I have become increasingly fascinated with Tourism Queensland’s competition for “The Best Job in the World”. The successful candidate will live on Hamilton Island and will spend their time exploring the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and reporting on their experiences through video diaries and blog posts. The call for applicants occurred on January 11th and the top 16 candidates were announced on April 3rd.

No, I am not interested in the job itself, I am interested in the concept as a case study in the use of web 2.0, social media, and viral marketing. According to media releases, the competition received over 34,000 video applications. Anthony Hayes, CEO of Tourism Queensland, said,

“In many ways [the competition] has taken on a life of its own spawning special discussion groups, bulletin boards, blogs and websites with applicants critiquing the competition, having detailed discussions and swapping ideas and tips. …. During the first weekend of the campaign . . . more than 200,000 people from around the world logged onto the website, including 25,000 in one hour alone.”

Wow. That is an amazing amount of traffic.

From a March 25th press release: “[t]he worldwide response to Tourism Queensland’s Best Job in the World campaign has been nothing short of phenomenal and already we have achieved around $100 million dollars worth of global publicity for Queensland.”

The top 50 applicants were tasked with campaigning for votes for a wild card spot on the top 10 interview list. Tourism Queensland ended up inviting 16 people, including the wild card, for interviews in early May. The wild card candidate, Clare Wang, received over 150,000 votes.

But get this, the wild card voting process tallied over 470,000 votes.

What fascinates me the most is the fact that Tourism Queensland spawned a global virtual army of social and conventional media marketers through the process of selecting the interview candidates. Yes, that’s right, they haven’t even given anyone a job yet! In the April 3rd press release announcing the top 16, Tourism Minister Peter Lawlor, stated,

“Tourism Queensland has spent the past few weeks watching in amazement at the lengths these candidates have gone to in their quest for The Best Job in the World. From organising stunts like scuba-diving in a tank in Amsterdam, dressing up as a mermaid in downtown Singapore and spruiking at a London pub to conducting hundreds of media interviews, the Top 50 have shown an incredible amount of ingenuity and passion. Within a week of being short-listed, Brisbane applicant Hailey Turner had even organised a 12 day round-the-world trip promoting herself and the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.”

The process isn’t complete yet as it still remains to be seen whether all this awareness will translate into addition tourism, but as an example of how viral and social media marketing can impact web traffic, I think that “The Best Job in the World” is an unqualified success.

I’m convinced that Tourism Queensland’s experiment would make a fabulous marketing case study. Analyzing what they did right, what they did wrong, how they managed and measured the process, and how you could repeat their results would be a terribly interesting read. Maybe someone with one of those new SSHRC business-focused graduate scholarships could make this their thesis topic.

Now that would be my dream job . . . being paid to do my own curiosity driven research.