Bracketing March Madness for Social Sharing
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament generates millions and millions of paper, and over the last few years, digital brackets and countless office pools. People watch the games, track their teams and talk about it around the office water cooler, the coffee shop, the dinner table and on their favorite social network.
The tournament has spawned the title of ‘bracketologist’ and even a college course. An estimated more than 50 million of us participate in office pools for the tournament. The broadcast portion of the tournament draws some millions of people with even more watching from mobile devices, affecting national productivity, if some researchers are to be believed.
CBS and Turner Broadcasting are partnering to show every tournament game live as part of a 14-year, $10.8 billion deal that started in 2011. The games are telecast on CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV with play kicking off Thursday, March 21, just after noon and going through the weekend.
The tournament is the No. 2 sports event as measured by national TV ad revenues, according to Kantar Media research. A 30-second ad has cost in the neighborhood of about $1.2 million since 2007, Kantar reported, up 8 percent last year to $1.34 million.
The researcher reported recently that March Madness TV ad revenue eclipsed $1 billion for the first time in 2012.
Last year’s national championship game delivered a 12.3 national live-plus-same day rating while the Saturday’s Final Four games were the highest since 2005.
The tournament’s first two rounds last year spawned about 2.45 million comments Bluefin Labs reported The April championship game between Kansas and Kentucky drew some 1.45 million comments, according to Forbes.
This year’s tournament began Sunday on CBS with the NCAA making its selection of the teams in the field, stretches for 67 games through April and begins with a bracket, a ladder of play, leading to one team .
The tournament is seen by some as one of the best annual TV tent-pole events because of the quality of the demographics (think alumni) and the longevity of the event (75 years). To start our coverage, we went looking for a bracket, but one that we could access on any device and any place and would have a social aspect to it, where we could invite our friends and share our results. Ideally, we want the bracket to play on our Social TV Daily website as well as on our Facebook Page, with results and status available per game. All of that is not available yet.
We first stopped at CBS to check out their brackets. We quickly left when CBS asked to collect our address and phone number in order to register. That, to us, is highly intrusive. So, we skipped over to the NCAA site, and loaded up the Capital One bracket challenge. http://bracketchallenge.ncaa.com
Having selected our bracket, we then looked for some help in making our picks. The search term “bracketology” provided what appeared to be the best help, especially with Tuesday night’s games in the First Four matchups.
On the play-in game between Middle Tennessee State and St. Mary’s, we were stumped. We solved it by selecting Middle Tennessee State to win based on comparing Klout scores. MTSU is @MT_MBB with a 67, while St. Mary’s is @smcgaels with a 63. BleacherReport picked the Gaels to win.
We completed the rest of our bracket and opened ESPN’s crowdsourcing resource http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/bracketology to give us some help, as well as usually going with the higher pick, and making a couple of upset selections.
We shared our bracket on Twitter and Facebook, posting it to Facebook.com/socialtvdaily and inviting our readers to participate.
Then, we went for a second bracket, using ESPN. This bracket doesn’t require registration up front, but does entice you to share your information with a $40,000 prize sponsored by Allstate (all you have to do is agree to accept calls from the insurance company) or e-mails from Acura.
With an interface that gives the non-sports pro the information she needs to make an informed and logical choice, ESPN’s bracket is fantastic with matchup stats, projections (crowd and computer) all easily accessible. The data made first-round picks relatively easy.
In picking the next round of games. ESPN requires registration and payment to access prediction information from TeamRankings.com, so we brought up the http://statsheet.com/mcb/teams and were able to compare teams by perusing a long list of statistics.
In this bracket, we have Duke playing Kansas for the title, and winnings.
Right.
[Our Klout scoring failed as St. Mary’s defeated Middle Tennessee 67-54 in the First Four portion of the tournament Tuesday night.]
