Friday, June 5, 2009

$10,000 to Twitter about wine? It's a 'Really Goode Job'

In a sign of the cyber-crazed times, the Sonoma County winery is on a nationwide hunt for someone to fill its “Really Goode Job.” The successful applicant will earn $10,000 a month to tweet and use other social media skills to generate buzz about its reds and whites.

The job, which begins in August, offers no health insurance and lasts for six months. But by the time auditions were held this week at a restaurant at New York's Grand Central Terminal, at least 747 people had posted videos in hopes of impressing winemaker David Ready Jr.

Hundreds more are expected to submit applications -- videos no longer than 60 seconds -- by the June 19 deadline, either by posting them directly to a website or by going on camera at auditions across the country.


Murphy-Goode Winery job
YouTube
Applicant No. 678, or Richard Standifer of Miami Beach, hopes to score extra points by drinking wine from a Vikings helmet. (Murphy-Goode's David Ready is from Minnesota, home of the NFL's Vikings.)

Ready said his idea was to "demystify wine" by using social networking via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites to spread interest among a crowd that might view the beverage as out of its league.

"This has never really been done in the wine industry," said Ready, a burly Minnesota native who sipped wine samples as hopefuls closed in, hungering for face time with the man who might be their boss.

In one video, an applicant named Valerie stood with a fat snake coiled around her neck to show her fearlessness in the face of one element of the job: monitoring the creatures that live among the vines. 

"I want to be able to go into the vineyard and get my hands dirty and stomp on some grapes," she said as the serpent's head bobbed beside her left ear. 

"Already my name makes me the perfect candidate," said another applicant, noting her last name was Vinograd: "As in 'vino,' as in the Latin root for wine."

There has been plenty of humor. One applicant gargled with a bottle of red wine, andanother attempted to capitalize on Ready's devotion to his home state's NFL team by pouring wine into a Minnesota Vikings helmet and drinking from it.

There also have been some clearly Web- and tech-savvy applicants.

"I'm a Twitterer, a YouTuber, a Facebooker, a MySpacer, a Digger," said Clay, who also touted himself as a blogger, photographer, video producer and sommelier. "Did I mention I was a home-brewer too?" he quipped at the close of his breathless video.

But most who auditioned in person beneath the cavernous sky-blue ceiling and ornate chandeliers of Grand Central simply stood and delivered their spiels in between train arrival and departure announcements.

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