The Final Four is Here - What Brand-Sponsored Bracket are you following?

Well the Final Four has been decided and will play each other today. I'm feeling guilty that I have not written even one post about March Madness this year. I guess all the conferences I attended this past month have taken me a bit away from the world of sports.

So today we're looking at what should be the best day of the annual NCAA Basketball Tournament: The two semifinal games, starting with Connecticut vs. Michigan State at 6 pm EST, followed by North Carolina vs. Villanova, both covered on CBS. Our Syracuse Orangemen at least got through a couple of rounds this year.

Then tomorrow finally for all the die hard baseball fans (say Hi to my Dad, the classic Boston Red Sox fan) it's play ball! The Major League Baseball season opens with the Atlanta Braves vs. the defending World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies on ESPN2.

Last year I wrote this March post that included some pretty innovative online promotions around the NCAA Tournament that involved blogs and social networks. This year however Twitter is the hot topic.  Most of us didn't know a Tweet from a Retweet this time last year. But hey I have to admit, I'm one of those that's been kinda obsessed by the whole thing and it's growing fast... currently at about 7 million users, up 15 times from a year ago, according to Nielsen Online. Then after just hearing Guy Kawasaki's Keynote about Twitter at the SES NY Conference a week ago,  you really see how marketers are integrating it into their mix.

So if you were one of those bracket-obsessed fans you had more choices then ever this year. You could check your stats and bracket picks online, in social networks and via mobile. 

Federated Media launched MarchTweetness, sponsored by AT&T, which has been the place to follow March Madness along with all the Twitter chatter. According to their blog, the site was down for the last couple of days "due to technical difficulties" but is back up again, however it is now become TitleTweets. 

Federated Media also launched Microsoft's ExecTweets, a collection of tweets from executives. Here you can follow in real-time business conversations from some of the most successful business executives (or perhaps this weekend it will be about their bracket picks). For both programs Federated Media has provided Twitter intros for those new to the micro-blogging world.

President Barack Obama filled out his bracket on ESPN's Tournament Challenge which made the news when he picked North Carolina over Louisville to be the champions of the NCAA basketball tournament. More than 5 million sports fans across the country picked ESPN to filled-out their brackets, a 37% increase from last year. You can actually follow the President's brackets here and were also able to compete against him. He currently has 80 teams out of the 320.

For years, CBS Sports has included a "boss button" on its video player, which, when clicked, takes you to a fake Excel spreadsheet screen so that you won't get caught watching the game at work. It was clicked 2.5M times last year and this year was turned it into a Comcast Ad.

Meanwhile,  MySpace teamed up with Coca-Cola’s Vitaminwater energy brand to offer the MySpace Bracket Challenge. Registered players competed to predict the outcome of each round and to earn standings based on the correctness of their picks. At the end of the tournament, the player with the most accurate bracket picks will be declared the winner and awarded a grand prize of $10,000.

They've also sponsored a Revive to Survive video contest inviting fans to upload a video of a game winning moment or one that re-enacts a previous NCAA Basketball Game. The winner is currently at this weekend's Final Four Game courtesy of Vitaminwater.

There are many more brands and promotions that got on board this year and I could have spent as much time writing about them all as I did with the Super Bowl posts. But it all comes down to tonight. So may the best team win and good luck to those of you holding on to the top brackets. I'm sure we'll all be following it on Twitter tonight!.

Comments

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