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This week marks the beginning of arguably the most exciting sports event of the year – the NCAA Tournament. From frantically preparing brackets, diehards planning out their wardrobe to optimize their sporting of team colors, to heated discussion on who will be this year’s Cinderella team, March Madness is one of the most social sports experiences around.

Last year, social media was the talk of the tournament, and it will continue to play a major role in how Americans experience the madness. In fact, research released by IMRE Sports found that nearly a quarter of online American adults (23%) plan to use some sort of social media to follow this year’s men’s NCAA Tournament.

The more interesting finding of this research is that 27% of those who will use social media plan to use a mobile application, and those with higher household incomes ($75K+) and college graduates are even more likely to use mobile applications and Twitter to catch the action.

In 2010, 8.3 million unique viewers watched or listened to 11.7 million hours of online streams of the NCAA tournament, and those numbers should increase this year. Turner Sports has seen these two trends and has taken an exciting step to continue to drive viewership of the tournament through their NCAA’s online platform – FREE March Madness On Demand for iPhone and iPad (goodbye productivity at work!).

The app – did I mention that it’s now free? (last year, this app would run you $9.99) – allows users to watch live streaming games, provide enhanced statistics – but more importantly, fully integrate their social media life into their tournament experience. One of the things I was most excited to see (other than the games, of course) was that the sharing functionality is front and center in the interface - and conveniently positioned next to the second most important element…My Bracket.

As we see more media networks investing in this trend toward mobile capabilities, I expect we’ll see social networking get continually higher billing.

No matter how you plan to follow the action this year, one thing is clear. It’s going to be “Awesome, with a capital A!”

Headline image courtesy Sports Chump

Disclaimer:  Due to several conflicts (including children, work, wife, The Office, Jersey Shore and sleep) I had to  schedule this post 12 hours in advance of it going live; meaning I might not have the latest information on the talks between the concerned parties.  However, that has no material impact on my main points.  Trust me, I’m a journalist.

With that out of the way …

By the time you read this the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between NFL owners and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) will most likely (see disclaimer; and even if there is a 24-hour extension of the CBA, as reported Thursday afternoon, this thing will eventually come to blows) have expired, leaving the two sides without a labor agreement and the 2011 football season - or at least part of it -  in serious jeopardy.

As a sports fan, I’m totally turned off.  As many people will tell you, this is billionaires fighting with millionaires over sums of money unfathomable to the vast majority of fans (Charlie Sheen excluded, of course #winning!).

As a marketer, and one who currently focuses on social media, I’m keen to keep a close eye on how the dispute plays out in public, particularly in social media.  This is the first pro-sports labor dispute of the social media era (the last being the National Hockey League during the 2004-5 season, when MySpace was hardly a hotbed of sports discussion and Facebook was just blooming as a place for Zuckerberg to exact revenge on a girl who slighted him - at least that’s how the movie goes).

It’s 2011 (you’re welcome for that nugget) and I can’t help but imagine the stream of opinions flowing effortlessly from the Twitter feeds of NFL players, owners, media and fans as the dispute moves into the grind-it-out-let’s-pretend-we’re-all-working-towards-the-same-goal-when-really-we’re-just-interested-in-protecting-no-actually-growing-our-pile-of-money phase.   In fact my crack research staff tells me that between February 15-28 there were 11,000 Tweets mentioning “NFL and lockout.”  Just since March 1 there have been the same amount.

The NFL is a public relations juggernaut, second only (in my opinion) to the NBA.  And it’s worth noting that basketball faces this very same situation next year; though as many sports writers have noted, the NBA actually needs a battle like this to realign a really broken compensation scheme; whereas football seems to be in pretty good shape.  In any case, I’m sure commissioner Stern is paying very close attention to the public sentiment as owners prep for battle with the NBA players union.  In fact I bet this post makes his morning clip pack (#DavidStern #Stern #DStern #NBA #TallAndRich #TheDecision #GoBulls).

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As a huge football fan, I always look forward to that time of the year when the Super Bowl is what everyone is talking about. But this year there is a new wrinkle, with social media such as Facebook and Twitter taking center stage.  These two social media powerhouses have an estimated 700 million users worldwide, and it’s no surprise that users have been tweeting and posting about the upcoming Super Bowl.

