Now that's how it's done.

G'day readers.

Today's entry actually started life as a comment on a rather pleasing entry of Ellis' about a lucky young go-getter from Hampshire by the name of Ben Southall landing himself a job that even Carlsberg would not be able to lay claim to; but alas, there was no way of commenting on it; so, naturally, I nabbed the idea. ;)

Tempting as it is to steal the idea as my own and wail "liar!" when accused of plagerism, I'm going to have a quick look at why the dream job isn't just a victory for Mr. Southall, but also his employer, Tourism Queensland.

Before I launch into all of that, I'll quickly sum up the story:

• 1: Tourism Queensland need to promote tourism for Hamilton Island, just off the Australian north east coast.
• 2: They set up a campaign to find an island caretaker with some awesome benefits, calling it the "Best job in the world". They are probably right.
• 3: Job applicants sent in a video to convince Tourism Queensland they are the ones for the job
• 4: The applicants are whittled down until the position is filled by just one person
• 5: The proud person who lays claim to having the best job in the world does lots of PR type things to help Tourism Queensland, meanwhile the initial process of finding the right person for the job has generated insane amounts of publicity itself.

The campaign certainly caused a stir, with the BBC doing an hour-long documentary on it, and being hailed by PR companies all over the place as one of the greatest campaigns ever. But what exactly made it so good?

One of the appealing things about the campaign is undoubtedly the emotional response to the prospect of being paid £74,000 a year for living in paradise in a kind of dangling a carrot in front of a donkey kind of fashion. Especially when you consider that this vacancy was first advertised in January '09, when the winter blues are pretty much at their peak in much of the north side o' the world.

Next, we have some pretty awesome user generated content stuff going on. If YouTube has taught the world anything, it's that people like stupid videos, and as such, getting folks to audition for the job through uploading videos of themselves is bound to attract people along the way, even if their interests do not lie with the job or the island.

So then, after all of that the winner is picked, Ben Southall becomes one lucky sonofagun and all eyes are upon him, prime for him to start his new job doing what? Ahh yes, being, essentially, a PR officer for the island, with one much more attentive audience than most would have had.

Not too shabby really.