Let the brackets begin.

The second round of voting in the Social Madness presented by Spark Business from Capital One is under way and just as in the March Madness college basketball tournament, our contenders are squaring off one-on-one.

There are three size categories to vote in: Small companies of 99 employees or less, medium companies with 100 to 499 employees, and the large companies of 500 or more employees.

To show you how it works, in the small category No. 1 seed Texas Motor Speedway    Texas Motor Speedway Latest from The Business Journals 1st round voting in Social Madness competition ends todayThis is final weekend to vote in Round 1 of Social MadnessTexas Motor Speedway declines hosting IndyCar Series finale Follow this company is squaring off against No. 8 seed Freeman + Leonard. That type of pairing holds for the other size categories as well.

Again in this round, your votes are important as part of a proprietary algorithm developed by American City Business Journals that also measures activity on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook by competitors.

You'll notice that the numbers have changed in each company's score from the first round.

That's because the scoring algorithm for the bracket phase and is reset to zero at the beginning of each round for the portion of a company's score that is derived from votes on socialmadness.com.

A weighted measurement of each firm's activity on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn carries forward cumulatively throughout each round, however.

Three local winners will be announced on July 17, and they will advance to the national competition, where another bracket-style tournament will be held. That tournament will go from July 24 through Sept. 10.

Each of the three national winners will be able to designate a charity to receive a $10,000 donation from the American City Business Journals.

Lance Murray can be reached at 214-706-7106