How to Spam Friends and Influence People
We live in a big city. We know a lot of people. But getting people to vote for us in the Ultimate Job was a whole new experience. Here’s what we learned:
1. Begin with a comprehensive e-mail campaign: your friends, family, co-workers, etc. Title your email “I need your help to get a job,” because everybody feels good about being a work reference and everybody hates viral “Vote for Me” emails. Avoid sending said email to your boss (like we mistakenly did)…it just invites awkward conversations and he won’t vote for you anyhow.
2. Strategic Facebooking: Change your status at least four times a day, including in the middle of the night so that your international friends don’t feel left out. Stagger your messages with your spouse’s, so that your common friends don’t block you when it gets overwhelming. Because it will get overwhelming before you’ve even made it to Top 50, let alone Top 10. Accept that some people will ‘unfriend’ you; they probably weren’t your friend anyways.
3. When other candidates start to gain on you, take your e-mail campaign one step further. Send a message to your dentist, your banker, that guy you met in Cuba 10 years ago [Note from Brendan: WHAT guy in Cuba? Why don’t I know about about him?] Take full advantage of all those business cards you collect and never follow up on. Accept the spammers credo that having an e-mail address is tantamount to someone giving you an open invitation to spam them at will.
4. Beer. When in doubt, bribe people with beer. “If we make it to the Top 50, we’ll throw a party and the beer is on us!” If you start to suspect that people are deleting your “Vote for BREL” e-mails, entitle those same emails “Free Beer”. It works.
5. Take the meaning of ‘friends’ on Facebook literally. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t spoken to someone in 20 years and only accepted their Facebook request to make you look more popular. For the sake of the Ultimate Job, a friend is a friend. Send personal messages, post on their Walls, “Like” whatever it is they happen to have going on in their lives. Manipulative? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.
6. Take advantage of the Oprah effect. When you realize there’s a possibility that the Runaway Bride and Groom couple will appear on Oprah, TELL EVERYONE. Who doesn’t want to know someone who got to meet Oprah?
Tags: Travel
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