NEW ORLEANS — The unveiling of the NCAA tournament field included few notable surprises and continued to underscore the selection committee’s strong message to schools big and small in recent years: There is no exhibition season in college basketball.

The 10-member committee rewarded teams in the seeding and selection process that scheduled aggressively in nonconference play and penalized teams whose nonleague schedules were considered soft.

What is not said in the pull quote above is that those schools who scheduled aggressively in nonconference play had to WIN those games. This stuff befuddles me. Iona v. Purdue is a good nonconference game?!?

What incentives are there for top-tier schools to schedule mid-majors? The top-tier schools know if they win, they are supposed to. If they lose, it hurts their chances. Where is the reward?

What top tier school is willing to play Wichita State? Or Creighton? Or VCU? Heck, those conferences had to combine with ESPN to create a made-for-TV schedule of games each February (Bracketbusters) just to increase their chances for getting in.

Unfortunately, in my experience with sports organizations, feedback usually doesn’t happen, and if it does, it is most often related to a specific incident that has been publicized and brought to the attention of management. The approach is lacking in terms of strategy, consistency and ultimately effectiveness in sports, yet is an important component for most businesses that provide products or services through both brick-and-mortar stores and online sites.

As a former sport PR professional, and co-author of sport public relations text, I am a proponent of feedback in the form of dialogue between a sport organization and its stakeholders. While I don't champion the revenue side as much as Bill Sutton does, he is absolutely on target with this post in the Feb. 13 Sports Business Journal (sub required).

Grunig and Grunig (1992, p. 291) boldly stated, in an era before the internet, that two-way symmetrical models of public relations described how excellent public relations should be practiced.

These two-way models have much in common with relationship marketing in that they are dynamic and seek to cultivate long-term relationships between an organization and its stakeholders. Feedback, or dialogue, is a hallmark of both. And the internet has spawned tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and others that make engaging in this process so easy.

Sport organizations must run, not walk, to implement Sutton's suggestions. If not for the revenue results Sutton advocates, then for the PR benefits.

This is what Twitter does to us; it makes us crave the next amazing thing just after we've consumed the last one. Any pause to absorb unfolding events offers a chance for observers to turn away

Catching up on reading this morning and found this on NPR. I mentioned to my graduate marketing class last night how much fun I had consuming the Grammys while simultaneously interacting on Twitter and Facebook. I had not watched the Grammys in years, but found myself strangely attached to it, even after Springsteen's opening performance (which was the REAL reason I turned on the awards show in the first place).

Ann Powers hits the nail on the head with this pull quote, which comes at the end of her post. And by doing so, she perfectly summarizes why the same can't be achieved with sports.

"Any pause to absorb unfolding events offers a chance for observers to turn away"... sports is filled with pauses. Basketball and football have deliberately created pauses (think media timeouts and 2-minute warnings). Baseball is almost a 3-hour pause.

"It makes us crave the next amazing thing just after we've consumed the last one"... How great would it have been for the NBA if Jeremy Lin's clutch 3-pointer last night was followed by 10 more minutes of playing? Or if Austin Rivers 3-point buzzer beater against UNC last week was merely a lead in to another 30 minutes of basketball?

It is too easy to turn off a sporting event following an "amazing thing". The Grammys, as Powers, points out, did not allow us to shut off the show. Sporting events won't change, and therefore, it will be difficult to achieve this level of social media engagement despite the interesting graphic this week from @GMRMarketing which indicates 83% of sports fans will "check" social media while watching a game on TV. Checking and interacting are two dramatically different levels of engagement.

Your thoughts?

Admittedly, I'm way late to the party on this article, but the beauty of social media is that you discover things you had not previously seen.

I know economic models show that a la carte pricing for cable channels is inefficient and will drive many channels out of business, but while I will gladly pay $4.96 for ESPN (or even $10.96) my satellite bill pushes $80 month, and for what? 125 channels that I don't watch, many I don't know that I have. I'd gladly pay premiums for those channels I do watch. My bet is my overall satellite bill goes down.

Springsteen was wrong. There are way more 57 channels with nothing on.

The economic forces of supply and demand will have a direct impact on New York Mets ticket prices in 2012.

Team officials have abandoned their previous pricing strategy of four color-coded ticket levels based on the attractiveness of the opponent and the date of the game in favor of what is known as "dynamic pricing."

In essence, the same seat at Citi Field could have a different price for each of the 81 home games. And for any individual game, that seat's price now can fluctuate daily, based on how much demand there is for the upcoming game.

Good summary article here on the Mets' decision to move to dynamic ticket pricing in 2012. This is rapidly becoming the standard in baseball with the Giants and Cardinals using it already.

Interestingly, one of my students asked the Kansas City Royals about this last week during our trip to visit their operation. The executive said, essentially, while they are open to anything, he did not think it would work in that market.

And that is true. In order for dynamic pricing to work, the market needs to be strong enough to create demand. The performance of the team or the market size have the greatest ability to create demand. Neither of those work for the Royals. Instead, the team employs different price points or bundling strategies for "premium" games against the Red Sox and the Yankees, the only teams which create significant demand issues for the Royals.

I am often asked if this would work in college, and I think the answer, at least for football, is no. Not enough inventory (81 MLB games v. 5-7 CFB games) and the fact that college football games are all-day events, not something someone decides to do on a whim. College basketball won't work either because schools push season tickets so they can force people to buy tickets to watch Double-Directional State v. Big Time U. in December. There is usually no demand for those games.

Curley Center Chat Addresses Coverage of Initial Eligibility

While NCAA rules limit when a college coach can talk about an incoming student-athlete, media members almost invariably focus on standout high school students headed for college or pursue in-depth stories about recruiting.

Along with those somewhat opposing perspectives come ethical issues that touch on everything from privacy to the potential high-stakes pressure of intercollegiate athletics. And that backdrop poses problems for everyone involved—coaches, the media and the student-athletes themselves.

The related ethical challenges, responsibilities for all parties involved and even typical outcomes will be discussed at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 28, during an online chat conducted by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State.

"Issues in Covering Initial Eligibility" is free, and people may access and participate in the session by visiting http://sportsjourn.psu.edu/chats online.

Participants include: Coquese Washington, women's basketball coach at Penn State, and Steve Wieberg, a sports writer who focuses on intercollegiate athletics for USA Today.

Malcolm Moran, the Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society and director of the Curley Center, will serve as moderator. The hour-long session will focus on journalism coverage of recruits, recruiting and many related issues with insights and opinions from the perspective of of a coach as well as that of a journalist.

In addition, the user-friendly format of the online chats allow for abundant interaction and questions from participants all over the world. Others involved with intercollegiate athletics, fellow journalists, college students and sports fans all may ask a question, comment or follow along by simply navigating to the chat online.

The Curley Center explores issues and trends in sports journalism through instruction, outreach, programming and research. The Center's undergraduate curricular emphasis includes courses in sports writing, sports broadcasting, sports information, sports, media and society, and sports and public policy, which is cross-listed with the Penn State Dickinson School of Law.

The John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State University routinely offers informative discussions about the nexus of media and sport and this week's topic should be of interest to anyone who covers college athletics and recruiting.