Can we learn from reality TV?

I have been thinking recently about how reality TV is so successful and if this can be mapped to viral marketing.

If you think about reality TV programmes it is all about the programme makers seeding enough information to gain momentum outside of the programme. Each programme wants people to spend the week promoting an act or contestant on the programmes behalf and even better if they then say bad things about the competition.

So when looking at marketing we want to seed just enough about our brand, services or products to get “a community” discussing it on our behalf. This means the community is defining our brand and obviously this does bring advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage is that if people recommend then it is well known that people respect personal recommendations but and it is a big but you need to manage those that don’t like the brand. If done well then those that like will help with those that don’t.

In summary we can learn a lot from this with social marketing.  For some companies it is critical to identify “a community”  to market a brand and/or product marketing and along with that the importance of making sure your are monitoring your brand.