Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Content marketing? That takes a lot of time, doesn’t it?

Are you in a hurry to get somewhere? Yes. Content marketing takes time. And getting it right takes a lot of work, and by work, I mean practice, not research. You can look at demographics all day, but if you really want to get going, you’ve got to start doing, start failing, learning where to avoid the failures if you can, and keep going.

Pick Whatever Platform You Want

Have you seen Vine yet? Twitter just launched it. It lets you record six second videos. Like this:

Sweet yet healthy treat. Micro cooking show. vine.co/v/bJtLu2VYeDa

— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) January 29, 2013

Can’t see the video? Click Here.

I just started using it. There’s probably a few ways it could be useful. I thought of one right away, and some of my friends are already making their own version. I promoted who was on my radio show like this:

Radio show guests this week on hbway.com/radio vine.co/v/bJMtr7EbqwL

— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) January 28, 2013

Can’t see the video? Click Here.

So maybe little six second videos aren’t your thing. Maybe you prefer text? Great! Blog. And keep a great newsletter going.

A photo person? Swell! Use Instagram. Or Facebook. Or Flickr. Who cares? Pick whichever platform you want.

But How Do You Find Ideas?

You try things. You see what people are asking about. I dipped into Twitter and saw people asking about details of social media for customer service purposes. Pow. I could write a post about that. I looked on my free health and nutrition group and lots of people are asking for smoothie and juicing recipes. Maybe I’ll make a quick ebook and pop it into the Amazon store. Or I’ll have a live Hangout on Air and share recipes in real time with people from my kitchen.

Ideas are all around you. You need only scratch a tiny bit to find them. But you also have to have your “and this relates to the people I share things with like this” hat on.

Content is a “Pick and Scratch” Process

If you’re looking to build media and get some attention, you need to produce more content than just a little. Where do you find the time? You pick at it. I wrote this while I waited for a YouTube video I was uploading to process. Where did I find time to do the YouTube video? I had a space between two meetings and I knew I needed to shoot this particular video so I got things ready.

It’s the same answers I can give you for living in a little house. You find ways to keep everything functional instead of wasting it. Small houses save space. Content marketers find time. It’s related.

Serve Your Community Passionately

I think about you when I sit down to write. I think about how I can help you. I think about whether I can educate or inspire or instruct. You’re the only person I think about when I create. I don’t wonder what my colleagues are doing. I don’t wonder what’s trending. I work on finding something I can share with you to be helpful. You’re the focus. And that makes it work.

Here’s a formula I love to remember daily: First, earn an audience. Second, nurture a community. Third, empower a network. (feel like tweeting that?) If so, then maybe I’m doing my job well. If not, I’m still on step 2.

You Must Be Responsive and Fast

Gone are the days of “working on a blog post in drafts for the last week.” If the idea’s worth anything, post it. Even unfinished if you have to. You’re not being graded. You’re being consumed, absorbed, and if you’re lucky, passed around. If you don’t have time for the best blog post ever, what are you doing with your time? Reading Mashable? You have work to do.

Utterly stuck? Go for a walk. Ask yourself over and over again what your community wants. Don’t have a community of your own? Write for the community you want to serve! ( tweetable).

This is bigger than “just business.” This isn’t an avocation. This is a path. Are you willing to put in the work to earn what you want?

I am not much of a fan of Will.i.am ‘s music. He’s the guy behind the Black Eyed Peas and several other bits of dance magic. I appreciate that he hits his target perfectly. I’m just not his audience. But I now respect the man immensely.

Thanks to this article in Fortune, I’ve come to realize just how bright a lad he is. He’s not only doing great work in marketing his own products and services, but he’s helping corporate America figure out some of their challenges as well. What’s most interesting to me, however, is that what he’s doing is coming to the picnic with ideas.

Most times, when someone famous is brought in to help a company, they are usually used as a kind of proxy. So, when Michael Jackson did the big deal with Pepsi, he just kept on Michael Jacksoning, and there was some Pepsi logo stuff behind him. By comparison, Will.i.am brought the idea of Ekocycle to Coca Cola, and he fleshed out the entire vision. It’s his project that Coke totally understands and supports, because of how Will.i.am laid it all out.

