social media

I was in California wine country last week and in nearly every meeting Murphy-Goode’s social media experiment, ‘A Really Goode Job‘, came up. Most thought this campaign brilliant from all the online buzz created but I’ve been skeptical from the beginning. On one level, the $100,000+ investment will probably generate double or triple that amount of free publicity so there is an ROI from a traditional PR perspective. But unless they pick exactly the right person I don’t think this campaign will generate much buzz after the winner starts work in August.

When I first heard about this promotion a couple weeks ago I immediately went to see if the winery had secured the key social outposts and was somewhat surprised to see they didn’t seem to have a Twitter account. So I created one and did a bit of customization so whoever gets this job won’t have to deal with a squatter (like here and here). To take this account over, just contact and convince me you are really from Murphy-Goode.

Since the campaign started, the winery has promoted their search via this Twitter account that has developed quite a following in the three weeks it’s been open. If I were running this promotion, all the key social accounts would be secured before announcement in order to better manage the brand on the social web. All you need to do is put ‘MurphyGoode’ and ‘MurphyGoodeWine’ into KnowEm and then get the accounts at places like Twitter, Friendfeed, Delicious, Vimeo and YouTube even if you don’t ever use them.

What’s interesting about this campaign is the diversity of applicants. Everything from wine and food bloggers to social media strategists to the clueless and truly scary. Their offer of $10,000 a month for a 6 month contact would probably find plenty of applicants in good economic times but now the flood of applicants will be in the several hundred if not a thousand. Sifting through these to narrow down the list for the next stage of the competition will take some time and Murphy-Goode has extended the deadline for this and presumably to get every last ounce of publicity. But for this campaign to rise above PR stunt status, the winery will have to choose their winner very carefully. If I were judging this competition I would have just one question: who will customers find interesting and want to follow?

From a results perspective their website has gone from 500 visitors to over 50,000 in just a few weeks. Murphy-Goode has gone from nowhere in the social marketing space to a winery being written about in Mashable and the New York Times. All very impressive that will make this campaign a topic of conversation within the wine industry for a long time whatever the outcome.

Will ‘A Really Goode Job’ be another social media success story or a shameless marketing stunt? Time will tell but the early results look promising.

UPDATE 5/22/09: After watching the following video my outlook on this campaign has dropped considerably. Looks like the smart money is on ’shameless marketing stunt’ now… super over produced for the social web, folks. Where’s the authenticity? Edited together stock footage with your winemaker cut in at the end, a viral video does not make. At least in my book.

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