Murphy-Goode Wrap-Up

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Six of Top Ten. (Me, Rachel, Annie, Eric, Kamary, Nick) (Rachel Reenstra pic)

Breaking News: I was NOT chosen as the Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent!!!

And if that’s breaking news to you, then you’ve either been living under a rock or haven’t had the time or inclination to follow the social media goings-on over at Murphy-Goode Winery.

Hardy Wallace, a formidable applicant and all-around heckuva guy, was chosen as the Murphy-Goode WCLC…and I support him 100%.

In fact, we ALL do!

Which is indicative of the entire time spent up in Healdsburg…total support for one another, regardless of who was chosen…and ultimately completely in line with the idea of social media, right?

Before moving on, I simply have to THANK everyone who supported me and everyone else in the A Really Goode Job campaign.  Everyone’s amazing and unwavering support has truly humbled me.

Gosh I'm cool! Well, not anymore...I think I lost those sunglasses! Ack. (Eric Hwang pic)

As a quick wrap-up, the Top 10 were flown up to Healdsburg, CA in late July for what turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life.  We had dinners scheduled every night where the Murphy-Goode wine flowed freely (kinda like Ancient Greece…or my version of heaven), educational talks out in the vineyards, a wine-blending competition, wine-pouring meet-and-greets, final interviews, haiku-writing contests, cooking dinner for 20+ people, a Segway tour of a local vineyard and on and on…CRAZY, right?

As soon as we realized that we were all so incredibly different from one another in the Top 10, we declared the weekend a “no competition” zone and set about to have a great time and be 100% ourselves.  Oh sure, we were competitive at Liar’s Dice and Texas Hold ‘Em (although Murphy-Goode winemaker Dave Ready, Jr. was the only one in the room who knew the rules for Texas Hold ‘Em…are you kidding me with all those goofy rules?), but the majority of our time up there was spent laughing and taking pictures and video, tweeting, Facebooking and just about anything else social media-related you can think of.

Rocky, Nick and I. Hell yeah I can play the tambourine! (Or so I learned that night.) (Rachel Reenstra pic)

It was only three full days we were there in Sonoma County, but it felt like summer camp.

Camp Murphy-Goode!

I had two running bits…that, as the Top 10 applicants in a widely-publicized job search, everything communicated to us was a test. When the Tasting Room manager, the wonderful Lorri Emmerich, suggested a breakfast place in town for me and Rachel to try since we were the first two to arrive on Saturday…I said whether we went there or not was a test. Sure enough, Lorri walked by with her husband an hour or so later and stopped to chat for a bit. I looked at Rachel as they walked off and said, “See! It was a test! And we passed!!! (I think.)”

My other bit was that it should be called “anti-social media” because at any given moment we all had our faces buried in our iPhones (guilty!) or smartphones to let everyone else know what was going on. If flashbulbs weren’t going off in our faces from the pro photographers in the group…we were our own paparazzi, in essence…then we were busy updating the “real world” on the happenings.

First night, me and Adam doing our social media thang while Dave Ready ran a bocce ball tourney! (Annie Lee pic)

In fact, every night when I got back to my hotel room, I’d spend at least an hour or so, regardless of how exhausted I was, looking up what the other nine had posted on Twitter and Facebook and their blogs so that I could “like” things, RT them or re-post in approval and appreciation.

Explore Healdsburg? Who has time when you’ve been dubbed one of the social media elite…and everything’s a test? 

If you haven’t seen the brief videos I’ve posted on the four-day excursion, you can check them out here:

www.youtube.com/toddhavens

And if you want to check out the pics, I’ve made the albums on Facebook available to everyone:

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

All Top 10 video submissions

Also, there are some GREAT videos and shots by Adam Beaugh (one of the Top 10)…with links to everyone’s sites, blogs, social media awesomeness…

http://www.areallygoodetrip.com/

and local Healdsburg tech pro Justin Whitaker posted a great compilation of the final announcement day:

http://myhbg.tv/1623/murphey-goode-wine-country-correspondent-announcement/

As opposed to the real photography professionals in the Top 10 (Adam, Eric, Rocky, Annie…did I miss anyone?), I took along my new iPhone 3GS and a laptop for expedited updating and sharing.

