Murphy-Goode Wines Social Media Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong - Jim Louderback: MediaBizBlogger - Jim Louderback - Jim Louderback - MediaBizBlogger

Published: July 27, 2009 at 05:35 PM GMT
Last Updated: July 27, 2009 at 05:35 PM GMT

Ed Martin's full live coverage from the Television Critics Association tour is available exclusively to corporate subscribers of the Jack Myers Media Business Report. For more information visit www.myersreport.com.

A few weeks ago, I was seriously considering picking up a few cases of Murphy-Goode wine. Now, I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole.

And today, many other internet-connected folks feel the same way I do. It has nothing to do with vintage, TCA or bottle-rot. Nope, it's due to social rot instead – and Murphy-Goode's tone-deaf marketing folks are to blame.

Back in June, they had a clever idea to try to promote their wines to a younger, internet-savvy audience. "Let's do a star-search for a new spokesperson", they decided, call them a "lifestyle correspondent", and use the power of the internet to select the winner, build awareness, buzz and good will.

Applicants were asked to post a video to YouTube, explaining why they would make the best candidate. Murphy-Goode encouraged fans to vote on their favorites, and the winery promised to first select 50 finalists, and then bring the top ten up to Healdsburg for a final set of interviews.

Over 2,000 people applied, and more than 900 videos applications were posted on YouTube. Thousands of votes were cast, with ex-TechTV and Revision3 host Martin Sargent the clear winner. His submission received 6,600 votes, more than 3 times as many as the second place video, and more votes than the next 4 or 5 candidates combined.

But when the winery finally announced their top 50 candidates, Sargent was conspicuously absent from the list.

His friends, followers and fans were aghast. How could the top vote getter – by a long shot – been squeezed out of the finals?

Across the web, it quickly got ugly. First Sargent's fans started lambasting the Murphy-Goode winery, and then his influential friends picked up on the injustice. Popular web host Leo Laporte told his 136,000 listeners about the travesty, as did Digg founder Kevin Rose (1,061,379 twitter followers). Kevin followed that up by spending nearly 10 minutes talking about the issue with his co-host Alex Albrecht on the popular Revision3 show Diggnation. The story ended up getting nearly 2,400 Diggs on the popular social news site Digg.com – which was enough to put it into the top ten, where it was seen by a significant fraction of the site's 39 million monthly unique visitors

There was more negative chatter around the internet - a lot more. And instead of improving the winery's perception among internet-savvy drinkers, the opposite appears to be true. Search for "Murphy Goode" on Google, and you'll find two of the top ten results are negative stories about the failed campaign, with headlines that say "Murphy-Goode's job contest turns sour", and "Murphy-Goode says #1 spot isn't good enough to make top 50". And nearly a third of the 122,000 search results for Murphy Goode are, in fact, negative stories spawned by the Martin Sargent debacle.

What happened? How did such a promising campaign turn so ugly? Here are my 5 lessons for how to keep your social media campaign from turning sour.

Respect the Wisdom of the Crowds: If you're going to solicit entries from the internet, and then ask people to vote, then you need to at least pretend to abide by their selection. Murphy-Goode built a framework that would have let them finesse this. All they had to do was put the top ten vote getters into their top 50. Even if they had zero intention of ever giving Martin or the other nine a job, they should have – at a minimum – given them some recognition for winning the popular vote.

Know Your Web Stars: You may have never heard of Martin Sargent. But he's an extremely powerful web celebrity – both because of his own following, and his influential friends. If Jon Stewart, Tom Brady or Britney Spears had entered - or even Wine Spectator editor James Laube -- you can be sure they would have been treated with kid gloves. Martin got snubbed and snubbing sucks. But Martin was powerful enough to get a (well deserved) revenge.

Monitor Constantly: While running a social media campaign, keep a close eye on what the social-sphere is saying about your brand. Use Twitter search tools, Tweet Deck, Trendrr, backtype – among others – to keep track of how your campaign is doing. And when you notice something going awry…

Fix it Fast: As soon as "Martin-Gate" began to spread around the web, Murphy-Goode should have jumped in and fixed it. Perhaps they could have added a 51^st finalist to the list. Or maybe they could have expanded the competition to end up with two winners, a winery choice and a people's choice. Rapid action could have saved this campaign. Even an apology and am "I'm Sorry" would have gone a long way to repairing the winery's reputation. Instead, company representatives responded with lame platitudes like "You're too famous" and called Martin overqualified for the job. That just served to fan the flames – particularly because one of the top ten finalists was Rachel Reenstra, former Animal Planet and HGTV show host.

Don't be half-assed: But here's the biggest slap to the face of everyone who created, watched, voted and even paid attention to this online kerfuffle. As the story got out, it turned out that some of the candidates for the temporary position were actually sourced by recruiters, who told them that "the online votes were relatively unimportant." That's the worst thing that ever could have gotten out. Today's engaged social network users are no less passionate than the millions of Iranians that flooded the street when their votes were ignored. And they're far more connected as well. Be honest, be authentic and be real. Murphy-Goode, alas, tried to pull a fast one. But on the internet, it's extremely hard to be opaque.

