2008: Year of the Stripped Down Email October 18, 2007
Nancy Scola over at TechPresident has the scoop on the latest attempt by a Presidential campaign to personalize mass emails. Basically, “Barack Obama” sent a “personal” email message out to his list yesterday about Hillary’s cash advantage. I am a member of Obama’s list and got the message. Then a few hours later Obama’s message was forwarded to me by some stranger in Leawood, KS with a personal note encouraging me to donate more cash. This same person from Leawood, KS also emailed Nancy, and the “from” address on the email was the same generic info@barackobama.com address that “Barack” emails me from personally. Basically, I think the Obama campaign has built some tools into their site that makes it easy for the most active members of their list to send mass emails to the least active.
This is just the latest iteration of a trend this cycle: impersonal mass emails that have been carefully doctored to look like personal notes. These stripped down emails have some common characteristics:
- They are usually from someone high up in the campaign who would never email you personally.
- They do not include any pictures or graphics and very little formatting (bolding, italics, etc.). So it looks likes something the sender could plausibly put together themselves.
- They include typical email subject lines like “FW” and “RE” that make it look like the sender just spontaneously decided to forward me something from Outlook.
- The text is the same press-office crafted spin you read in every campaign email.
Basically they are made to look like the work/pleasure emails we all get everyday from our friends, clients and co-workers, but are really the same old same old.
Part of me likes this trend. Theoretically, I prefer to receive text emails w/o all the formatting and pretty pictures. I’m also confident these are working pretty well, based on Obama’s fundraising numbers.
But mostly I think these carefully crafted emails are just cynical and somewhat troubling. I think Nancy summed it up pretty well:
It’s worrying to me that the lesson that we thought we learned from 2004 — that people respond to personalized politics — is being so loosely interpreted to in 2008 in a way that seems to imply that people won’t know the difference between actual connections between real-live people and bulk emails from people who may as well be fake. There’s no difference between this email and one obviously written by the Obama press shop.
What do you think? Am I overreacting or does this tactic strike you are pretty cynical as well?
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I got a similar e-mail from Kristina of Leawood KS.
I assumed they requested this of donors online and gave them an editable letter with their proposed language.
I think it’s a good way to allow people who are invested in the campaign to “micro-volunteer”. Time constraints and comfort levels conspire so that very few people are going to knock on doors. Most would feel comfortable with this. And as small an effort as it is, I think it reinforces their connection.
For the campaign its another long tail example. The modest pitch–a request for $25–fits with that shallow though exceedingly broad reservoir of political financial resources.
And as a recipient, well, knowing their was a regular person of like mind pushing that button on the other side created a sharper desire to contribute than the one from the headquarters or even Obama himself.
Proof seems to be in the pudding:
http://techrepublican.com/blog.....-in-3-days
Amount raised? $1.8 million.
This is a standard spammer tactic: faking a personal message. The kids at BSD are to be commended once again for their keen insights, and also dinged once again for sitting on a throne of lies.
I got an email too from a first time donor who wrote, “I want to see a change in politics. Barack’s refusal to accept money from Washington lobbyist bigwigs appeals to me. It shows that he wants to make decisions with ordinary people in mind.”
It inspired me to contribute because it reminded me of a recent Obama conference call Houseparty, where we hand wrote messages on postcards (provided in the hosting packet) to undecided voters telling them why we support Obama, and asking for their support.
So in case you are wondering if the donors are real:
Yes they’re real. . . and they’re spectacular!
I think it is pretty fantastic and yes, I think you are overreacting, yet I guess it doesn’t hurt to know this and write about it as you have. But if it comes related to and can be traced back to Obama’s website, the Obama campaign, it’s okay. The bottom line is donors backing Obama know who they are and if they get some kind of related email and want to continue donating regardless, they will, like me.