Home Agents Calling for Barack Obama
Posted by Ted Hopton on February 5, 2008
OK, I’m impressed. I got a friendly email from the Obama campaign (I’m not really so gullible to believe the candidate sent it personally, but his name on it is a nice personal touch). It invites me to call people and urge them to vote for Obama.
Do I have to go to a phone bank somewhere to do this? Do I have to sit through some training so I know what to say? Do I even have to get up from my chair? No, no and no.
I simply follow the link in the email and I’m taken to part of the my.BarackObama.com website, where I can open a call script to use for my calls, and I can click on another link to request a list of phone numbers to dial. From my own home, with only my Internet browser and my own telephone, I have just become an outbound calling volunteer in the effort to get Obama elected! (I’m not actually going to do it, though — just wanted to check it out.)
There’s even a timer on the page that counts down the amount of time until I am allowed to request more names of people to call — I guess it’s like a game, where I see if I can finish this list before the timer runs out. Interesting productivity enhancement tool.
As I said at the start, I am impressed. This is a striking example of using Internet technology and social networking to get a message out to massive numbers of people. It seems to me to go beyond Web 2.0, since the end result goes beyond the Internet, reaching through the Web 2.0 features, you might say, back out into the real world to touch people and get them to go vote. Now that’s slick. I wonder how successful it has been in getting out the vote?