That’s the lesson to us. You can offer to help or you can bring an idea of great value to your prospective client or customer. One will get you a little bit of business. The other will lead to partnerships of great value.

Cheers to you, Will. And thanks for getting that Britney song stuck in my head. Argh.

I woke up thinking about labels this morning. I thought about how strange they are, how limiting. And I realized yet again that despite some people’s disdain for the concept of personal branding, we need to be mindful of what others label us.

The early days and what sparked me

When I got into the online world way back in the 80s, it was for a simple reason: the people around me were into talking about the Red Sox and cars, and I was into Batman and Star Wars. Folks on those first bulletin board services and later on platforms like AOL and Prodigy could align by interest instead of geography, and that was cool to me. Before that point, we were mostly forced into geography-centric, work-centric, or family-centric social groups.

Years later, when I got into blogging in 1998, it was because the tools let me express my interests and gave me an audience (pitifully small for a long while) for my writing. I didn’t need permission to publish. I just put my work out there for people to see. Eventually, I got the hang of it, and connected with others who wrote work that I found personally interesting. Instead of having to stay slave to whatever the tastes of mainstream publishers were at the time, I could find someone writing something of interest via the web.

Listening to podcasts brought about a huge realization that knowledge was power. I often tell the story about hearing information from then-CTO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz that led to a significant savings on a purchase my company was making. Getting immersed in that world the first time led me to cofound PodCamp, and it’s what led me back to podcasting most recently with my new show.

Six years ago, when I joined Twitter, it felt like a super fast personal news service. I remember the moment that I knew it was valuable. I was at the CES event in Las Vegas, and Apple was having a big event (Macworld, I think) in California. I was roaming the floor with Jeff Pulver and he asked if maybe we should hop a plane to see what Apple was doing. I said, “We don’t have to: I’ve got all the news right here in real time.”

I wasn’t all that fussy on Instagram when it game out. I used to tease people who used it, saying that it’s a tool to turn people’s lame life experiences into a bunch of fake album covers (for those of you under a certain age, albums are these weird square cardboard covers and vinyl discs that transferred music to our homes in the age before Spotify). I now think that if Facebook hadn’t bought it, Instagram would have proven a huge threat to Zuckerberg and company. Why? Because it allows people to share personal experiences in a very simple way. There’s not a lot to the product, and that’s why it’s exciting. Oh, and I use it all the time now.

I’m not a social media guy

Having a lot of domain knowledge about these social media tools has labeled me a social media guy. I understand that. I’ve been a cheerleader for this or that tool for quite a long time. But the truth is, the tools are just that. They’re interesting insofar as how they can deliver value or not. In and of themselves, I’m not all that interested in them.

When I am thinking about business, I’m rarely thinking, “How can I help a company better use Pinterest?” Instead, my thoughts are more tuned to, “This business wants more buyers. How do I facilitate that?” Quite often, I use the social tools to bring some kind of benefit to a company (or an individual), but they’re not a default.

My favorite social media right now? Email. I am in love with my newsletter experience, and how the interactions with people can be so personal and intimate and customized. Email’s been around for decades. See?

I’m a business designer

In reworking what Human Business Works does for the world, we decided to focus on publishing and educating around a set of core concepts that we feel will help professionals do the work they want, only better. Business design is holistic. I don’t help people with marketing. I help them with improving their business. Should marketing be the missing piece, I’ll work on that. Should people need more exposure, we talk about how to get it. Should they need sales (usually a “yes”), we walk through ways to improve that process. Customer service? My favorite.

But labels are used whether or not you want them

But the labels are for other people any how. One realization I had early in business is that if you don’t have clear and obvious interface points, people don’t know how to interact with you. If I say I help with marketing, sales, and service, then people understand where to slot me. But there’s always a slotting. It’s why I get to keynote the annual PRSA conference for PR professionals *and* an annual Coldwell Banker conference for real estate professionals *and* events for the marketers of the world. Because what I have to share relates to humans in all aspects of business, and not just one.

