Although the NCAA will be streaming all the games live online, I expect to see some equally spectacular memories coming from twitter and Facebook this year. As social media’s relevance continues to gain, so does the crossover between social media and major social events like the NCAA tournament. The obvious place to start is on NCAA’s twitter and Facebook pages. The Facebook page seems to be a open venue for rooting for your favorite team, as already evident:

Michael MarrUniversity of Louisville will surprise everyone – go Cards!! 22 seconds ago · Like · Comment

Also look for some great lists of tweeps to follow during March. The Official NCAA March Madness twitter has a great list of college basketball coaches. Universities have done a great job utilizing these twitter accounts to promote their team:

and even their sponsors:

Enjoy the great college basketball action, and be sure to share your favorite lists, pages, tweeps, and other social media sources in the comments here.

Visitors to the mobile tournament Web site will be able to track their brackets along with the progress of others in their group. Fans will have access to scores, news, schedules, pictures and commentary.

Yahoo is also offering fans a chance to win $1 million for creating the perfect bracket in its Sports Tourney Pick’em contest. If no one creates a perfect bracket Yahoo will give a fan with the best bracket $10,000.

Yahoo Sports is offering a 2nd Chance game that allows fans to redeem themselves if their bracket is "busted." The game gives fans a chance to start over with a new bracket after the second round of games is complete.  The fan with the best bracket in the 2nd Chance game will win $5,000.

KFC is the official Tourney Pick’em sponsor and is giving fans the ability to use their printable brackets for discounts on 30 hot wings at KFC restaurants.

Yahoo Search will feature a specific Yahoo Shortcut to help fans find the schedule of events, scores, and brackets at the top of the search page.

Registration for the Tourney Pick’em contest is open now until the first tip-off on March 19.
 

March Madness OnDemand Logo
(Photo Credit: CBS Sports.com)

Total minutes of live streaming video in the first four days of the tournament reached 222,305, 520 surpassing the entire 2007 total minutes of live video which was 162,974,160 minutes amounting to 36 percent year-over-year growth.

More than 3.6 million fans are currently participating in the CBSSports.com bracket games across the Web. The total number of bracket participants is up 62 percent from 2007 (2.2 million). Fans clicked on the "Boss Button" which brings up a fake spreadsheet 2.1 million times.

The First Round Georgia vs. Xavier game on March 20 had a record-setting total of 376,000 hours of consumption. This surpassed the previous record high of 133,000 total hours set in 2006. The Kentucky vs. Marquette game also broke the 300,000 mark with 325,000 hours.

CBS says a large factor contributing to traffic growth was its decision to drop registration requirements for admission to the video player along with links on over 200 Web sites leading directly to live video of the tournament.
 

It must be that time of year again; adrenaline is high, workplace productivity is low, Cinderella is donning her glass slipper, and the faint aroma of hardwood in the air as the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament is upon us. By the time the dust settles on Sunday night, dreams will have been shattered, brackets will have been busted, and many a buffalo wing will have been delightfully devoured.

No one can debate that the thrill of watching your bracket come together perfectly is one of those feeling you cherish for a lifetime (or at least for three weeks in March). When it comes to the science of bracketology, however, there is some debate as to the favorite online destination for prognostication among NCAA basketball enthusiasts this year.

According to Hitwise, it was pretty much a three horse race this year in terms of the most popular online sports sites to fill out brackets. After all was said and done, ESPN.com’s Men’s Tournament Challenge beat out the competition with a 32.8% total market share of visits. Coming in a close second was Yahoo Sports Tournament Pick’em with 30.4% share, barely edging out CBS Sportstline’s Fantasy Mayhem at 30% share.

Rounding out the field, Fox’s College Bracket Challenge finished dead last with a 6.9% market share.

On average, users spent 15 minutes on any particular site when filling out their tournament brackets, which no doubt pleased advertising partners looking to market to what mostly constitutes a very young demographic.

Hitwise also reports that the share of searches for the term “ncaa brackets” were up 38% when compared to the same week’s statistics last year.

Pausing for melodramatic over-the-top effect.

This insanity is digitized these days, perhaps adding some efficiency to an otherwise productivity-draining pastime (but don’t listen to the whip-crackers, their own brackets are filled with ways to reduce the billions of dollars of productivity lost during lunch, weekends, and sleep – if somebody figures out how to transform dreams into spreadsheets, they’ll make billions).

The websites dominating the bracketeering are names you’ll recognize, which means the underdogs you want to win have a long row to hoe to upset the big dogs.

This year’s Web Final Four is already decided, according to Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott (I have to say, by the way, I think it’s nifty how LeeAnn’s moniker is webified like that – you almost expect her last name to be Dotcom).

Your NCAA Web Bracket Pool Final Four

·    ESPN.com Men’s Tournament Challenge bracket pool, leading the pack with 32.78 percent of the fan base spending just over 17 minutes of their workday in hoopdream hysteria.

·    CBS Sportsline.com’s Fantasy Mayhem is on ESPN’s high-topped heels, attracting 32.18 percent of the market for fifteen and half minutes.

·    Yahoo! Sports’ "Tournament Pick’em" gets 30.29 percent of NCAA fans, and the award for the dumbest tournament pool title. Yahoo! Sports fanatics spend about 13 minutes there.

·    Fox’s Fantasy College Bracket Challenge squeaks into the top four with 4.75 percent and an eight-minute average session time.

But the smart office punters are dribbling some mathematical precision to step up their game. A few minutes at Poologic.com, and they can one-up the water-cooler competition with algorithmic surety. Tom Adams estimates his underdog algorithm has secured $250,000 for his site users.

Don’t bring that scientific evolutionary game to USA Today’s Robert Lipsyte’s court, however. Lipsyte takes the over-dramatization, the madness, the convulsive, paroxysmal ecstasy to a whole new level of religiosity (boy that was a whole lotta big words in a row, wasn’t it?).

Just so it’s not overdone (too late, huh?), I’ll leave you with Lipsyte’s Final Four existentialism:

March Madness becomes a way to chart our existence in a manner that seems to give shape to destiny. The clear lines of the bracket override our feelings of personal and political helplessness, the sense that all is out of control.

Sorry for setting off your BS detectors. Just hit reset.