It does not matter what business you are in, you’ll find nowadays that your businesses exists in some way on the virtual internet sphere. The method by which internet pages are ranked makes website design, SEO, and social media a jungle that most businesses are lost in.
We are being told that we must write content, translate content, re-write content and localize in order to get noticed by the search engines. Experts are telling us to tweet, blog, socialize online in order to get noticed.
The result is that most people and businesses spit junk all over the web, mostly talking about themselves, and promoting their interests, and sometimes even generating automated content or machine translation content which damages everyone, including the content or translation creator.
Content is ruling over us, we are indeed slaves to content, and as its subjects it brings the worst of us. It makes us take shortcuts, create quantity over quality content for which we’ll all be sorry for.
Good content is something that people invest their time in, something that is written for others to think about. Same with translation – good translation is localized and adapted as if it was originally written in that translated language.
People say that internet content multiplies every six months. It would be safe to assume that the majority of this content does not add value to anyone. Even social media that is geared towards conversations and discussions is filled with self proportion junk. Instead of responding intellectually and adding to the discussion people write comments to get noticed.
If the rules of the game force us to create and translated content then we should treat it as if it’s actual opinions and information that we put out there in the real world. Just like in the real world where we carefully choose our words, self promoting only when it’s proper, avoiding repeating ourselves over and over in different words – the same ethics should be used in virtual world. We will eventually benefit from it. It will portray quality and professionalism that is critical to any kind of business.
