Candidate Etiquette Lesson #2 To Spam Or Not To Spam
Since Mayor Menino announced that he would not run for re-election the floodgates have opened for political candidates in Boston. Never in recent memory has the field been this crowded for elected office in Boston. Originally there were 24 people running for Mayor, over 45 running for City Council and special elections for 1st Suffolk Senate seat, 8th Suffolk Senate seat and US Senator in Congress.
With all these people vying for votes, searching for support and dialing for dollars, Super Voters in Boston are being bombarded with robo-calls, mailings and the subject of this posting… E-MAILS.
The Blackstonian has decided to give away this tidbit of Free political consultation. This is something that every candidate and campaign staffer should know. The definition of spam: SPAM = unsolicited e-mail.
Most of these campaigns are using email contact management software like Constant Contact and Mail Chimp. Anyone who has gone through the set up of any of these programs can remember that important step just when you are adding email addresses to your newly created list and it implicitly warns things like “Make sure you have permission to send to these addresses” “Do not add emails from acquired lists” “Only send emails to people who have signed up for your list” or some variation of the same message: DO NOT SPAM!
Clearly, in this election cycle this little piece of netiquette has been ignored as we have received NUMEROUS emails from VARIOUS campaigns (who shall remain nameless for now) for candidates that we do not know, have never attended an event, certainly have never signed up for an email list or any type of contact sheet.
Its our guess that emails are being farmed from a few sources:
1) Those long emails you may get about important organizational efforts in our community that have hundreds of people CC’d in the TO box. A No-No.
2) People are sharing email addresses from their personal/organizational lists. A No-No.
3) Social Media sites; facebook, twitter, websites, etc. A No-No.
For more on what is and what is not appropriate for E-Mail campaigns check this out:
How to Make People Hate Your Email Newsletter
http://blogs.constantcontact.com/product-blogs/email-marketing/permission-marketing/
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