Murphy-Goode has just announced the “Top 50” for their “Wine Country Dream Job”. In ten days they’ll cut the roster to 10 and fly those folks to Sonoma for in-person interviews.
I’ve made the Top 50 based on this video: Dave from Mars
If you’re so inclined, I would appreciate your “favoriting” the video: You’ll have to provide your email address and then confirmation a corresponding email message — a cumbersome process attempting to keep the voting fair.
Anyway, my analysis of this program as a marketing mechanism: It’s a clever premise to use social media to recruit a social media whiz (official title: “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”). Some of the results/stats (so far):
- Over 1,000 applicants (1,993 according to the company) took the time to create/submit a one-minute video application. Most of these folks will remember Murphy-Goode’s brand name forever, and probably buy a bottle occasionally.
- Since the applicants were mostly social media types and Murphy-Goode was ambiguous about the role that the number of video views and “favorites” would play, most people got busy promoting their videos. That’s 1,000 unpaid promoters who know how to leverage the social web. I saw untold Tweets, Facebook posts, and even three separate discussions in this Linkedin group (Rhoby’s drew the most engagement but it appears that she did not make the Top 50).
- Murphy-Goode’s website (www.murphy-goode.com) traffic rank rocketed skyward by 2,818,000 slots in the last 3 months (per www.alexa.com) to 168,717 in the latest 7 days. It will be interesting to see how that holds up.
- The “contest” website (www.aReallyGoodeJob.com) has done even better, appearing frequently in the top 20,000 most visited sites in recent days.
- I found many prominent blog posts and traditional press stories including Daily Finance’s story titled “Twittering for wine: How to run a million dollar ad campaign for $60K”. This is no doubt helping sales and online buzz.
- Despite the title stating “$60K”, when factoring in salary and overhead, website development costs, the impressively thorough vetting of candidates (written applications coupled with telephone interviews of 30 – 60 minutes), travel costs and the like, I estimate that Murphy-Goode will spend upwards of $250K on this program by the time it’s done.
The bottom line for businesses aspiring to drive growth through social media and social networking: To be effective, these programs take the same level of planning and investment as good old-fashioned marketing campaigns. Murphy-Goode has done their spade work and is getting good value for its money so far.
By the way, the best-in-class example of such a program remains “Will It Blend”. If you’ve never seen it, start here: BlendTec on YouTube (I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed). Interestingly, BlendTec is primarily in the B2B space and their sales quintupled as a result of this campaign.