Sitting on a panel discussion for the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit in Berlin earlier this year, I told the audience that the Queensland Reef Island Job was a perfect example of new ways of marrying PR with social media to produce the perfect marketing campaign.
Pondering the question on Twitter this morning, others seemed to agree.
PR expert Adrian Johnson said: "It's a glorious PR & soc med campaign. Can't think of a better travel 1. Ever. Queensland=paradise is what world now thinks."
William Bakker of Tourism British Columbia spoke of its "brilliance".
I still stand by this assertion.
As we've said before, campaigns such as these - hooking something like the 'Dream Job' into its fabric - are nothing more than clever ways of grabbing attention away from the traditional marketing methods.
However the conclusion of the 'competition' element of the campaign today - err, well done Brit Ben Southall - has thrown up some interesting data.
Hitwise figures obtained by Travolution today reveal a number of things.
* UK web searches for 'queensland' are up 40% year on year, which says something about the relative success of boosting the profile Queensland itself as a destination or the popularity of job campaign. [As Hitwise UK research director Robin Goad said in an email, this was from a low starting point]
So far, so good. But...
* In the 12 weeks to the week ending 2 May 2009, there were around 7,500 search terms containing the word 'queensland'. Of the top ten, only three ('queensland', 'queensland australia' and 'time in queensland' would be seen as tourism related). These three accounted for around 5.5% of the total.
* Although there was uplift in traffic to one of the Queensland tourism sites (experiencequeensland.com), probably as a result of campaign as it was the main site to which visitors to the job portal were subsequently directed, the other main site (queenslandholidays.com.au) actually saw a decline year-on-year. This could be economy-led, of course.
As mentioned above, buzz over the 'job' resurfaced today and the mainstream media duly obeyed.However, in a post yesterday, the BBC highlighted briefly the impact of the campaign from a marketing perspective.
And the Guardian, perhaps rather unfairly, compared the final stages of the competition to the latest series of Britain's Got Talent, suggesting the media had lost interest (apart from itself, of course) in the campaign.
We suspect, however, the organisers are probably more than pleased with the much more subtle coverage they are getting and do not need the circus which is following Susan Boyle et al.
Further reading: Other best jobs in travel.
Without doubt it was the best PR campaign I have come across but I wonder what impact it has had on promoting Queensland and bookings to the Great Barrier Reef.
It would be interesting to get some stats from the tourism board.
I think to hold peoples attention the content coming from the island will have to be top quality otherwise people will turn off.
Great to see a Brit getting the job though.
The challenge that they'll have now is to really capitalise on the hopefully plentiful stream of content and media that the new job candidate is going to generate. I haven't seen any detailed information about how they are going to utilise it thus far, has anyone else?
A clever, clever campaign with loooong legs. PR gold. I wonder if more people have looked into moving to paradise rather than just visiting it since "job hunt" started?
It was a brilliant campaign but it went on for a bit too long, I think. My feeling is that the buzz created when the campaign was launched was a lot bigger than when the winner was announced.
The winner has a huge job on his hands: imagine having to continue to capture the imagination of the world and enthuse people into visiting Queensland. I agree with Darren, the content coming from the island would have to be top-notch!
It would be very interesting to see the stats. I wonder how using social media to promote a destination stacks up against the magnetic power of movies (i.e. 'Crocodile Dundee for Oz, 'LOTR' for NZ, etc...).