Buzz Marketing? Winery Goes 2.0 with Job Contest

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

A job so cool, you even get a bitchin' hat.

Talk about truth in advertising: this really is a dream job.

Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County, California, is offering one lucky applicant a six-month gig to be their “social media whiz.” The job involves blogging/posting/tweeting/videotaping the winery, its products, the lifestyle and the surrounding community…

Then there’s the compensation:

“If you are chosen, you will be housed in a deluxe private home in the heart of Wine Country, within walking distance to our tasting room on Healdsburg Square. In addition, you’ll be paid a salary of $10,000 a month (U.S.) for the six-month contract. You’ll receive return airfare to your hometown, accommodations and transport in Sonoma County, travel insurance for the contract period, computer, internet, PDA, and digital and still camera access.”

Irresistible, yeah? But there’s a catch. (And sorry, folks, the application deadline has already passed. More on that in a sec.)

If you truly are a social media whiz, you have to prove it. For a shot at the Goode life, you have to post a 60-second video application to M-G’s site, then get people to vote on it. This, of course, favors two kinds of people:

1. Those who already have lots of friends — the fake Web 2.0 kind, and the real life kind.
2. Those who are genuinely good at hype.

The top vote getters score an expenses-paid, on-location job interview, which sounds like a blast in itself.

Now, from a business perspective, this campaign accomplished all of the following:

• appealed to the ‘Net Set
• created awareness of the Murphy-Goode Winery
• shaped the brand as fun and tech-savvy

As I mentioned in an earlier post, those wine people know marketing better than most of the VC-funded geniuses in Silicon Valley. Why not get mileage out of your basic recruiting campaign?

I do think the timing and promotion of the campaign could have been better. Applications opened April 28 with only a six-week window to submit your video and solicit votes. That’s really not a lot of time for an under-publicized contest, and if you were late to the game, you had to really scramble. This favors the applicants who heard about it early and who already have a lot of friends. M-G did get 784 applicants, but with more time, they could have had many more with higher quality videos.

In addition, I only found out about the campaign after a friend emailed me today, the 20th, the day after the application deadline. Here I read marketing and advertising blogs and publications daily, and I hadn’t heard about this campaign. M-G would have generated more exposure — and a broader base of applicants — with better promotion.

Which is probably why they need to hire this person in the first place.

That said, I love the campaign, and I hope more employers attempt to be this creative — and let me know about it first. I could use six months in wine country… ;-)