Hardy Wallace, winner of Jackson Family Wines’ Really Goode Job contest, tells NorthBay biz what he learned as the social media voice for Murphy-Goode Winery after six months on the job.
The media picked up on the story and ran with it, detailing during the selection process how 2,000 people had applied, 200 of whom lined up in San Francisco in the spring of 2009 for a 24-hour head start on the application.
“In terms of media impressions, oh man,” says Mark Osmun, public relations director for Jackson Family Wines. “We got more than I anticipated, more than I’ve ever seen in any industry for any clients—and I’ve done PR for 30 years. We received 833 million media impressions.”
All this even before candidates had been finalized. Of the original 2,000 applicants, only half followed the contest rules and made the first cut; that group of potential candidates was then whittled down to 10. Among them was Hardy Wallace, a laid-off tech worker from Atlanta and active wine blogger with a dream. He’d decided to try and make it in the wine industry months before the contest was even announced and showed up first in line on that fateful first day in San Francisco.
“I went at it like a man possessed, and I never worked harder in all my life,” says Wallace. “I wanted to make a big splash and do as much as I could to make sure no matter what happened, I was going to be successful. I committed.”
His commitment wasn’t lost on Osmun, who offered a quote from Scottish explorer W.H. Murray to describe Wallace’s life over the last year: “… the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too,” he quotes. “A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”
Do what you love
Prior to entering the Really Goode Job contest, Wallace had spent 12 years as a technology sales and marketing executive for Kodak (150 days a year on the road); in addition, his personal passion for wine led him to develop the popular Dirty South Wine blog. What ultimately attracted Jackson Family Wines to Wallace was not only his addiction to and experience with social media, but the facts that he knows and loves wine, he’s energetic, he’s happy, he’s a gifted public speaker and well-versed on an encyclopedia of subjects. He also came with a strong network of followers from his own blog and was a relentless participant in other wine blogs and communities, as well as having contacts within the wine trade and press.
Aside from the monumental publicity the job search received, Jackson Family Wines was hoping along the way to learn about social media and its potential from people who were already in the thick of it. In addition to Wallace, it hired Really Goode Job runner-up Adam Beaugh, former social media director to the governor of Texas, as director of social media for the company, a permanent position that oversees social media efforts for all Jackson Family Wines brands, which include not only Murphy-Goode, but also Kendall-Jackson, Stonestreet, La Crema, Matanzas Creek, Edmeades, Cambria and a host of others. Jackson also hired another of the top 10 candidates, Rocky Slaughter, as a social media consultant. Several of the other candidates found similar jobs with other wineries.
“Social media is an advantage now and a necessity in the future,” Wallace says. “Those who are getting in first are building relationships really quickly and are able to learn from mistakes before mastering it is a necessity.”
As it turned out, Wallace’s breadth of knowledge and interest in topics other than wine—his ability to connect with a wide range of people over a wide range of topics that could eventually link back to wine—benefited him in his job as Murphy-Goode’s brand ambassador. “I knew this before from writing my personal wine blog, but the things people respond to are usually the things you least expect them to,” he says.
As examples, he points to the blog photo he posted, which made it look as though he had a ghost in his house, titled “Is the Murphy-Goode house haunted?” Followers responded immediately and in great numbers. He also made some great connections and generated traffic during three days of “Tweetups, dinners, parties, and several videos and blog posts” with friends and fellow Atlantans Kevin Gillespie and Eli Kirshtein, who were contending on the past season of Bravo’s “Top Chef.”
“The hard sell is the death of social media,” Wallace offers. “As soon as you do that, people turn you off and you’re no longer trusted. The people I followed, I always wanted to hear what they had to say about other stuff. It’s kind of like picking friends. Because through the other stuff—they like that and that, and I like those two things, too—there’s a connection made.”
From the ground up
The lifestyle correspondent job description was left fairly broad from the beginning, so Wallace was largely left to define it as he went along. Maintaining a Murphy-Goode blog with regular video posts started right away, as did setting up active homes for the brand on Facebook and Twitter.
“I started with a pickaxe and shovel,” he says.
He was nothing if not prolific. Before the last month of his six-month tenure, Wallace’s social media content—including Facebook, blogs, YouTube, tweets and inclusion in the blog posts of others—generated some 5,700 total messages referencing Murphy-Goode (“A huge part of social media is getting other people to talk about you,” says Wallace).
“Message-wise, we wanted to demystify wine,” adds Osmun. “Social media goes everywhere; everyone can connect with it. Same with wine. I’ve discovered social media is about much more than putting a message out. It’s about seeing what other people are saying. It’s almost like market research in real time. A lot of it is sitting back and listening.”
