Not too much lingdao, please

former lingdao Chen Liangyu

Today we have been working on the website for our Speakers Bureau and one of the tasks was to find a captive slogan to go along with the name. With the help of some online friends (thanks Marc!) I came up with: Chinabiz Speakers Ltd. A leader in opinion leaders.

Near brilliant I would say, if I wouldn't be the author myself and it would allow us also to, eh, get some help from Google and Yahoo in promoting our service. By systematically combining the worlds "China" and "opinion leader" in for example all the fifteen profiles where it would be appropriate, I was sure we would be scoring very high in the combination of those two words in the search engines. A sure winner.

Unfortunately, my Chinese partner did not agree. In the Chinese translation that would create a bit too much lingdao, and that could attract the kind of attention we did not want. I still hope he finds a good way to translate this slogan in a less harmful way.