Oh, and if you're looking for a creative, engaged spokesperson who really knows how to take advantage of social media, Martin Sargent is once again available. And if he enters your next on-line campaign, consider yourself warned. He knows how to win!

Jim Louderback joined Revision3 as the CEO in July 2007. He can be reached at jim@revision3.com

To communicate with or to be contacted by the executives and/or companies mentioned in this column, link to JackMyers Connection Hotline.

This is so amazing! Integrity rules!
If you say you will do something, please DO IT!!! Market power is not in the brand is with the consumer! Be aware!
Nice work!

Posted at 09:40 AM on Jul 27, 2009 by Mario Estuardo Archila-Maldonado

What a ridiculous argument for trying or dumping a brand...

I agree that they made marketing mistakes from which others could learn - but I find it infantile to say you'd pick up a few cases or never touch them again, all because a blogger didn't get picked to be in a contest.

Posted at 10:19 AM on Jul 27, 2009 by @Edw3rd

It could also be argued that Martin Sargent has made himself that much less employable since companies can just as easily see, through the same Google searches, how quickly things can go south with him onboard.

What happens if he feels he's been treated unfairly or doesn't get a raise he thinks he deserves? Does the company get dumped on then, too, by his "millions" of followers.

I think it cuts both ways and Martin has actually done a great deal of damage to his personal brand...the brand that actually gets the bills paid.

[Posting anonymously so I don't see a #f***(MyName) hashtag up on Twitter like they did for Murphy-Goode.]

Posted at 10:35 AM on Jul 27, 2009 by Anonymous

Thanks for the kind words.

As for what I buy and what I don't buy - if a company is negative or mean or duplicitous to a friend or associate, I simply don't purchase from them. It's my choice. That's the power of capitalism. The converse is true as well, it's called "Word Of Mouth". Heard of it?

Finally, as for Martin being employable, I can personally vouch for him... He has been nothing but professional throughout. He could EASILY have posted negative comments, and made certain conversations between MG and himself public, but he has refrained. Martin has conducted himself in an impeccable way - and that only shines a positive light on him and any potential contribution he can make to an organization.

jim

Posted at 03:36 PM on Jul 27, 2009 by Jim Louderback

Martin is funny but is he really the face you want for a wine company? For each wine drinker he turned on, he would turn off 10. Martin's drunk slacker persona would work for MD 20/20 or malt liquor.

Posted at 10:25 PM on Jul 27, 2009 by Herb K

I predicted as soon as I saw Martin take a swig directly from the bottle that they wouldn't want him. Perhaps they could have gained a bunch of internet nerd buyers if they had hired him, but they're surely thinking bigger than that.

Don't get me wrong. I'm an internet nerd, and I laughed at the swig. But they want Mainstream Market. Could be a mistake, but you don't know that, yet.

Posted at 02:45 AM on Jul 28, 2009 by preternat

Just a thought, if one guy gets more votes than all others because he already has fans you need to include him, even if you don't want to hire him. Between Twit, Rev. 3, and heck just Kevin's and Leo's Twitter followers, 1.5 million people read about this. BTW it was a 3 step process to vote, and I wound up doing it for nothing, that upset me a little.

Posted at 05:10 AM on Jul 28, 2009 by Joe G

Brilliant article Jim, learnt a lot, now following Martin on twitter because of Murphy_Goode's FAIL. SM is only going to get bigger, and people like Martin will be in high demand - the corps just need to catch up on that fact.

Posted at 10:47 PM on Aug 15, 2009 by T: Sashadentremont

How many duplicate votes were there;could they have
considered that? Also,they were going to job interview
the top ten,not hire someone because of their total vote count.Perhaps when you try to destroy a brand over this ie making a tempest out of a teapot,you should pray that someone doesn't in equal measure,
protest your product(s).

Posted at 03:23 PM on Aug 21, 2009 by eastsider

Oh brother. What a bunch of prima donnas you internet "stars" are. It's the company's prerogative to choose the winner. The real story here is what a bunch of sore losers and babies the group of you were. Pathetic and childish. (no, I have nothing to do with the wine company -- I've never even heard of them).

Posted at 09:25 PM on Aug 28, 2009 by Jason Capri

I submitted videos to both campaigns (Murphy-Goode and Queensland Tourism), and observed closely both the process and the by-products. "Mistakes were made" in both campaigns that hurt the brands.

In Murphy-Goode's case, I was surprised and disappointed that they announced their final 50 24 hours early. If they had recognized the seriousness of the Sargent uproar, they could have easily claimed this mistake and used it as an excuse to include Sargent after all.

By the way, the application process made it clear to me that the votes weren't that important--that this was a job search. When I urged my friends to "vote" for me, in my email I made it clear that I didn't think it did much but if you had no votes, it wouldn't look as good as if you had lots of votes. It didn't take many votes to break the Top 200.

Posted at 09:24 AM on Dec 7, 2009 by gwendolyn alley aka art predator

Oh, and thank you for linking to my post "Careful Murphy-Goode Social Media Just Might Spit Wine in Your Face."

Posted at 09:26 AM on Dec 7, 2009 by gwendolyn alley aka art predator