Going online with glass of wine

NEW YORK — Are you a "people person"?

How about an "excellent communicator"?

Do résumé-wrecking clichés similar to those make your thumbs twitter with excitement? If so, you may be just what California's Murphy-Goode Winery is looking for.

In a sign of the cybercrazed times, the winery in Healdsburg, Calif., is on a nationwide hunt for someone to fill its "Really Goode Job."

The successful applicant will earn $10,000 a month to tweet and use other social-media skills to generate buzz about its reds and whites. The job offers no health insurance and lasts for six months. But by the time auditions were held this week at New York's Grand Central Terminal, at least 747 people had posted videos in hopes of impressing winemaker David Ready Jr.

Hundreds more are expected to submit applications — videos no longer than 60 seconds — by the June 19 deadline.

Ready said his idea was to "demystify wine" by using social networking to spread interest among a crowd that might consider the beverage out of its league.

"This has never really been done in the wine industry," said Ready, a Minnesota native who sipped samples of his wine as eager hopefuls closed in, hungering for face time with the man who might be their next boss.

The online buzz created by the job posting has proved a wise marketing ploy.

"It's so the new frontier," said Tara Moncheck, who planned to submit a video.

Ready said he got the idea of hiring a "lifestyle correspondent" via video application from the Australian state of Queensland. This year, tourism officials there caused an online sensation by inviting people to submit videos for "The Best Job in the World."

The gig: spending six months as caretaker of a palm-fringed, azure-seas island and using blogs, video updates, photo diaries and other online media to promote tourism. More than 34,000 people applied for the $105,000 job.

"We thought, wow, can we apply this to the wine industry? I guess we can," Ready said.

Ready said the main weakness among the applicants so far was their inability to show a passion for wine or for life in the bucolic Alexander Valley, not their mastery of the Web as a marketing tool.