Brackets for everything? Good or bad?

Happy March Madness! Let's talk about this for a minute.  Living in the south, people really only care about college football...until March.  As soon the words "March Madness" start getting thrown around, these southern homies pretend to start caring about college basketball.

You might be wondering why this is, and I have the answer.  The first explanation for this revolves more around psychological theory.  People want to feel part of a group, and when people are all talking about a certain topic at a certain time, people want to feel included.  Now let's talk about brackets....

When thinking about March Madness in general, most people do not think about it without the association of brackets.  People spend hours on end creating and perfecting their brackets.  They join leagues with their friends, coworkers, and sometimes people they don't know.  The idea is to guess all of the winners of each game.  Whether you are an avid college basketball fan or just making picks based on the attractiveness of the players, anyone can compete.

Since competing through these brackets is so successful, the idea of competing in a similar way has gone beyond March Madness.  With this past season of The Bachelor, a similar mode of competition was unveiled.  People could compete in the Bachelor Fantasy League hosted by ESPN.  This same sense of camaraderie is felt through this similar game experience.  These fantasy league/bracket platforms create brand love, as well as potential advertising dollars for the organization itself.

In my opinion, these platforms are special and work, because they are not constantly seen through every platform.   As the concept of fantasy leagues and brackets are applied to more tv shows and sports, will this lessen the appeal for the organizations that did it first?

xo

Why are celebrities immune from the unwritten rules of instagram?

Ahh unwritten rules of insta...  We all know they exist, and we all (well most of us) follow them.  For example, we don't post on Instagram more than once a day.  We post pictures that are visually appealing to make our life look about ten times more glamorous than it truly is. We as everyday humans go about life following these rules, but there is one group of people who are completely ignoring them...celebrities.

Celebrities are known to have a strong social media presence, and all of them are considered influencers in one way or another.  Let's look at some of the biggest offenders...

Justin Bieber: Okay so recently Bieber came back to Instagram, so obviously fans were excited to see some fresh content.  What they got what the opposite.

Violation 1: Justin often posts pictures of random things.  This content isn't unique and feels weird when it comes up on our Instagram feed.  Instagram is a place to publish your own content, and it is common for Justin to simply just post pictures he finds on the internet.

Violation 2: A signature part of Instagram's platform is to publish a photo with a caption.  People pride themselves on funny, creative, witty captions, but Justin simply ignores this.  It is not uncommon for him to post images without a caption at all.  Fans are given no context.  Not only is this a violation, but he also posts multiple of these caption-less photos in a day.  These multiple photos are also only slightly different.  Instagram has a new feature where you can post multiple photos in one post.  It's about time for JB to try it out.

Miley Cyrus: Ever since Miley cut her hair and came out on her wrecking ball, her insta game has been the opposite of strong.

Violation 1,2,3,4,5+: The point of posts on Instagram is to post visually appealing content.  Miley definitely doesn't think that is the goal.  She uses it more as a visual diary and posts images of things happening in her daily life.  As a celebrity, you would think that we would get a glimpse into life in the fab lane but this isn't the case.  Her posts are often weird and don't tell a story at all.  Yeah I guess this makes her more relatable, but when I follow someone I want to see things that are unique. I'm just not getting this from Miley.  This is all Miley does, so she gets 5+ violations for this.

As you're scrolling through your Instagram feed, take note of this.  Celebrities do insane and almost cringeworthy things on Instagram.  The way they interact with the platform is a quick tap to the unfollow button for most other people.  Why are these super influencers immune?

xo