A Recipe for Labeling Yourself

Realize this before I give you the ingredients: no matter what you call yourself, what others perceive will be different. Just the same, you should do what you can. If you don’t help people understand what you represent, others will fill in their own blanks.

Ingredients

• Simple words (fewer syllables)
• Customer-facing explanation
• Ties back to “the real world”
• Repetition
• A body of work

Preparation

In working out what HBW and I do for people, I settled on the term “business design.” The words are easy enough, and people can grasp what I mean when I put them together. Choose simple words to explain what you do, even if it’s tricky. My former CTO, Bill Wessman, used to introduce himself at client meetings like this: “I’m Bill. Tech” He’d say almost nothing else. Those who needed to know who he was knew what he did, and those who just needed him in a bucket knew he wasn’t the finance guy, the CEO, or the sales guy.

Sometimes, people have incredibly flowery labels for what they do, but not such that people understand how they can interact with you. I’ve talked to “chief dreamers” and many “divas” and it’s hard to understand what they intended to do for me. “Professional declutterer” is understandable. “Interpreter” would be a swell name for a pastor, right? (Though they do a bit more than that.) Make the way you talk about yourself define the value others would get from working with you.

If you go too far afield, people won’t know how to engage your services. Tie your description back to a real world interface. Business design focuses on sales, marketing, and service elements of a business. I won’t be as helpful for the CIO (though I’ve worked with a few). Make sure this is clear in how you talk about yourself and how your website talks about you.

They say repetition is reputation. True that. And the phrase means “what you do is what people will know you for.” I agree. But I also mean to say that the more times I say “business designer,” the less people will call me social media guy.

At the end of it all, if you’re not doing what you say you do, no one cares. I called myself an author for decades before I had published a proper book, and years before I even wrote regularly. I loved the label more than I loved the work. Thankfully, that has changed. But what you do is what you are. I meet lots of people who are the “Dream Lifestyle” guy, and who live in a one-bedroom in Scranton. No matter what you say you are, you are what you do most.

Identity Matters More to Us Than to Them

At the end of it all, it doesn’t matter who you are to the person you serve. What matters is that they derive a benefit from their experience with you. That’s what they want. What attracts them to you in the beginning isn’t what will land the deal to keep you coming back. Results are what bring people back.

But don’t shrug off the work of being clear about who you are and what you stand for, because it matters. Those labels can limit others’ perspective of you, and that limits your opportunities. Be vigilant, and you’ll find your place.

It starts with a passion. In this case, Jacqueline Carly was a native New Yorker who felt compelled to move to action and help people with a gesture of some relief supplies for Hurricane Sandy.

She connects with her loudmouth boyfriend (me). I have the “loud bullhorn” of a platform. I ask for a place to stage a supplies drive collection.

It requires a community-minded place with their ears open: Microsoft New England Research and Development center (Microsoft NERD) comes to the rescue. Immediately. Late on a Saturday night. And in force. I have no idea what Sara Spaulding feeds those people over there at Microsoft in Cambridge, but they are fast, ready, nimble, helpful, and they went the extra distance.

It requires the community: you (and others). Without the actual supplies, the drive doesn’t matter. We had help from far too many people to name (and I will forget some of you), but Sara and Audrey and Jen and Lois and Marshall and Andrea and Walter and Keith and Nivas and Scott and Chris and Jeremy and John and Kevin and Anthony and Kerry/Dan and the many people who found a way to drop off supplies at the drop of a hat. The amount of help and feet-on-the-ground we had were amazing.

It requires research. Jacq finds all kinds of small DIY networks of people all over NY and NJ who are sourcing materials and supplies. People like Jennifer Iannolo were quite actively filling their Facebook profiles with all kinds of pointers to local communities of need. Jacq sends hers to the Unitarian Church of Staten Island and into the hands of the wonderful Reverend Susan. I forget where Jennifer took hers. And more are to come.

