Pies at HQ being wrapped for delivery

Every February we cook a small mountain of big pies as part of the lunch for the annual Norfolk Farming Conference, being held this year at the John Innes Centre and attended by the president of the NFU.  We love the idea of the whole county’s worth of hungry farmers tucking into the pies.

It’s been a busy week at BrayCo HQ in deepest North Norfolk, with the usual round of making and baking – and we welcomed a new pie elf, Frances, into the fold. But on Wednesday I broke free, leapt on a train and went down to London. The mission was to visit one of our new customers and then head to the party held for the nominees for this year’s top 100 social brands.

Note the wall paper - that's their logo.

The customer was The Craft Beer Co in Leather Lane in Clerkenwell. We send two big deliveries of pies a week down to them, so I wanted to see the pub in action. Craft Beer Co has been named as the 4th best bar in the world so I expected to be impressed. It’s smart, but subtle in its smartness, comfortable to be in and very much focussed on excellent beer, with a long bar of taps and pumps. They choose to have a few excellent options for food, food that goes well with a beer, which is where our pies come in. I met the bar staff and management and discussed how the various flavours of pies fitted in with their customers tastes and the beers. It’s the building of  working friendships that is easy with local pie stockists but takes a bit more effort with customers outside Norfolk, but is so worth doing to form a good team with the people who are actually selling the pies and to help give them what they need. And it’s particularly fun, when you get to sit in a great pub working.

Many, many beers

After a bit of shopping and a tour of foodie hot spots, with my friend Linda who runs Bright Blue Skies, we headed to an underground bar and a room full of social media enthusiasts. Last year, to my bewilderment, Bray’s Cottage was named one of the top 100 social brands along with household names such as Dell, Innocent, Marmite etc. You can relive that bewilderment here.   And we’ve been nominated again – which we’re truly chuffed about.

We met up with co-nominees and the team from Headstream who organise the SB100 and listened to Dell’s  Stuart Handley (Director of Comms EMEA ). Dell were the top ranked  in last year’s SB100. Listening to Stuart was fascinating – their experience as a massive organisation using Twitter and Facebook is an eye opener for a small business, just imagining the logistics and management of that scale of communication with customers makes your head spin. Dell have 103 thousand employees all with access to Facebook and encourage employees to be active on social media. They know that 22-25,000 conversations happen online about Dell every day and they monitor, actively listening, and intervene to improve customers experience of the brand and products. As founder Michael Dell, an early social media enthusiast, said “It gives us big ears”.

I very much liked the fact that Dell’s use of social media is instinctive rather than fearful, which is the impression you get from a lot of larger organisations. All the best users are wise but brave.

His top tip for the growth area in social media was business to business. I’ve had a few conversations with local firms of accountants and lawyers, helping them try to work out how they can use social media, so it’s going to be fascinating to watch that emerge.

Gratifyingly to us small fry, Stuart said “As a big brand we keep an eye on the innovation that small businesses bring to social”. So we’re watching Dell watching us.

We decided it would be much more fun to have a blog right here on our website. So here we are. The posts from wordpress.com will be added when we get chance but at the moment we are raring to go with some new posts for you.

We hope you enjoy the pie talk (it won’t exclusively be about pies, of course) and do join in with your thoughts and comments.

Sarah and the Brays Cottage Team