Jon Garfunkel writes at Civilities.net about his ideas for Replacing Spam with Social Network Emailing:
When you sign up for an organization … you should be able to specify your “captain”. This is the person who will email you, call you, and be responsible for your involvement. You may pick the person who brought you into the organization in the first place. You may pick the actual precinct captain. Or you may look at the list of people volunteering to be captains, and pick the most attractive one. Up to you. That’s democracy. That’s how real estate companies work. Big brand, personal agent.
The giant leap forward is that one should only get contacted by their captain – and not get spammed by the head office. If may be “zero cost” to send out hundreds of thousands of emails, but it’s also zero benefit if the emails. It’s more effective to send the captains, who can send it on to their teams.