Then, it’s a matter of communication. I ask for a vehicle in case we get more than we can carry in Jacq’s car. We get another driver, Jen, and then Mike Bavuso from Big Foot Moving & Storage volunteers two guys and a truck and labor to take the rest of the supplies down to NJ. This happened via Eileen at Yard And a Half landscaping, who follows me on Twitter. Mike has no idea what he’s getting himself into, but he goes for it. We get an amazing pro moving company (who you should hire for your next move in the Boston area), who help us greatly.

We ask where to ship supplies to New Jersey, and Deb Ng finds the answer by the mayor of Newark himself, Cory Booker. So that’s how that gets done. I was talking with my small town’s mayor about what Mayor Booker did, and he was excited for the possibilities, because this kind of accessibility and this kind of velocity is what will power the next wave of active government.

And what’s it like to deliver these goods? Here are some words from Jen, our second driver:

“Delivered goods to New Hope Church in Newark earlier today. Never been hugged or blessed so much. Watched a woman with an infant get blankets I brought. Then went and reloaded with stuff friends collected and hit the shore area. Creepy! Large stretches of no lights, trees down, and boats tossed right up on land by the roads. Was able to do so all because you got an idea and ran with it. Got to personally bring generator gas and a birthday cake to a family in real need. It was a long, tiring, awesome day.”

That’s what YOU did. Jen helped, but you did it, too.

The Recipe

Without the passion, nothing starts. Without the platform, no one responds. Without the big-eared community anchor, we have no place to work. Without you, we have nothing to fulfill our passionate hope. Without the research and on-the-ground networks, we have no way to deliver. Without the “last mile” teams, we have no success.

Use this recipe if ever you’re compelled to movement. Find the actors for this and you will succeed.

We are indebted to you, because without you, there was no adventure, no story, no learning, and most importantly, no relief to those still fighting to get back to this century. And their struggle continues. If you want to help, there are many ways. The easiest? Text REDCROSS to 90999 and you’ll be donating $10 to ongoing relief efforts. And thanks.

There’s something special about entrepreneurs whose startups take off and those whose stay small–starting with how they begin.

In studying successful entrepreneurs for my new book, Breakthrough Branding, I was struck by a series of contrarian habits that set them apart. Here are five contrarian lessons that I learned from them.

1. Think “small” rather than search for a “big idea.”

Contrary to everything we’ve heard about finding a “big idea,” there’s a fundamental paradox in business. Big ideas are small–simple, focused and different so they can occupy a specific niche and dominate their category. Kevin Systrom was building a location-based mobile business like FourSquare, but found that only one piece of it, the photo app, was different and had real traction with customers. So he focused on the photo app, named it Instagram, and became insta-rich. If you can’t write your business idea on the back of your business card or explain it to a ten-year old, you probably have a big, bad idea.

2. Use the start-up phase–the so-called Valley of Death–to take risks and experiment.

Rather than follow conventional wisdom and be cautious at the beginning, brand-building entrepreneurs use the “the Valley of Death” to experiment and tweak their fledgling idea. You can die in the valley, yet growth entrepreneurs realize this starting period is the most valuable time because you can create tremendous value out of practically nothing. When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, he thought small and experimentally. He began with students at Harvard and tinkered and experimented with the site to create a different user experience and then started expanding.

3. Realize that when people say, “You’re starting what?” that you’re on to something.

Most people will tell you that you’re crazy when you present a fresh idea, so you have to be a contrarian to forge ahead anyone. You need to realize that you have a viable business idea when you find the “white space,” which is just a new need in the marketplace that no one is filling. In 1980, Fred Carl Jr was designing a new home kitchen and his wife, Margaret, wanted a heavy-duty range like her mother’s 1947 Chambers range. They weren’t made anymore so Carl looked into restaurant ranges; but they weren’t suitable for homes. So Carl decided to make one. All the major manufacturers told Carl that no one would want a commercial-style range for the home. Everyone thought he was crazy. That’s when Carl realized he had a good business idea, and named his range, Viking, because it was strong and enduring.

