is a platform that we use back at the end of 2019 because I network a lot and somebody said, "yeah, this would be great, I love what you do". And it was and it went from being an add on to absolute necessity overnight. And you say to people, do you use a Hoover. And actually most of them don't, they use a Dyson or something else. Do you use Zoom? Is now the same kind of conversation. Well, most people recognise and are comfortable with that. This is just an extension to that in a way of making it much more user friendly and again it's about control to me. So RHEMA enables the visitor at an event to choose where they are rather than Zoom historically. And I know it's improved just recently, Zoom historically was very organiser centric. So the organiser told you which group you went into, which side room you went into, who you got to talk to? Rhema doesn't do that. Rhema will only allow each individual to decide where in that confined space they are and enable them to move around, some of them to them as they choose to. And for me, that's the whole thing about building relationships is that it's about having consent. It's about being able to choose where you are and finding people that you've got something in common with. If you start having a conversation and you get on your carry on a conversation, if you start a conversation, then nothing really is going down or you want to talk about something else or you see somebody else that you want to go and talk to the other side of the pub. You can just go over there and help and continue that conversation in the digital space. So it's great
Just out of interest, in real life when you go to the pub, you go and you see two people talking and you think, oh, I'd like to speak to one of those two people and you can stand next to them and you can be seen standing next to them waiting for your turn to speak. Can you do something like that in the village as well?
Absolutely.
You're going to be seen waiting.
You can go and you can go and sit at the table. And as you join the table, you can have a conversation still happening with the other people on the table. And God willing and with a phone, somebody will say, hi, JAy. Great, great to see you.
So that's the same as Rhema. Oh, I was talking about the village,
the village uses Rhema.
All right. Okay, so. OK, because I would love to be able to go to an event an actual event and be able to go up to the stands and have a look around at the stand and then wait for my opportunity to speak to someone, but knowing that I wasn't being ignored, but I was waiting to be seen. You know what I mean? Because
Absolutely
We've done a lot of virtual things and you can't see if it's you or the second person, you know, or the eighth person or you could not be noticed at all. So that would be an added benefit for a conference organiser who wants to have paid stand's, I suppose, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. And that's exactly the kind of thing that we're doing. I mean, we've got to decide is what we're well, within two weeks of Good Friday now, and we've got a farmer's market taking place to kind of enable people to come and get a bit of a flavour for what the village is like and just meet some great people who've been doing everything they can to get to the last few months, where she can to have good conversations, because that's what it's about. It's about having good conversations.
And as we're coming out of lockdown in, you know, a lot of the world and at different stages and different adaptations of that coming out process, where do you see the village in three months, six months, a year? You know, the typical where do you see yourself in five years time? You know,
it's funny. I was talking to somebody about that just this morning. I have a great friend of mine who's a marketing guru. And about 10 years ago, he used to talk about where do you want your business in ten years time? And then about a year later, you go to the same talks and he'd be saying, well, where do you see your business in five years time? And about a year later, you go to the same talk and he'd say, well. So, yeah. And that horizon is getting closer to your question. There's so much that we've learnt through the pandemic with the summits that we've learnt about what we can do. We've learnt that we can build relationships without giving somebody a hug. We've learnt that we can do business without being in the same room. We've learnt that you can be in the States and I can be in the U.K. and we can have conversations and discover that we've got stuff in common and discover that we want to work together and all of that. I hope and I try will stay with us until what I believe will happen is that the village will provide a space for those sorts of things to take place and that there will be occasions when we go out to the pub and we see people in person. And there'll be occasions when we when we sit at home and continue to build those relationships.
So digital relationships is the answer to the question, how does business continue through pandemic?
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And with relationships first, because I think that's the thing that we've all discovered in the last 18 months, is that actually when we've got good relationships, when we have a tribe around us and we've got people around us that care about about helping each other. So the business will come from that. If all we're worried about and focussed on is the bottom line, that actually will come to the other end without any relationships. Because actually it's very easy to see straight to that kind of stuff. But actually, if we genuinely care about other people, then all of a sudden we discover that actually business comes.
Well, this is Maslow's hierarchy, isn't it? It's a sense of belonging is an imperative. It's a moral imperative in human beings, just as important as food and shelter is. But wanting to progress and learning, that's another thing. There's a hierarchy. So you're actually meeting two critical criteria directly from Maslow's hierarchy, say so how can you progressist? I mean, you've got this platform up now in the what sort of Add-Ons can people look forward to? Or is this stuff you go up and down the pipeline and this isn't the five years ahead? I'm talking more short term.
