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Most vinophiles can swirl and sip. The Murphy-Goode winery wants one who can sip and click.
The northern California winery is looking to pay an Internet-savvy wine-lover US$10,000 a month for six months in return for tweeting and blogging about the joys of wine country.
The move is aimed at reaching new customers and tracking tastes in real time.
“Trends in winemaking and wine styles change every five, six years, so it’s nice to be able to be on the front edge of that,” said Murphy-Goode winemaker David Ready Jr.
“We want to open up the dialogue with potential consumers as well as our consumer base now and I think it would be really neat to be able to have that conversation all the time, rather than have to jump on a plane.”
Hundreds applied for the gig, which includes the use of a house in Healdsburg with a wrap-around porch perfect for sitting and sipping. Ten made it to the finals and the big announcement comes today after a weekend in which the finalists met in Healdsburg, 110 kilometres north of San Francisco.
The “Really Goode job” campaign was partly inspired by Tourism Queensland’s wildly successful “Best Job in the World,” a six-month stint as caretaker of a tropical Australian island. Nearly 35,000 applicants wanted that job, which pays $120,000.
Murphy-Goode didn’t get quite that response (2,000 applicants total), but did get a lot of attention. And not all the buzz was welcome.
The winery posted some of the video applications on its website and invited viewers to choose their favourites. That set off a flurry of postings by Twitterers and bloggers hoping to influence the final selection.
But it soon became clear that the tallies had no influence on who made the top 10, leading to some indignant tweeting.
Turns out the poll was just for fun (by law the winery can’t run a contest), something the folks at Murphy-Goode concede they should have made more clear.
It was a short, sharp lesson in networking etiquette, but as spokesman Mark Osmun candidly pointed out, “If we knew a lot about social media, we wouldn’t have to be hiring somebody.”
