Winery's Dream Job Leaves Applicants With a Sour Taste
Process to choose Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent questioned
By SAJID FAROOQ
Updated 11:15 AM PST, Sat, Jul 11, 2009
It was suppose to be the greatest job in the world. Get paid $60,000 to drink wine and tweet about it from your fancy Napa Valley cottage.
But all was not well in winery heaven after nearly 2,000 applicants submitted their qualifications and post 900 videos online to become Murphy-Goode Winery's Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent. Apparently the winery didn't get the memo that to social networking geeks everything is about the numbers. As in the number of Facebook friends and the number of people following them on Twitter.
When the winery revealed its list of 50 finalists there was a problem. Some of the most popular videos, based on the number of views each application received on the winery's website, did not make the final cut.
"Yeah, we screwed up," Caroline Shaw, a spokeswoman for the winery told our friends at the San Francisco Chronicle.
The winery showed how web unsavy it can be by not explaining the person it would hire would be based on merit and not whose video went viral.
Shaw said the promotion "was never intended to be a contest," which are illegal for alcoholic beverages in California. Maybe the winery should have explained that before it enjoyed all the free publicity it received from The New York Times, CNBC and others across the world.
The winner, or should we say chosen applicant, will be named on July 21.
First Published: Jul 10, 2009 4:01 PM PST
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