4. Listen to their heart and emotions as much as their intellect.

Successful entrepreneur want to make money, sure, but your goal has to be more than just making money. Finding your business idea is about finding your purpose. Your goal must be tied to your deeper story, your sense of destiny for yourself and your business. Innocent was launched by three Cambridge University graduates who quit their jobs in 1998. The small idea behind Innocent is authenticity, as their tagline says, “The fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the fruit.” Its brand personality is playful and interesting, and in the early days Innocent experimented with labels listing ingredients such as “banana, orange. and a lawnmower” that got them tremendous publicity. After a few years Innocent became the top smoothie brand in the United Kingdom and recently sold a stake to Coca Cola.

5. Create a new trend or category rather than fit into the market.

Growth entrepreneurs keep a pulse on what’s happening but don’t try to fit into the market–they try to appeal to where their customers are heading. They have what I call an “outside-in” orientation. They begin with the larger context–the outside–and work inward. After getting his MBA from Stanford, Joe Coulombe acquired a convenience store chain called Pronto Markets. In the mid 1960s he was intrigued with an article in Scientific American about how many baby boomers were going on to college. That article gave Coulombe his small idea. He speculated that those well-educated boomers would want a more sophisticated–but offbeat and fun–food-shopping experience. His name was Joe, so he decided to call his high concept grocery store Trader Joe’s.

These five lessons are simple but contrary to the way most business owners operate. They’re not obvious to many business owners because they are counterintuitive. That’s why they are so important.

Image: Flickr user Zorin Denu

More than ever, innovation is a real, tangible competency at many Fortune 500 companies, which are investing substantially in their innovation capabilities to build new businesses, explore new technologies, and find new avenues to creating value. However, for every company that has produced substantial impact through innovation, there are many others that have struggled to produce real results. Tempted by the hope of disruptive products and beyond-the-core growth, less successful business leaders discover that making innovation happen at a large company is harder than they imagined. After a few years–usually three–they find that their budgets are dramatically cut and their priorities realigned. In some cases, their entire innovation structures are eliminated.

What separates the great innovation organizations from the good ones? Simply put, it’s the ability to account for what I call the “pipeline paradox.”

The Innovation Pipeline

The traditional graphical depiction of an innovation pipeline is a funnel. The wide end is filled with lots of different ideas, which through a series of stages and gates, get distilled down to just a few worthy ones–the ones that emerge at the end of the funnel.Because of this mental model, innovation leaders tend to place disproportionate emphasis on finding the big idea. They hire staff with fuzzy front-end skillsets. They do cross-company brainstorms and buy market research. They may even buy a dedicated idea-management system to collect ideas.

After substantial time and effort, these idea-focused innovation leaders eventually alight on a few concepts with great potential. But then what happens? These same innovation leaders discover they must overcome the pipeline paradox.

What Really Happens

Once a company decides on the ideas it wishes to pursue, it must invest more time, people, and strategic thinking to get them to market; this inverse relationship between number of ideas and the amount of resources is the pipeline paradox.

Too often, companies make substantial investments in finding new ideas but fail to allocate enough resources and staffing on graduating projects beyond the funnel and ensuring they can be easily integrated into a business unit. As a result, a lot of ideas get suspended in the middle of the pipeline.

By the time an idea leaves the innovation pipeline, it should be market-ready. The marketing plan needs to be established; details around manufacturing and operations must be aligned; partner and channel implications need to be addressed. Failure to account for this transition increases the likelihood that an innovation group identifies great ideas but produces few tangible results.

A Path Forward

To better account for the pipeline paradox, corporate innovators should follow these steps:

1.) Begin with the end in mind.

Over 20 years ago, Steven Covey stated in his first Seven Habits book that starting with the end goal is crucial for highly effective people. This is equally true for successful innovation pipelines. From the very beginning, think about what it will take for the idea to become a business. Which functions need to be involved in scaling the business? Where will the staffing and resources come from?

