As we were working on a client proposal on Friday, Lani siad this to me in her usual offhand way:

We’re using words to create energy.

For some reason, this made my brain go “Zing!” I got to thinking all weekend about the laws of thermodynamics - specifically the First Law, which says that matter and energy can neither be created or destroyed - you can only change their states, or transfer them. Words do have energy, and carry energy. And by that, I mean the power to cause action.

But then there’s the Second Law, which says there’s no such thing as a 100% efficient transfer of energy. In terms of writing marketing content, no matter how hard we try, we’re never going to get 100% conversion. So the best we can do is create content that carries our messages as well as we can - and that means testing, tweaking, and refining to make the marketing engine runs as smoothly as possible over time.

Finally, there’s the Third Law, which in natural scientific language is: “As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.” And quite honestly, I can’t think of an apt marketing metaphor to apply to this one. (If you’ve got one, leave it in a comment!)

Even bad examples are good examples, as the old saw goes, and this is an example of how trying to shoehorn a common concept into a metaphoric context doesn’t always work as smoothly as you’d hope. But the effort - ahh, making the effort - is better than not making one at all.

The poet Allen Ginsburg (or the British scientist C.P. Snow, depending on  your Internet source) summarized the Third Law as “You can’t quit.” So if you can’t quit, you might as well make a play, right?

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Posted in All About Content, Fun With Marketing |

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 7:06 am and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.