Well, last night saw one of the most unpredictable NCAA tournaments ever come to a close with Duke beating underdog Butler by just two points in the championship game. For the NCAA organization, it is now time to get back to addressing the idea of whether expanding March Madness to a 96-team bracket is a good idea or not.
We started a research project back in February to follow the growth of NCAA expansion chatter online. The goals were simple. See how the tournament itself affected the conversation about expansion and monitor sentiment surrounding the proposal.
As you may have read here in the past, I always stress finding the right terms. Starting with five different search queries with variations on “NCAA,” “tournament,” “March Madness,” and four variants of “expansion,” we scoured the Web for the most relevant URLs.
Site Type Breakdown
It turns out that blogs and news sites make up almost 71% of the relevant URLs, with blogs ahead of news by just 6.77%. The total breakdown of site categories is as follows:
- Blogs – 38.86%
- News – 32.09%
- Social – 13.7%
- General – 13.67%
- Video – 1.68%
Volume
Now here’s where it gets interesting. There had been a lot of talk about expansion, but little official word from the NCAA itself before March 9. In a shrewd strategic move, the NCAA acknowledged that it was considering expansion just 9 days before the tournament began.
Looking at volume growth chart to the left, you can see that expansion chatter slowly grew in the month of March, reaching a peak in the days immediately following Media Day on March 9, where NCAA execs discussed the expansion.
On March 16, two days before tournament play began, there is another spike as expansion talk enjoys its highest numbers of the month: 460 URLs across the Web. Two days after the beginning of March Madness, the amount of expansion-relevant URLs plunged to 214.
From there, most of the talk about expanding to 96 teams continues to diminish as people got caught up in the big upsets and all the other tournament hype.
Even when the conversation experiences another spike in popularity on March 31/April 1 after the Final Four press conference where prospective models were discussed, it was only as high as the March 16 total.
What will be really interesting to see is how the volume of expansion posts increase now that the tournament is over.
Sentiment
Now we get into a lesson on how to interpret data correctly. Virtually every social media monitoring platform has sentiment measurement, and all will more than likely agree that machine logic can only do so much.
A computer cannot interpret sarcasm, words with multiple meanings, slang, or words whose intended meanings are defined by the context of their sentence or paragraph with 100% accuracy.
That is why humans are still the most accurate interpreters of data.
A quick look at the data shows that sentiment trends mostly positive, with 53.99% of overt URLs having positive sentiment.
Analysis from the Spiral16 analytics team, however, reveals that sentiment about the tournament in general cannot be automatically separated from sentiment regarding the expansion. The subjects are simply too closely and inter-related, sometime appearing in the same sentence. Even though the keywords in the study mention expansion, sentiment within each URL could refer to any number of March Madness-related topics.
Above is an example. Click on the image above for a larger version, or read the text of the quote below:
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“Rather than expand the NCAA Tournament field to 96 teams, the NCAA should satisfy its corporate sponsors and television partners by making its elite teams play more often in the tournament. Before I go further, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I’m against changing the NCAA Tournament.”
Conclusions
The tournament effectively swallowed up most of the expansion talk, and the fact that sentiment was hard to gauge also speaks to the timing of the acknowledgement.
At the end of the day, your social media monitoring tool should be there to point you in the right direction. It won’t hand you analysis on a silver platter.
The value of a social media monitoring platform doesn’t come from simply looking at a few charts and graphs. It comes from the ability to drilldown into that data in a way that is meaningful to you.
As convenient and helpful as automatic charting is, the information contained therein still has to be digested by people. The value is in the data, not merely in the graph itself.
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expand to 128 or not at all
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