The 2016 NCAA men’s basketball tournament had no shortage of storylines thanks to bracket-busting buzzer-beaters and logic-defying Cinderellas.

Why does all this matter to brands? For several weeks, much of the nation turns its eyes to this tournament, providing real-time insights into brands’ target audiences and opportunities to engage with them as a friend, instead of a money-hungry business.

For the 2016 NCAA March Madness tournament, Cision used its social software to monitor the teams, players and coaches and surface conversations, sentiment and trends from one of the year’s most popular sporting events.

Data unearthed from these conversations has obvious benefits to any brand in the sports or athletic apparel industries but also directly relates to the 68 schools in the tournament field, the event’s sponsors and so many more.

Here’s a taste of some of the data we uncovered:

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About

I drive go-to-market content, SEO and social strategy for multiple brands at Cision, an earned media software intelligence company.

Your content program is only as good as the stories you are telling. I engage and inspire audiences with interactive and multimedia projects that serve all areas of the funnel and have experience scaling content programs globally to drive brand awareness, leads and revenue for the business. I own our keyword strategy and non-technical SEO for the business.

I revolutionized Cision’s outbound promotion efforts to amplify its inbound lead generation results by creating a multichannel campaign strategy that promotes discoverability, search rank, audience awareness, credibility, and ultimately more topline revenue growth. I also helped with our rebrand and watched Cision go public in 2017.