Advertisers, who have historically spent large sums of money on Super Bowl commercials, are trying to link their clever and comical Super Bowl ads with social media.  Estimates predict that 50 percent of ads shown during the Super Bowl will incorporate social media compared to just 25 percent of ads last year.  For example, Visa created “Go Inside the Super Bowl with Visa” (http://sbtwitter.nfl.com/) where one can gain direct access to tweets  by NFL players, executives and sports journalists.  Visa even has a “tweet off” between the Steelers and Packers fans.  Using a graphic of a hundred-yard field colored with the two teams’ colors, Visa is measuring the number of twitter mentions of #Packers and #Steelers at http://sbtwitter.nfl.com/matchup/.  As of February 3, 2011, the Packers fans lead the Steelers fans 57 percent to 43 percent.

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Between The World Cup and LeBronapalooza I’ve had sports on the brain for the last few weeks.

As I followed the media coverage I thought I might be able to take some of the tired clichés and re-fashion them into lessons for social media practitioners.

My original plan was to post 10 items, but I could only muster up nine.  Anyone care to help with the 10th?

1. Singles and doubles start rallies. Not every social media program has to be a round-tripper.  In fact starting small - listen, test and learn - can lead to bigger and better things down the road.  The groundwork gives you permission to swing for the fences.
2. The “12th man” is your greatest advantage. Give your fans something to cheer about - something exclusive, entertaining, educational or utilitarian.
3. Don’t hold your stars down.Let your most popular personalities represent you in social media.  Do you have a rockstar product manager?  A charismatic executive?  Give them the tools, forum and role to be a voice of your organization. continue reading
   

The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, is quickly approaching. Starting June 11^th, 32 teams representing different countries from around the world will compete for the soccer title that has been given every four years since 1930 (with an exception of 1942 and 1946 due to WWII). But 2010 is a particularly special and relevant year. Why, you ask? Because of social media!

Social Media as we know it did not exist during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Twitter did not launch until July 2006. Facebook didn’t become public until September 2006. YouTube existed but videos looked like this #6 most popular YouTube video of 2006. Now, only 4 years later, Facebook has over 400 million members and more than 50 million tweets are sent each day. These platforms, which were infants during the last World Cup, are now globally available and hugely popular.

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Apologies that Facebook Friday is coming at you a day late this week but here in Washington DC we got TWO blizzards so I hope you’ll forgive us. The 2010 Winter Olympics started yesterday and of course every major athlete, organization, and sponsor has a Facebook campaign going on. Here are some recommendations for getting the most out of the games using Facebook.

The Officials - Inside Facebook has a good run-down of the main Facebook pages from the IOC, Visa, Vancouver, and NBC. None of these stand outs but some are a great way to keep track of scores and upcoming events if you’re a hard core fan. The majority of them simply repurpose content or sweepstakes from their website or YouTube and the applications are action oriented, inviting fans to learn about the sports or get into the action with virtual skiing, speed skating, or hockey.

The Athletes- There are lots of Athletes who manage their own fan pages and if you have a sport or an athlete you love these are really fun and the best way to feel like you’re there. Brand pages make it easy for athletes to share their stories and experiences with fans through status updates, blogs, and multimedia; today USA’s Lindsey Vonn posted a status update that she was in her condo baking banana bread and is her injury is healing nicely. Vonn and other athletes and also using Twitter but in Vonn’s case you can tell it’s linked off of her Facebook so the posts don’t make much since when their cut off at 140 characters.

Your Friends- Last week, Facebook quietly rolled out their next jab at Twitter: a search feature that letsyou look at friends’ posts and everyone else’s. Search for “Olympics” and you can see status updates, photos, videos, or links your friends are sharing related to the games. The search functions aren’t nearly as flexible as Twitter search and the use of hastags hasn’t appeared yet but if privacy advocates don’tcomplain about this new feature I think we’ll see a new version of the now-dead Lexicon in 2010.

Overall, I’m underwhelmed with branded Facebook campaigns this year because they didn’t take advantage of human element of platform.

In 2008, our team worked with Lenovo to build the Voices of the Summer Games. We found 100 relatively-unknown Olympic athletes from around the world, armed them with Lenovo products, and asked them to blog about their experiences. The reason the program was a success was because it reminded people about who these athletes are: not everyone is going to win gold; most of these athletes have jobs andfriends and families outside of their competition and are living the dream of their moment to compete against the best in the world. Had this program been done today with the flexibility of brand pages, Facebook would be the perfect platform to bring these great stories to life and cheer on the unsung heroes of the games.

Briefly noted- USA Today had an article about broader social media use at the Olympics: here.