Looking for Work
Posted by Tom Gable
In March, we covered an emerging PR position: the ghost tweeter. Now, it seems the trend is toward creating public social media positions where the job description includes blogging, tweeting (or twittering as the case may be), posting to YouTube and other online activities. Not only are the jobs available, but clever marketing people are using those very tools to generate buzz and more resumes than they would have had otherwise.
The most recent example is Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County offering $10,000 a month to a person to generate buzz through social media for six months. Tina Susman covered it in The Los Angeles Times. The winery set up a site for applications and held auditions in New York. More than 900 have posted to the site and if you have several hours to burn, the postings range from creative to outrageous (applications close on June 19).
The winery got the idea from Queensland, Australia, which invited people to submit videos for “The Best Job in the World” — spending six months as caretaker of a palm-fringed island in the Great Barrier Reef area, surrounded by azure sea, and using blogs, video updates, photo diaries and other online media to promote tourism. Susman reported that more than 34,000 people applied for the roughly $120,000 job.
Lessons learned: getting creative in the use of social media and video for something as mundane as advertising for new hires can have significant impact. Is YouTube the new Craigslist?
