The creators of television and cable reality shows could be sued for practicing deceptive bait and switch tactics. The genre which includes The Apprentice, The Girls Next Door, Miami Ink, and The Hills are touted to chronicle people interacting in real-life situations. I’m sorry but what is portrayed is much closer to pure entertainment than reality. I’ve never seen meetings run as they are in The Apprentice and pray that my daughter doesn’t consider the escapades in The Hills to approximate reality.

On the other hand, social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and micro-blogging site Twitter are growing at exorbitant rates while continuing to suffer from criticism by mainstream business as time-wasting black holes exposing people to career risk with unproven business return. Facebook has doubled its traffic in the past 18 months and had over 70 Million  unique visitors in February 2009.

Twitter has been growing at triple digit rates but it’s nearly 8 Million unique visitors in February trailed LinkedIn and were only roughly 10% of Facebook traffic. Despite its meager proportions to big brother Facebook and in the face of market skepticism, it’s still my opinion that Twitter is the New (and true) Reality Show.

The veracity of the conversations that take place in Twitter and the way it has been adopted by Millennials (Generation Y) and others is undeniable. Maybe it is the “reality” of having only 140 charachters at your disposal that forces “tweeps” to craft their message in a more meaningful and concise way. If you are a direct marketing copywriter and are still trying to adapt your writing style to the web, a crash course in Twitter will train your brain to make the message punchy and attention grabbing.

Business is taking notice as well.

In Brazil, one of the best known TV hosts, Marcelo Tas, has engaged in “sponsored tweeting” with Telefónica paying the tab. “This idea of compensating influentials to talk about your brand is probably going to grow” says Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner.

Blackbottom, a Utah based apparel company posted this Tweet to promote a special on cycling jerseys and shorts. Using hashtags and cross-referencing with their own email subscriber list, the company is taking baby steps towards the Twitter version of direct marketing. I have seen this with other companies, notably Athlinks, a company that aggregates race results for all sorts of endurance events, and expect to see more examples in the near future.

The New York Times documented the success of “Wine guy” Gary Vaynerchuk, a well known Web 2.0 guy who started the Wine Library and began online sales in 1997 when he was still in college. Since then he has steadily advanced his Internet-based marketing skills. His sites include winelibrary.com, where his daily webcast, “The Thunder Show,” has won a wide following, and garyvaynerchuk.com.

Last December, seeking to enhance sales, he offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

This is just the kind of evidence that we all need to justify social media tools for business purposes, but there is more than pure ROI to be gained from micro-blogging. I’ve been able to conduct and take part in mini-surveys, have contributed to executive search, learned of breaking news before it hit the AP wire, found a triathlon coach in Vermont, and the best pizza in Buffalo, NY.

Twitter is a thought aggregator that can be a highly valuable research and networking tool. It’s becoming so popular that someone even cooked up a fake loyalty marketing program just for fun.

I’m not a Twitter apologist, and have to note that part of the evidence for it being a true Reality Show is the emergence of spam, scams, and random human drama appearing in the public timeline. Just as offline people offer to solve all your problems in a book for $19.95, deliver you the miracle diet while you still eat fast food 3x/day or find you a cheap Rolex, Twitter is not immune.

Twitter complies with the truism that your benefit is in direct relationship to your investment. At a very rapid pace, expect to see more companies listening about and promoting their brand as well as testing direct product promotions.

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