Melissa Campanelli's The View From Here: How to Enjoy March Madness at Work (Thanks, Web Technology!)

This week we have a guest post in my spot: Joe Keenan, senior editor of All About ROI and eM+C … and sports fan. As a die-hard sports fan, not to mention college basketball junkie, March is gluttony at its finest. I'm not alone in my revelry. Round-the-clock action serves as a rite of spring for sports fans across the nation, who are rooting on their alma maters, local universities and, of course, whomever they've penciled in to their brackets. But with the “madness” comes a real dilemma: How do you watch the games when they're being played in the middle of the day during the workweek? Worry no more. CBSSports.com has got you covered — and without the risk of getting caught. (CBS is the official broadcast network of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship.) While the site has broadcast live streaming video of NCAA tournament games since 2004, helping stranded office workers like me keep track of the action, the threat of getting caught by the boss was always a deterrent hanging out there. Enter the “Boss Button,” a tool that when clicked hides the live video action on the screen and silences the audio, replacing it with a "business-like" image. Slacking off at work has never been made so easy. Designed by cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, the boss button was first rolled out in 2009 to more than 2.77 million clicks. The functionality has been redesigned for this year's tournament, and sneaky office workers have taken notice: The button was clicked more than 1.7 million times on the tournament's first day alone, more than 60 percent of the total clicks of the boss button for the entire 2009 tournament. And there's an entire contingent of fans out there who are watching the action apparently without repercussions. Consider the following traffic statistics released last week from CBSSports.com: 3.4 million hours of live streaming video and audio were consumed by 3 million unique visitors to the NCAA March Madness on Demand video players on the first day of the tournament last Thursday, a 20 percent growth versus 2009 — both numbers represent the largest single day of traffic for a live sporting event on the internet; 2 p.m. to 2:59 p.m. ET was the most watched hour last Thursday with 533,000 streaming hours (16 percent of the total for the day), peaking at 2:45 p.m. with 147,000 streaming hours; and the most watched game from last Thursday was the double-overtime Florida vs. BYU game with 521,000 hours of streaming video and audio, a 50-plus percent increase over 2009's most watched game from the first day of the first round (Washington vs. Mississippi State). "The continuing evolution of NCAA March Madness on Demand gives our fans even more reasons to stay connected to the tournament on a daily basis," said NCAA Senior Vice President for Basketball and Business Strategies Greg Shaheen in a CBSSports.com press release. "Tremendous first round games, enhanced features in the MMOD player and solid early traffic numbers all point towards an exciting few weeks to come." Has your company found success streaming video online? How about implementing a special functionality on your site such as a boss button? Tell us about your experiences by posting a comment below.

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Melissa Campanelli's The View From Here: How to Enjoy March Madness at Work (Thanks, Web Technology!)

Joe Keenan

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Joe Keenan