Obama Should Change His E-mail Manager

For a campaign that's supposed to be so Internet savvy, Barack Obama's sure makes some silly mistakes with its e-mailings.

Out of the blue recently, Kathy Sharpe, CEO of digital marketing agency Sharpe Partners, received an unsolicited e-mail from the Obama campaign with this subject line: “Visited the Obama Store lately?”

In fact, she had never visited it at all.

Opening the message revealed the headline, “Show Your Support in Style.” The body copy urged recipients to buy various bits of Obamaphernalia, such as coffee mugs, posters and yard signs.

Trouble is, Sharpe wasn't a supporter, at least not then, though she may have since changed her mind. She's a self-described registered Democrat who wasn't in love with Hillary Clinton but planned to vote for her if she got the nomination.

When the Obama Store e-mail arrived, like many would-have-been Clinton voters — and, to be fair, conservatives disappointed in the McCain nomination — she was deciding whether to vote for her party's nominee at all.

And getting spam from the Obama Store didn't helped nudge her into the Democratic nominee's camp one bit.

“I wasn't a big Hillary fan, but I'm not happy,” she says, referring to Clinton's loss of the nomination. “[The Obama campaign] just made me more unhappy when it might have had a chance. There's a good few months to go here.”

Even more annoying, as far as Sharpe was concerned, is that it was an e-mail pitching Obama's store.

“If it were the issues of the day or something like that, I still would have been annoyed, but I would have been interested,” she says. “But the store?”

Sharpe says she did not sign up for Obama's e-mail program.

In any case, political e-mail is exempt from the Can Spam Act — which is a good thing because both Obama's and McCain's e-mail violate it by failing to contain a physical postal address. Also, politicians of all persuasions have been known to do e-mail appends and rent lists to inexpensively reach likely supporters.

But spamming people based on party affiliation, or demographic, or whatever the Obama campaign used to reach Sharpe is not a vote getter by any stretch in this particular election. Republican does not necessarily equal McCain supporter in 2008. And Democrat does not necessarily equal Obama supporter. And Obama's folks, of all people, should know this.

Moreover, this isn't the Obama campaign's first e-mail gaffe.

In February, some pranksters apparently began signing up anti-spammers' e-mail addresses using fake, insulting names on Obama's e-mail list. As a result, people who never agreed to receive Obama's e-mailings began getting personalized messages from the candidate that addressed them in a rude manner.

For example, anti-spammer Edward Falk received an unsolicited e-mail from Obama's campaign calling him StupidSpamSucker SlutFace, according to a post on his Spam Diaries blog.

Because e-mail's so cheap, many tend to treat it cheaply. However, e-mail is a highly emotionally charged communications channel. When people get spammed, they get angry. Put simply, e-mail ain't the way to send an unsolicited pitch to anyone who might be on the fence.

The self-proclaimed 2008 presidential candidate for change should consider changing whoever is in charge of his e-mail efforts.