Yeah, of course. What is that every good village have. So every good village has about every good village has a village hall and a place for people to gather. I'm very blessed that I've got some great friends, one of which said to me, "Jay your village is missing a church". So we'll add that into the mix at some point. And I can imagine there's going to be all sorts of opportunities to meet together. So I can see us talking about stand so that we've got more music taking place of varying sorts. And we've got we've got a bustling high street. So I can imagine that we will have some kind of beauty event. We'll have conferences that take place because I can I can host up to 500 people in the village hall and I can have four groups of 500 people meeting all at the same time. So we can do we can we can cater for the significant numbers. It's just a question of what is it the people, how do people want to gather on and do what I'm doing and what whites?
And how often does do the villagers meet?
Oh their meet as frequently as they like to, where I'm aiming to be is that the park is open every night and that we've got events going on every day and that those are different events. So at the moment, we've got a business case that runs and eat so they can put something. I don't know whether you've read the book, Eat, Eat, Stop Fork. So it talks about kind of looking at the list of things you've got to do. And there's always that big, nasty, green, slimy one that you go out. And I don't know why everything else would be fine. I'm he's encouraging us to get out the way we've got somebody else is talking about portfolio queries. And I have events looking at people who've got portfolios of work and helping them to work out all of the challenges around that. So you have a real variety of ways of gathering. And what I love about the village is that every time I have a conversation, what it has to offer is bigger. So in the early days, we didn't have a travel agent and then the following day we did. In the early days, we didn't have a shop and then we did.
So just out of interest, are you the only person that can instigate the meetings or can each person who goes onto the platform wants to get their own?
I've got an admin team that we can accept requests for events and we can put those on for other villages or ambassadors or shopkeepers.
OK, so you're like a giant noticeboard,
yeah,
cool.
And providing the actual space.
Yes, because you need to noticeboard to provide the space. OK, cool. So how is this afforded, you know, how do people pay? Is it monthly? Is it.
Yeah. Yeah. So there's two ways that people pay. And again, we are doing things slightly differently. So villagers pay to be a villager. Our first five hundred villagers are able to get access to the village for just five times a month, and that's how they access the village and come along and get involved. I've had all sorts of fun conversations around the fact that everybody should be able to go in for free because how will Facebook have charged five pounds a month? It would never become what it is, to which my answer is very simple. If I've got a thousand villages, I'll be thrilled. If I've got 3000 thousand villages, I'm probably going to need to have more than one village. And we'll worry about that when we get to that point. But I'm not looking for tens of thousands of villages. I'm looking for a community that is more a community that understands the value of trust and wants to operate in that way. So I want it to be a very special place to be, not someone that there are thousands and thousands of people.
It's a marketplace as well, isn't it? It is not just a place to meet, so people can purchase stuff directly through the village
They can meet, they can go into the various shops and engage with the various shopkeepers who are both on business to business and business to consumer. So, yeah, absolutely. And I was just speaking to one of the shopkeepers this morning who started a new Shopify site and already sold a couple of pieces of her artwork to her new site. And she so.
And you mentioned Good Friday, so Good Friday is coming up soon, very soon, lots of Easter eggs and celebrate the what event do you have then over the Easter weekend?
We've got two. Well, actually, you could say we've got four. We've got the farmer's market on Good Friday. We have got an Easter's on the Saturday. And then in the evenings, we've got a live band on the Good Friday night along with a quiz and on the Saturday's we got a magician who has absolutely transitioned his skills in the light of the pandemic. So he's not doing stuff online and really changed a lot with the way he does his work.
OK, and can anybody join in these events, do you have to be a village?
Anybody can join in the daytime events so anybody can come to the farmer's market or use the fair during the day. Villages will be able to host the evening events and in the welcome in. We're trying to get encourage people to join the village
Cool, so very much when somebody says this sounds interesting, what's in it for me? What would be the point is that you'd give people
The simple answer is it's best what you bring and what you take away, much like every good village it's made up of the people that are in it. And so what is available to be taken away at the moment is a number of things, including, including pay shop priviliges and all sorts of useful goods and services from the High Street, as well as a place to meet and a place to build relationships and a place to learn all sorts of things that are available as we speak. But I'm going to talk to somebody later today. They might join the village and what it's not available to, it will therefore be different tomorrow. So it's a constantly growing and evolving place.
Do you have a village that has a different language?
I have absolutely no problem with different languages being used within the village, but that's not something that I've explored yet. We are in the early days.
Oh, yeah. No, I was just wondering if that was something you could accommodate.
I, no, other than a little bit of Cantonese that I can speak, and a little bit of German, a little bit of French that I can speak as far as my language goes. But that isn't to say that I'm very open to having those kind of conversations.
Oh, that's handy tonight. OK, well thanks very much.
Yeah.
Thanks for joining us today and thanks for sharing the information about the village. We'll put your links into the bottom of the podcast here so that people can connect and hopefully see you at the Easter weekend. And if you're listening to this after Easter weekend, then connect with Jay and learn more about my village. Thanks very much for joining us.
And if you missed it, well, it was your loss.
Yeah. Thanks very much for joining us today, everyone. We'll talk again next week. Bye bye.