Murphy-Goode Win­ery becomes the talk of the Twitterverse

I’m not going to lie. It’s hard to work in PR and brand­ing these days. You are bom­barded with all sorts of expert infor­ma­tion and advice. Peo­ple are con­stantly sug­gest­ing you try this strat­egy, plat­form, or net­work. Your brand is not only expected to sus­tain a sta­ble pres­ence on old media chan­nels but rein­vent itself and strive under new media expectations.

All day I read arti­cles, blogs, case stud­ies about brands that tried some­thing — usu­ally — missed the boat, and are now enjoy­ing the not always pos­i­tive feed­back we are all so ready to give.

But then again, every once and a while a com­pany comes along and really hits the nail on the head. Today’s gold star for Social Media Dom­i­na­tor goes to: The Murphy-Goode Win­ery. Their lat­est social hir­ing strat­egy and con­test has all the com­po­nents of a suc­cess­ful online media ini­tia­tive: pur­pose, vision, viral poten­tial, rich media good­ness, and more.

I thought it would be ben­e­fi­cial for other com­pa­nies to read a bit of the back­story, and under­stand how a bou­tique win­ery in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia has the whole online world watch­ing its every move.

The back­story: Murphy-Goode

I first stum­bled upon A Really Goode Job after a con­ver­sa­tion with appli­cant Maria Ogneva (@themaria). She pointed me to a Mash­able post that cov­ered the guide­lines. Basi­cally, Murphy-Goode is look­ing for a “Lifestyle Cor­re­spon­dent” to live on site at the Mur­phy Goode win­ery for 6 months, learn­ing all about wine, wine mak­ing, wine tast­ing and sur­round­ing Sonoma wine coun­try. The daily activ­i­ties will involve shar­ing these wine sto­ries, adven­tures and expe­ri­ences with the rest of us via mul­ti­ple rich and new media chan­nels — such as social net­works, video sites, photo gal­leries, and more.

Not a bad gig, huh? Did I men­tion they are going to pay the lucky guy/gal’s travel expenses, a 10,000 a month stipend plus accom­mo­da­tions, and pro­vide com­puter, inter­net, PDA, and dig­i­tal and still cam­era access. Wowz­ers. I’m excited just blog­ging about this. OK, mov­ing on …

Why this was successful

A clear goal: They had one — to hire the right per­son for the job. To even be con­sid­ered the per­son had to demon­strate their knowl­edge in social media by pro­duc­ing a quick video, writ­ing blog posts, push­ing viral con­tent, and gain­ing buzz. Murphy-Goode did just what every com­pany tries to do (whether with tra­di­tional hir­ing meth­ods or new age ones), they weeded out the bad appli­cants at no cost to them.

They are left with 912 strong can­di­dates. It was a win-win. By care­fully choos­ing the way they were going to pro­mote the posi­tion, most of the work was done for them. Well done guys, well done.

Sec­ondary successes

It doesn’t stop there. As we all know, social media enables com­pa­nies and brands to cap­ture long-term ben­e­fits from suc­cess­ful ini­tia­tives. It’s the beauty of a strong, viral mes­sage. If you Google “Murphy-Goode win­ery” right now, you will notice that 6 of the top 10 SERPS are actu­ally cov­er­ing the con­test. They have dom­i­nated their brand name with pos­i­tive list­ings. This is what we call great online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment. They cre­ated the right kind of buzz and let it run wild.

In addi­tion to tak­ing con­trol of their brand, they are also gain­ing vis­i­bil­ity to their ser­vices. Con­fes­sion: I have never heard of the Murphy-Goode win­ery, and I am a wine lover. I mean seri­ously, I love love love it. OK, you get it. Any­way, I have now vis­ited their site about a dozen times, shared their link on my Face­book page to my 1,000 plus friends, and tweeted about them to my over 3,500+ fol­low­ers. All because @the­maria vouched for them, sent a link my way, and applied for the job.

Now that is suc­cess­ful social media. Tak­ing an idea, cre­at­ing buzz on mul­ti­ple plat­forms, let­ting peo­ple push your mes­sage around in a pos­i­tive light, and reap­ing the rewards.

Lastly, not only did they get their name in front of peo­ple, but the right peo­ple. If you check WeFollow.com (a user-generated direc­tory of Twit­ter users) there are 1,054,832 Twit­ter users that have tagged them­selves with “wine.” These are wine-lovers, drinkers, enthu­si­asts, jour­nal­ists, win­ery employ­ees, and more … and for the past few weeks the top wine story on Twit­ter has surely been the Murphy-Goode hir­ing con­test. As a com­pany, it’s cru­cial to focus your social media efforts on the right plat­forms for you. No point yelling your mes­sage into a room of peo­ple who aren’t lis­ten­ing … right? Right? Bueller … Bueller?

So why bother with social media?

I meet with a lot of com­pa­nies, and almost always I am asked to “give an exam­ple of how a com­pany has increased their bottom-line with social media.” Well, now, in addi­tion to my usual spiel of stats, graphs, etc., I can also hand out this case study. What it comes down to is any com­pany can find suc­cess with a social media strat­egy; they just need to have the right goal in place. They need to under­stand where their audi­ence is hang­ing out, and get in there with a good story … start pass­ing it around. The rest usu­ally takes care of itself.

I will surely be vis­it­ing Murphy-Goode on my next visit north, and since I find it bad luck to visit a win­ery with­out pur­chas­ing a few bot­tles, this social media strat­egy not only gained them 1,000 great appli­cants, a few pages of top-rated SERPS, media atten­tion from top blogs like Mash­able, thou­sands of site vis­its, BUT also a few actual wine bot­tle pur­chases from me. Yum. Yum. Talk about reap­ing the rewards of social media.

Side note: For any­one who would like to vote for Maria, and help her snag her dream job, you can view her video above, and vote here: Maria Ogneva.

Joanna Lord is a social mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant and founder of Your­Job­Stop, the job resources board. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Joanna or leave a com­ment below.

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