FanSection Blog

For the past few years I’ve particpated in a March Madness pool powered by CBSsports with a bunch of people local to Silicon Valley.  They are great people - goofy at times (as proof is our Mascot pictured above) - and each year we have a lot of fun tearing into each other on the bulletin boards.

At the beginning of this year I begged for us to move our pool from CBSsports to Facebook for two reasons (ofcourse unrelated to the fact that I work at Watercooler, the creators of the leading March Madness app on Facebook):

1. The year before I had to turn off email notifications from the message board because it swamped my blackberry (my pocket was on constant vibrate and it drove me crazy and drained my battery)
2. Without emailed links, I never ended up going to the message board because it was out of my way and even when I did go I always forgot my username and password since I only used it once a year

I thought the group would agree to it instantly because its a pretty tech savvy group, but they didn’t. They said it would be too hard to get the group to switch and that CBSsports was fine.

Ok, now fast forward to the end of the tournament.

It was being discussed how this year there was much less activity on the message boards than ever before.  Although I expected much resistance, I commented that it was probably because people have grown use to and dependent on getting their social news and interactions from their Facebook stream.  To my amazement, there was a group of nodding heads, then the same person that earlier said “no way” immediately agreed!  It was not even debated.

I believe next year we will set up the pool in Facebook via Bracket Madness (screenshot below)…and I bet it will be the largest and most engaged pool ever…due largely to the power of the Facebook Stream when it comes to such a social tradition of March Madness.

BTW - Even our mascot pictured above finally created a Facebook account…seriously, it felt like I was on the scene of 40 Year Old Virgin.