Georgetown Midnight Madness: SEO Applied

Georgetown Midnight Madness going viral with Wale

Midnight Madness at Georgetown is one of the single biggest endeavors of the year for the Georgetown Athletics Department.  Pretty much every staff member is involved, many of whom will not sleep for the next 48 hours until the event is completed.  McDonough Gymnasium, which is home to 28 sports, will be overtaken by students, recruits, security, bands, concessionaires, TV production trucks and just about everything else you can think of.

The event has grown in popularity and ask any Georgetown alum and there is usually a fond story about Midnight Madness while they were in school.  All in all a great experience and no one does it better than Dan O'Neil, Brian McGuire and the staff at Georgetown Athletics.

So imagine if you had worked for years and years to build up a reputation for an event like March Madness.  Your entire staff works night and day, coaching staffs are trying to make sure recruits see the best of what Georgetown has to offer.  So much riding on the next 2 days.  And what if someone was trying to find information about March Madness, such as this really cool video featuring Wale that your (who will be performing at the event) department had spent weeks preparing and thousands of dollars to produce:



Now imagine you just realized that 90% of the content on the web is found via a search engine such as Google and when people type in "Georgetown March Madness 2010" your site does not come up at the top of the search.  Such is the case this morning when a search on Georgetown March Madness (a very, very specific search) returned four unofficial fan sites (3 owned by SB Nation) above the press release on the official GUHoyas.com site.  For a top Google sports search that could mean thousands of interactions that could be going to the official site that instead will end up engaging somewhere else.  Just a good example of the importance SEO plays in getting people to review your great content. 

On a related topic, we spend a lot of time discussing the publisher mentality and how good content is a great engagement vehicle in social media outlets OUTSIDE of your own properties.  Georgetown did a nice job of making the Wale/March Madness video available to social channels.  As a result, even though they may have missed an opportunity to reach someone directly through search, they were still successful in getting people to view their content.  In all of the blogs that were listed ahead of the official site in the Google Search, the Wale video was promoted.  Therefore the messaging was amplified much more loudly than if they had just created the content for their own purposes. 

Great application of the power of both SEO and the publisher mentality.