2.) Be clear about the goals of your pilot.

Although all innovators know the value of piloting, truly savvy innovators are explicit about the goals of their pilots. They know what assumptions they are testing for and they are thoughtful about building the pilot around those assumptions. The next time you set up a pilot, be sure to ask yourself, “What is the smallest, lowest cost way to obtain the greatest validation about my key assumption?” By answering this question, you will build a great pilot; or even better, you may discover that a smaller-scale (and lower-cost) study is more appropriate.

3.) Figure out a way to turn a profit in the short term.

As a corporate innovator, it can be very tempting to say to yourself, “In five years, this idea could be a $100 million business.” Avoid this type of thinking. All companies, especially public corporations, are judged by quarterly results. Your boss won’t have five years to show results, and neither will you. As you build out your innovation and get closer to the end of pipeline, be proactive about identifying near-term ways to monetize the innovation. Making money in the near term is a sure way to earn your group the right to think about the long term.

And One More Thing . . .

Steve Jobs famously said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” When it comes to creating breakthrough products and services, corporate innovators can be great at designing the ideas. In many ways, the idea generation and screening is the more exciting part of innovation. But a lot of hard work is required to figure out how the design should work, and that means devoting time and resources to guarantee its success.

Top image: Volodymyr Krasyuk/Shutterstock

If Terminator 2 taught us anything, it was that a properly timed thumbs-up can make us cry. Also, autonomous, self-shaping blobs are a must-have on our checklist for the future.

Think of these ‘smart pebbles’ as 3-D pixels.

Now, MIT professor Daniela Rus and student Kyle Gilpin are publishing a paper on building such a wonder goop. They tend to refer to the technology as a smart “sand,” and they imagine scenario in which you could drop a small model into a vat of the sand, and the sand could sense that model’s contours and create a 3-D version of the object from that information. So you could drop in a tiny cup, the sand would sense the cup’s negative space and then it would shape into a cup that was 10x (or much more) larger.

Right now, the team is focused on developing an algorithm to make their approach possible–a hyper-efficient language that’s simple enough for each grain of sand to understand without massive processing power. It’s only with this language that the idea could hope to scale.

“The beauty of encasing a prototype of the object to be formed with the smart material is that we drastically reduce the communication burden on the system so that we are prepared to scale-up the number of modules in the system,” Gilpin tells Co.Design. “If we used CAD or similar, we’d be forced to transmit a complete description of the shape to be formed to all of the modules. With 100 modules that’s okay, but somewhere on the way to a million, it becomes unreasonable. We don’t want to send a million messages, one for each module in the system, telling each whether it is a part of the shape we’re attempting to form or not.”

To test their math, the teams has developed a prototype of the sand. (Gilpin calls these larger pieces “pebbles.”) Each pebble is 10mm across and contains an independent processor along with magnets that enable the magical sticking trick. As cool as they may be, the resolution of this rapid manufacturing technology is really only as sharp as the building blocks are small. Think of them as 3-D pixels.

“Shrinking the hardware presents the biggest long-term challenge,” admits Gilpin. “As we shrink the modules, we’ll have to look for alternative connection mechanisms. One possibility is using electrostatic forces instead of magnetic ones. This would allow us to replace the relatively bulky electro-permanent magnets with much smaller electrodes.”

The researchers hold their prototype “smart pebbles.” You could build structures that can respond and adapt to their environment.

That said, the technology’s promise is massive. You could build structures that were far smarter than even our most advanced 3-D printed parts (even those that we’re using within the human body), that can respond and adapt to their environment. “In addition to duplication, I would see our modules used for sensing tasks in constrained spaces,” writes Gilpin. “Perhaps you could pour our modules down a pipe in order to both map the shape of the pipe while finding defects or cracks. The modules could potentially help reinforce those weak points…Because it can self-disassemble, perhaps it could be used as an intelligent scaffolding for bone, or even organ, regrowth. The system could sense and relay important information to doctors and then disassemble as the bone healed.”

