Like many of you, I was really rooting for Butler to win the NCAA men’s basketball tournament earlier this week. But it wasn’t because I hate Duke, or because I have some sort of “Hoosiers” nostalgia that made me root for the small school from Indiana. It’s because those kids were really helping me prove a point!

On the first day of the NCAA tournament, I spoke on a webinar about the integration of traditional and new media. During my remarks, I used a slide with the logos of schools that pulled off the greatest upsets in NCAA history to illustrate a message.

You see, I’ve been hearing lately about a lot of B2B executives who are so intimidated by social media that they are opting to simply avoid it. They don’t understand it, and they fear loss of message control.

So, they are going to sit on the sidelines.

To me, that is like Princeton or Richmond or Valparaiso saying they are too small to win, so they just won’t play in the tournament. Well, guess what, the tournament is happening anyway – whether they compete or not.

The same holds true for social media. The game is happening whether your company participates or not.

Conversations are occurring about your business in blogs, via Twitter, in social networks. The only way to completely lose is to not show up at the game – to not know what’s being said, and to not be able to respond. And the best defense, as they say, is a good offense.

It was so nice to see Butler – an ultimate underdog – play so well throughout the tournament and, then, battle so valiantly against the basketball powerhouse that is Duke. In a way, their hard-fought loss may have actually made my point better than a win would have.

No, they didn’t win the title. But being there and playing hard won them five games, and put them in the national conversation. They were the buzz of the country and the after-effect should mean that many talented recruits will now be considering Butler, and many fans will be scrambling for tickets next year. I’ll bet the school will even get more admission applications than ever before.

Your business won’t win every conversation in the world of social media either, but being a player will allow you to compete. And the buzz and notoriety Butler has achieved is exactly the type of positive groundswell a business can create for itself with social media.

Fight on (communications) Bulldogs!