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How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

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Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#81

Post by anigbrowl »

otherdave wrote: post #21
anigbrowl wrote: post #11

If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…

What about when you get an email from a website you just signed up for that opens with "Hi, Anigbrowl! I saw that you signed up for my site..." and is "signed" by the CEO. If you found out that was an automated email and that the CEO didn't really type it up personally, would you be equally upset?

When it's pretty obviously a form letter it doesn't bother me much. The nature of email is such that I know the same letter may be going to many thousands of people, or that large chunks of it might have been cut-n-pasted.

What I'm saying is that the more personal-seeming it appears, the more attention the reader is likely to pay. An actual handwritten letter presents as a highly personal communication. Even where it's justa courtesy note, it says that the other person values your business enough to take time to literally put pen to paper. For example, a few times I've bough a used book via Amazon and it arrived with a hand-written note of the 'thank you, hope you enjoy it' variety. It may be done by some junior employee, but any firm that does that goes straight into my 'preferred sellers' list because it's a rare flourish of personal courtesy in a world where most things are mass produced and commoditized.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#82

Post by eksith »

If the amount of energy and money spent on this level of sophistication can be devoted to actual customer service, imagine their retention. After all, it's the retention that keeps your business going. If your customers will spread the word about you too, that's far more convincing than "convincing looking" handwriting.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#83

Post by anigbrowl »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #63
anigbrowl wrote: post #11

If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…

What if instead of employing an outside company these were in house employees?

It wouldn't bother me if they identified as such eg, eg 'Dear Mr X, I'm an account executive at BigCorp and I want your business because...' or even 'Dear Mr X, I'm writing on behalf of the CEO of BigCorp...'

It's the misrepresentation that bugs me. If I get a handwritten letter I expect it to be from the person who signs it, and to be able to call that person up directly. So if it purports to be a personal note from the CEO and turns out not to be, that's when I'd get offended.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#84

Post by dmdeller »

zvm wrote: post #43
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DirecTV and credit card companies do this to me all the time. I'll receive a letter that looks like some kind of greeting card or invite with no identifier but an address. The font used on the outside mimicks human handwriting, so it looks authentic if you're not really paying attention. I kinda get excited I'm getting invited to something, I open it up, and its a fucking ad. I don't understand how people do business…

I've noticed the dead give away for those is that they come with a "Pre-sorted Standard" stamp instead of the first class postage that most personal mail uses.

I keep getting the same one from a certain car dealership every few months. Apparently handwritten address on envelope, real ordinary first-class postage stamp (even placed at a slight angle, so it doesn't look like a machine did it). Postmarked from a different state than the dealership is in. No return address.

Open it up though, and the deception ends immediately. Just your usual tacky, glossy printed brochure.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#85

Post by jimmaswell »

notahacker wrote: post #69
phreanix wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write a really short sentence and your signature should say "sent from my iPhone"

This. More generally, the less attention that goes into perfecting the layout and wording, the more likely the reader is to believe you're on a busy human's to do list and not a mailing list. HTML layout very bad, neat little bullet points bad, good copy bad, lack of line spacing and excessive terseness good.

So basically be as inefficient as possible

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#86

Post by anigbrowl »

DanBC wrote: post #56
ForHackernews wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it. You can give it to me. But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.

You want to buy a tv. You set aside an amount of money to buy that tv. From that point you're trying to get rid of that bit of money in return for a TV.

The focus is on the 'in return' part not the 'get rid of' part. If you got lucky and unexpectedly won a free TV of acceptable quality, you wouldn't feel burdened by having both the TV and the money you had intended to spend on it.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#87

Post by droob »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #73
anigbrowl wrote: post #11

If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…

> Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir. Well, yes, but they do what works. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Which means they manage to connect with something deep inside our minds. So, when you make statements about what marketers do, you're really commenting on how the human mind works - a jumbled, impromptu, cobbled-up-in-a-hu…

Except that it's rarely "what works" as much as it is "what we can convince somebody else works, so they pay us to do it." There is shockingly little measurement and followup in the marketing world, despite what the industry would like you to believe.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#88

Post by droob »

gk1 wrote: post #30
_mulder_ wrote: post #17

Judging from the Robot letter in the article, the easiest way to spot a robot-penned letter would be that specific words are all the same. Look at the word 'the' in the picture, or even the 'th' in 'this'. They're all identical. The robot seems to be working from just a small pool of characters. Some sort of randomisation algorithm would work well here, varying the size, weight and slant or jitter of each letter woul…

> Having said that, if you are someone who works on this sort of invention, please take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your life and consider just how this invention is contributing to the advancement of mankind. This is a silly point that gets repeated far too often. You can make that statement to almost every developer and designer here. Some people are quite satisfied advancing their own lives and tha…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#90

Post by rm445 »

vdaniuk wrote: post #13
anigbrowl wrote: post #11

If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…

"Marketing people" is one of the most egregious generalization errors on HN. It's certainly in vogue to hate on marketers but it is not an identity, marketer is a hat that people wear. Just stop.

Eh? It's a job that people go to work to do and work at all day long. Nobody, I hope, is completely defined by their work, but marketing person in a career, often titled with something dreadful but marketing-specific such as 'marketing executive' (whatever that may mean). Not a hat.
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