Victorious

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwNdaJkI2uc

Nickolodean's Victorious is a show surrounding the lives of a group of talented friends who attend an arts high school. In this episode, the friends get caught up in a battle to have the highest number of followers on the social site "The Slap" which can be equated to a real life mash up of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. This "war" begins because the group finds out that Trina, a loud obnoxious girl, has over a 1,000 followers while they trail behind. The episode is humorous because it features "strategies" real-life users implement to gain an audience.

One of the characters, Robbie attempts to gain more followers by holding contests because "contests are one of the best way to get more followers." Every hour he posts a video of himself in a secret location and the first one to find him gets a prize. A few seconds after he explains his strategy, a crowd of students find him and tackle him for the prize.

Jade, another friend, carries around a mega speaker yelling at everyone to follow her. She is seen harassing other students to follow her. She says she is "gently suggesting." This behavior is similar to brands that continually declare "follow, like, share" on everything that people can see.

Cat on the other hand, decides the best way to gain more followers is to promise to tweet a thousand tweets a day. Her strategy is that the more you tweet the more followers you get. When confronted with the fact that there is no way she could actually post 1,000 tweets a day, she walks off tweeting "I like birds." "&cheese." There are some brands who use this strategy by pushing out content that is irrelevant. Consumers may find the posts entertaining but the short entertainment will not follow back to the brand.

The group realizes that because they have been so caught up in trying to gain more followers, they forgot to complete their school assignment. This is much like brands who use social media platforms just to gain more followers and forget to engage users to build positive relationships.

In the end however, it is revealed that the only reason Trina has over a 1,000 followers is because she bribed someone to hack into the site and change her followers from 34 to a thousand. I wouldn't suggest brands to that either.