Visual and viral
Check out http://fixoutlook.org.
This is the smartest grassroots social media campaign I’ve seen in a long time. They send an email and encourage you to mention this site in a twitter message. The site shows a page with everyone who does.
Update: Microsoft Corporate VP William Kennedy posted a very disappointing response to the campaign. Disappointing not so much because they won’t change Outlook 2010: I didn’t have any expectations this late in the development cycle.
Microsoft’s response is disappointing because it was full of marketing double-speak:
We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years.
Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world.
There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability.
The response hypes up Word as a document/email creation tool without addressing the core criticism of the campaign about reading emails that contain fairly basic CSS-based HTML which has been around for many years now.