The Major League Baseball’s ‘Social Media Derby’

On Monday July 11, Major League Baseball held its first ever ‘Social Media Derby.’ State Farm hosted a Home Run Derby in which they decided to fully intergrade social media. Broadcasted live on ESPN, the MLB Association arranged for the players to interactively participate in the event by both playing and tweeting directly from the field. The players would use the hash tag #HRDerby to make it easier for fans to follow. From this event the 23-all stars that participated gained a combined 121,428 followers on Twitter, with an average increase in followers of 17 percent. The MLB and Club Twitter and Facebook accounts combined gained 53, 375 new followers and fans within 18 hours. Due to the Social Media Derby, ESPN registers a 4.7 household rating with an average viewing audience of 6,686,000. This was a 4% increase from the 2010 even which was held in Anaheim, CA.

Along with tweets and Facebook postings, the athletes also distributed videos and photos across various media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, ESPN, and MLB websites.

ESPN hosted an online Home Run Derby Tracker that provided the players personal season stats as well as their derby stats such as hits, distances, and outs. The stats pages were broken up by both player and round. On each player’s individual stats page was a Twitter feed which included all the player’s personal tweets as well as fan’s and other professional’s tweets which discussed the player and/or event.

In “Understanding Professional Athletes’ Use of Twitter: A Content Analysis of Athlete Tweets,” the authors suggest that social media sports consumption helps to motivate interest in the sports, teams, and players, and in return, increases the likelihood of the fans to watch the games on television. Further, they found within their study of sports fans using social media, that many of them use Twitter and Facebook as means for interactivity between other fans and professionals. The idea of incorporating social media in this year’s Home Run Derby proved to be not only a good idea, but one that will most likely expand in the future.

Incase you were wondering, Robinson Cano won the derby, and increased his followings by 84 percent.

Two Peas in a Podcast

CBS Sports is a division of the CBS Broadcasting Company, and airs all the major sports games as well as multiple commentary and featured shows (as do most major television stations). The station also includes many college sports and discussions and shows on “fantasy” teams like fantasy football and baseball. The company has realized however, the need for its viewers to keep up with discussions and programs away from the television, without uploading the entire show or programming onto their website. So, aside from short video clips of highlight reels, how has the station managed to keep their up to date? PodcastsPodcasts, and not just for one or two programs, but for the majority of the station programs. They also include video podcasts, targeted specifically for users with smart phones, to download and view on the go. The programs in their podcast selection include:  The Oddcast, Fantasy Football, Fantasy Baseball, CBS Football, Baseball, Basketball, and college football and basketball, to name a few. They have the option of uploading the podcast through RSS, iTunes, and Zune, sending you directly to a link with easy to follow instructions.

Steven McClung and Kristine Johnson, from the Journal of Radio and Audio Media, suggest that podcasts are a great way to reach your audience as well as keep them interested. Podcasts are a way to energize audiences when they’re not in front of their TV screens or don’t have much free time. Further, podcast users tend to be frequent social networkers, and interestingly enough, download both audio and video podcasts. Podcasts have been shown to increase the socialization of what people have seen or heard. By posting podcasts of entire shows, CBS Sports is allowing for viewers to interact with each other regardless of which screen they are getting the shows from.

Of course, there is always a negative side to a media strategy. For sports podcasts, people may find it easier to simply listen to the radio. Further, for those who are creating the sports podcasts, which are usually the audio part of a show, the producer and speaker must remember that any graphics or visuals cannot be seen when simply listening.