I'll be hiring Adam as my personal photographer whose only job will be to take nice shots like these! Me likey me. (Adam Beaugh pic)

SUCCESSES

Although I wasn’t tapped for the ultimate job, I did win 3rd place in wine-blending (which I’d never done before and was a lot of fun)…and I made it into the finals of Liar’s Dice where I went head-to-head with Dave, the guru himself, and Adam.

Am I bluffing here at Liar's Dice? You betcha! That's how you get into the finals, my friends! (Eric Hwang pic)

I didn’t win anything for 3rd place in the wine-blending…but for making the finals in Liar’s Dice I had to get up at 5:30am the next morning to be in a Skype interview for the local Sacramento NBC affiliate morning show where they ran out of time before asking me a question.  Ah, morning television!

At least Dave took me, Adam  and Mark Osmun out for breakfast at his favorite local eatery where we watched as the waitress tripped and dumped an entire pitcher of orange juice (it looked like) on a young guy dressed in a business suit.  It was awful, but when his buddies couldn’t stop laughing…neither could we.  Of course, when she came back over to us with a scalding pitcher of hot coffee asking me if I wanted more…”Oh no! Thanks, I’m fine! You can step away now, slowly, carefully…steady as she goes…”

SOCIAL MEDIA

The way it should be, I think, is how we approached it.  If there was competition, it was friendly.  Social media means that Hardy will lean on us to help spread the word just as much as we’ll lean on him.  Especially as we set to bring a slow-to-change industry successfully online.

Kudos to Murphy-Goode for breaking such public new ground!  (That sounds weird…such new ground publicly?  Meh.)

MURPHY-GOODE

What a great group of people!  Many of them have worked with the winery for decades…something you never hear nowadays.  Their humanity and generosity were overwhelming and, even though I only met them for a few days, I really do miss them!

Perhaps my affection for everyone is even more pronounced because Murphy-Goode was such a faceless entity for the entire AReallyGoodeJob run.  Tweets and Facebook fan page updates came mysteriously from On High – to actually meet the people who work so hard and care so much about Murphy-Goode and each other was a bit of a shock, a complete reversal from the walled-off anonymity of the campaign.

Rocky, Hardy (at the sink) and moi making dinner. (Adam Beaugh pic)

WHAT’S NEXT

These are questions we’re all trying to answer in our own ways. It’s why it’s taken me a couple of weeks to write this post.

Hardy is the official Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent for the next 6 months starting on 8/15/09 while Rocky was added in the 11th hour in a created-for-him internship role (SMART MOVE, Murphy-Goode!) and Kamary will be working with the winery in a consulting capacity.  You can already see what Kamary’s up to here at WineTimeTV.net

The rest of us are talking with other wineries (some in the Jackson Family portfolio…others not) and many, many opportunities that wouldn’t have been possible even a month ago could now easily come to fruition.  What a weird, weird, amazing world this is.

This site, AGoodeGuy.com, will not have much more life in it as it was created specifically for the A Really Goode Job campaign (obviously), but any future announcements will be posted here as well until another, more permanent home is found.

Simply TOO much happened in those 3-4 short days to write about…and it’d probably bore y’all to tears…but PLEASE feel free to ask any questions or share your thoughts in the comments.  It’s all over now so you can ask anything you want!

Thanks, again, for your support…and forgive me for failing to mention everyone who helped make this campaign such a phenomenal success!  (Linsey Careers, the townspeople of Healdsburg, my momma for birthing me, etc.)

I’m Todd Havens.  And I’m a Goode Guy!

(Yuk-yuk-yuk.)

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Top 10 for A Goode Guy!
• Q&A with Me Over at TheWanderkind
• Murphy-Goode hires Hardy Wallace as wine lifestyle correspondent
• Case Study In Progress: Murphy-Goode Dream Job

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