Posts Tagged ‘Island Reef Job’

So who doesn’t want to work on an island off the Great Barrier Reef, write a few blog posts, take a few photos, and make £73K  in 6 months?  That’s what Australian tourism officials are offering for one lucky job applicant for the position of Island Caretaker that they’ve recently advertised.  A clever advertisement, particularly with Blue Monday, the gloomiest day of the year for us in the UK, approaching on the 19th and the constant stream of depressing news around the current economic crisis, it has generated reams of media attention.  ‘Island Reef Job’ has, in my opinion, overnight become one of the most successful PR stunts for quite some time.

In one day I read about this opportunity in the Metro, saw it discussed on Loose Women, had my flatmates bring it up over dinner, and received an email about it from a friend in Canada.  According to AP, within 24 hours, the website had had over 200,000 hits, which has crashed the website’s servers.  Even the server crash is making news of its own, with a good portion of the over 600 Google News hits for ‘Island Reef Job’ at the time of this post.

It’s a great example of generating talkability; the Queensland Tourism Minister announced that the campaign has already reached over 29 million people and some of my friends are even predicting that it might result in a reality TV show to choose the lucky job recipient.  I’m looking forward to seeing how this one rolls out - if I can ever get on the site!