How a Chatbot Helped Mamdani’s Campaign Court Influencers

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor built out an expansive creator program that was assisted, in part, by an Instagram chatbot.

The creator and influencer program was led by Emilia Rowland, a former Democratic National Committee press secretary who was brought on to lead new media for the Mamdani campaign. But in the final weeks of the race, Mamdani’s operation also turned to the Instagram chatbot Manychat to help with its creator outreach. 

The chatbot, according to Gabriella Zutrau, a freelance digital consultant who piloted the Mamdani campaign’s use of Manychat, was customized with different conditional flows that helped distinguish between typical Instagram users – those with fewer than 20,000 followers – and creators and influencers with as many as 35 million followers.

Here’s how it worked, according to Zutrau: Instagram users with fewer than 20,000 followers that interacted with Mamdani’s content on the platform would receive an automated reply from Manychat that helped with tasks like sending links or collecting email addresses. 

But for users with higher follower counts – those who fit the profile of a content creator or influencer – the chatbot reached out with a request for them to fill out a Google form and engage with the campaign outside of social media, where the campaign could organize them further.

That Manychat flow, Zutrau said, helped save the campaign some of the onerous and time-consuming work of having to track down individual creators or their agents. 

“They’re messaging us first, so they’re expressing some amount of interest,” Zutrau told Campaigns & Elections in an interview. “And in some cases, they might be expressing disdain. But we’re still sending them the form regardless. We’re basically cutting out the step where we have to track them down and contact them.”

The influencer outreach via Manychat was just one way Mamdani’s team leveraged its social media savvy to help propel the backbencher New York assemblyman to an overwhelming victory in this month’s mayoral election. Mamdani and his campaign earned a reputation for churning out viral content, fostered a network of creator partnerships and managed to transform online engagement with supporters into real-life turnout and volunteer efforts.

That digital strategy – along with a laser-focus on affordability in New York City – has widely been cited as one of the reasons for Mamdani’s win. He defeated his main rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in the mayoral race by nearly 200,000 and helped mobilize scores of young voters. Voters aged 18 to 29 accounted for about 35 percent of total turnout – the highest rate of any age group. 

A big part of Mamdani’s success, Zutrau said, was that the campaign was willing to try new things – and actually put time and money behind those efforts.

“They really put content at the top of their priorities in a way that has felt pretty unique to me. Huge shout out to them for appropriately funding their content,” she said. “It was about just being really, really open to experimentation – having a really intense culture of experimentation and letting experts cook.”