Gilpin knows that the technology is a ways off, believing it to be closer to a 10-year vision than a five-year one. In other words, this self-assembling sand could be waiting for us right where 3-D printing leaves off.

Images by M. Scott Brauer/MIT

When it comes to predicting March Madness winners, who knows best: experts, algorithms, or the crowd?

An estimated 45% of Americans will fill out an NCAA tournament bracket this year. That’s more than the number of people who voted in the 2010 midterm elections. And until the clock strikes 12:15 p.m. on March 15, and actual balls start being thrown at actual baskets, each and every one of us can pretend to be the smartest guy or gal in the room when it comes to making March Madness predictions.

But who (or what) really knows best? Last month, we looked at algorithmic, social, and expert approaches to predicting Oscar winners and determined that a combination of expert opinion and algorithmic analysis was the most successful tactic. Now, on the eve of America’s favorite predictive orgy, March Madness, we ask the question again: Are the best predictors robots, writers, or the crowd at-large?

Surely, the people who are paid to watch college basketball for a living know what they’re doing, right? But while all but one of CBS Sports’ expert analysts expects Kentucky to win it all, the predictions vary wildly beyond the championship game. Furthermore, the experts may be more likely to choose upsets because, hey, they’re paid to know something the rest of the world doesn’t. And what better way to prove that than to throw outlandish upsets at the wall and see what sticks? The trouble is, while upsets are bound to happen, they’re usually not the upsets we predict. According to a study conducted by Indiana University (the 4th seed in the South region, by the way), you’ll have an equal or better success rate by trusting the Selection Committee’s seeding and picking zero upsets, regardless of your sports expertise. But since that’s no fun, let’s look at a couple other approaches.

A second option is to put your trust in the wisdom of the crowd. The bloggers at Hoopism have compiled data from the betting information service Sports Insights to display the percentage of real bets placed for or against each team. But since the data is based on actual wagers, the site only contains predictions for early games in which the teams are already decided.

That leaves us with the algorithmic approach, and few have seen more computer-based predictive models than Danny Tarlow and Lee-Ming Zen. Like many, Tarlow and Zen run an annual NCAA tournament pool. But what makes theirs unique is that each entry must be compiled by a machine with no consideration for human judgment.

“Three years ago, I had two things on my mind,” said Tarlow, a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. “First, I was working on building a recommendation system similar to the ones used in the Netflix challenge. Second, I hadn’t paid attention to college basketball that year, but I needed to fill out my bracket for a pool with some friends.  At some point, it struck me that I could use the exact same recommendation algorithm I had been coding up to make my bracket predictions.”

Tarlow went on to explain how the computers fared against their human counterparts in last year’s competition. “We included three human-ish baselines: always picking the higher seed, the bracket predicted by Nate Silver, and Lee’s personal bracket.  Against that field, the machines won.” (For the uninitiated, the New York Times’ Nate Silver creates a bracket each year combining human- and computer-based systems.)

Tarlow and Zen both agree that while the success rate of each algorithmic approach can vary greatly, the computers are getting better every year. “The approaches and setups definitely become more sophisticated,” said Zen. “But even then, we’re only scratching at the surface.”

Tarlow agreed that they still have a long way to go. “I’ll just say that I haven’t taken my bank account and headed off for Vegas yet,” he said.

You don’t need to create your own algorithm to get a little robotic assistance for your bracket. There are plenty of free computer-based predictive models out there, from numberFire to Power Rank (which displays its predictions in an attractive visualization). But if there’s one thing most of the predictors agree with, human or otherwise, it’s that the smart money is on No. 1 overall seed Kentucky to take home the championship trophy. Then again, ESPN is quick to point out that the No. 1 overall seed has only won once since the committee started handing out that distinction eight years ago.

All of this reveals what we already secretly knew, even if our pre-tournament egos try to tell us otherwise: There’s no foolproof method to sports prediction, no matter how knowledgable the human, or how advanced the algorithm. So America, stop agonizing over your bracket and get back to work.

Image: Flickr user Erik Charlton