The Buzz: NCAA Tournament
| Marko Muellner
FIRST FOUR OPINION DEFLATION
While measuring the buzz from the NCAA tournament, we asked ourselves, “Is the new ‘First Four’ a good idea or a bad idea?” What is everyone else saying about it?
Well, after the “First Four” games, the negative buzz had grown. Blog posts like, “Do you hear me, NCAA? It’s stupid!” have increased. Tweets like “First Four=STUPID” were definitely on the rise. “Stupid” being the common term from those who don’t want their NCAA tournament messed with.
Who let all the air out of the “First Four”? Looks like the First Four did.
EASIEST ROAD TO THE FINAL FOUR
The Buzz for keywords: “Duke,” “easiest,” “easy” and “road,” was especially high, putting them in first place for easiest bracket draw. Replace the keyword “Duke” with “Pitt,” and the buzz decreases a little, but stays high enough to put Pitt in second. Odd then that the two teams with the easiest draw suffered early exits. Ahh, the many mysteries of March Madness.
The “toughest” and “hardest” road? Ohio State.
BARACK-ETOLOGY
Every year, brackets are filled out by the millions. And some brackets get more attention than others. Yes, Dick Vitale is the pundit people are turning to, more than fellow analysts Jay Bilas, Joe Lunardi or Andy Katz.
But LeBron James carries as much weight in his picks as Dick Vitale or anyone else, which is pretty interesting, considering LeBron never played one tick of college hoops in his life.
But hold your buzzer a second. There seems to be one person far above the rest. That’s right: President Obama, who not only has way more bracket buzz than anyone, he also has a decent lefty jumper of his own. Does that give the President the most trusted brains-and-braun combination? It’s certainly the most mentioned.
Barack wins the Bracketology Buzz by a landslide!
CHECK THE SCORE…ON FACEBOOK
It may not count for points during the game, but ranking the biggest Facebook following shows a colossal gap between leader Ohio State and everyone else. Will the Buckeyes dominate the tournament the way they’ve dominated social media? And did Louisville, Duke and Pitt’s quick exits have anything to do with their buzzless use of the Facebooks?
TWEET 16
If tweets and blogs and comments were baskets, here are the teams that would advance to the next round, scored in head-to-head social media mentions over the past four days with Webtrends Social Measurement. In the case of Duke, buzz obviously meant nothing, but look at the Butler/Wisconsin match-up, there’s truth in those numbers!
IS IT UK OR KU?
Outside the game brackets, we measured an acronym head-to-head showdown between Kansas and Kentucky. In “UK” vs. “KU,” Kentucky wins with 1,325 social media mentions to Kansas’s 1150. When you add the keyword “win” to both of those queries, it’s super- close: 306 social media posts mention “UK” and “win,” while “KU” and “win” got 305.
Kentucky by a free throw!
TIDBITS
Two people tweeted the misspelling “Marquet,” but thankfully no one mentioned “Markette.”
Also, “BYU” and “Cougars” got 1280 mentions, but only one person tweeted “BYU” and “Cosmo,” the mascot’s proper name. From a post on March 21 at 12:21PM on utahonthefly.com: “BYU needs to dump Cosmo and get a live Cougar, how awesome would that be.”
That would be awesome, except for the cougar, who’d be trapped in a gym with 22,700 screaming humans.
All analysis was done using Webtrends Social Measurement and by Webtrends analysts.