Not one to take a day off, Wallace was an employer’s dream. Affable and easy to laugh, he can barely sit still in a face-to-face meeting, his iPhone constantly buzzing with incoming Tweets he can’t help but want to see and act on. If he wasn’t sleeping over those six months, he was working, Christmas included.
“When you’re first getting started, people think the blog’s the most important thing or Facebook’s the most important thing,” he says. “To me, Twitter’s the most important thing, because you communicate with people on a minute-to-minute basis. That immediate connection is where the value is at the moment.”
Wallace used Twitter and Facebook to set up dozens of personal private tastings, too, pouring for people in the Murphy-Goode tasting room that he’d met online, visits that would often lead to wine sales and wine club sign-ups.
“It’s not just the sales you get,” Wallace notes. “It’s that these people, first of all, are active on social media, [so] 99 percent of the time, as soon as they walk out that door, they post things or tweet about Murphy-Goode. It’s word-of-mouth on steroids.”
Jackson Family Wines won’t discuss specific sales numbers, but will say the publicity positively affected both sales and distribution, including more and more people asking their local retailers and restaurants to carry Murphy-Goode. And tasting room staff told Wallace that about 75 percent of those who walk into the tasting room mention the Really Goode Job campaign.
“You can more easily sell what’s familiar,” he says in response.
The increase in distribution is significant because, as Wallace describes, before winning the job as Murphy-Goode’s lifestyle correspondent, he hadn’t seen the brand in years. But he also knew, “If it was all about dirt and grapes it wasn’t going to work.”
“It needed to be about people, it needed to be about fun,” Wallace says of his social media message. He reiterates this point by detailing that his audience exists almost entirely during work hours, peaking at 9 a.m. EST and 9 a.m. PST, again around 4:45 p.m. EST and 4:45 PST. Clearly they’re looking for entertainment from their workplace and it couldn’t be prolonged: No 4,000-word essays; no 10-minute movies.
“I threw a lot of stuff on the wall to see what stuck, did some traditional harvest videos, some non-traditional harvest videos, some winemaking type things, cooking things. It was always cool to see what people reacted to,” he says. That’s the beauty of social media, he adds. It may be permanently stored somewhere digitally, but it’s only fresh until the next thing comes out, so there’s room to experiment.
The one thing never to experiment with, he warns, is quality, because the way to distinguish oneself online is to make sure photo and video components look good. Wallace uses a small, high-quality Canon video camera that can also take quality still shots and record worthy audio.
Looking toward the future
When considering how to increase its online presence, Jackson Family Wines had looked at the social networks being maintained by the likes of Starbucks and Toyota, strong brands that were doing a lot online. But in each instance, there was a staff of some 50 people devoted to such enterprises—something Jackson Family Wines couldn’t do. Instead, it went searching for a select few.
It was the right move. The Public Relations Society of America has named the Really Goode Job campaign a Silver Anvil Awards finalist in the “alcohol” category (up against one entry each from beer and spirits). The Silver Anvil is the PR world’s equivalent to the Oscars; winners will be announced this month.
Wallace says for him, social media, even for a big brand, must still come down to an individual voice. He wants to know he’s interacting with a person even if the Twitter account reads “big brand.” His favorite example of this is Popeye’s Chicken, whose Twitter account is written, he found out, by the company’s CIO, who’s developed a consistent—and funny—voice, imbuing the brand with the right personality. Wallace aimed to do the same for Murphy-Goode.
When his six-month stint officially came to an end on February 15, Wallace was offered a permanent position with Jackson Family Wines, but declined. That same day, Wallace announced two new gigs. First, in exchange for residency in a small home located on the same property as the tasting room, he’d begin consulting for Michel-Schlumberger Wine Estate in Healdsburg; the one-day-per-week position involves broadening the winery’s message via social media. To fill the bulk of his time, though, Wallace will be handling sales and marketing for Kevin Kelley’s Natural Process Alliance (NPA) and Salinia labels in Santa Rosa.
“NPA is a tiny winery. We only make about 800 cases of organic, natural wine, that’s sold in refillable stainless steel Kleen Kanteens,” he says. “Wine is delivered to restaurants, almost like the milkman years ago, and the empties are returned to the winery to be washed and refilled.
“The wine is amazing,” he continues with trademark enthusiasm, “and the delivery and packaging is revolutionary. Along with traditional sales and marketing, we’re pushing the brand through both social media and video at www.thenpa.tv.”
Turns out, even before he sorted out the particulars of life after the Really Goode Job, Wallace had put his house in Atlanta up for sale and committed to stay in Wine Country, job or no job.
“At this point last year, I could have said, ‘This is going to be the worst year of my life,’ he adds. “But I can look back and say 2009 was the best year of my life. I had more fun, felt more successful, connected with more people, did what I love and will continue to do what I love. There’s no way to look back.”
