Caught in the net – the best conversations you’ll read all day

Made in Britain content editor Martyn Moore writes about the weekly chats that make the Made in Britain website great

THE concept of #MadeinBritainHour on Twitter is very simple. Every Thursday between 1pm and 2pm Made in Britain asks three or four simple questions of its 21,000 followers. The questions are around a theme and the responses come flooding in.

Look at last week’s transcript, for example. We focused on manufacturers’ websites: what works, what doesn’t; what you like (relevant info), what you hate (pop-ups!) and what you should never do (use Google Translate). In an information-packed hour, we got information about email response rates and how much to pay for a website.

We get comments from members and non-members, we don’t discriminate, and we're often joined by the experts who present our members-only webinars who share their wisdom for free. We capture all the comments in a long, and sometimes very long, text file.

The document comes to me in a raw state and my first job is to separate comments by Made in Britain from the rest and label them. The rest are labelled ‘Response:’ and the comment is italicised. Made in Britain’s contributions are plain text and the questions are bold. I think this styling makes the conversation easier to follow.

Because Twitter is a very informal means of text communication, I tend not to edit the words very much. I leave the abbreviations and some of the creative spellings in place.

The copy is topped-and-tailed with our standard ‘intro’ and ‘outro’ and then I publish it to the site. The editing and formatting take about an hour and is the best value hour I spend all week because the end result is priceless.

If you haven’t spent at least a few minutes of your time browsing the subjects we’ve covered, you really owe it to your business to do that. It’s a very rich seam indeed. We’re also happy to take suggestions for future #MadeinBritain Hour subjects. Email editor@madeinbritain.org with your ideas.

Read a list of all our Twitter conversations with links to the texts here.

By Made in Britain 2 years ago | By Made in Britain

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