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January 12th, 2012 
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When it comes to capturing the attention of young people, baseball suffers from the same problem that plagues all forms of entertainment — infinite competition.
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“You used to go outside and play sports, which put you on that path,” says Terry Lefton, editor-at-large for Sports Business Journal and Sports Business Daily. “Now there are more things to do. My 14-year-old plays video games constantly. I’ll be watching NFL with him, and if the game gets boring, he’ll go upstairs and play Madden. He doesn’t see any difference.”
To such young people, a three-hour baseball game may seem agonizingly slow and dull. No wonder that, as 2011 dawned, Major League Baseball was looking to revamp its image via social media.
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The league’s solution, created in tandem with Boston ad agency Hill Holliday, was a novel one: Last spring, MLB hired two guys — Mike O’Hara and Ryan Wagner — to watch all of the season’s 2,429 regular-season games plus the playoffs from a super-sized “Fan Cave” in New York’s East Village and then record their thoughts on social media. (Both are pictured; O’Hara is on the right.)
Ten months on, MLB and even skeptics like Lefton think the effort has been successful, even though evidential data is hard to come by. What the league did track sounds impressive enough: 1.3 billion media impressions and 250,000 combined new fans on Facebook and Twitter. What’s more, the effort reached younger fans: The average Fan Cave fan was around 30 years old, versus 45 to 48 for the average MLB fan. “It’s a great way for them to skew a lot younger,” says Ben Sturner, CEO of Leverage, a sports sponsorship and branded entertainment agency, referring to MLB. “Its a really smart move for them.”
Did the campaign convince non-fans to become fans, increase ratings or get more butts in seats at ballparks around the nation? Making that sort of case would be extremely hard to prove, says Tim Brosnan, MLB’s executive vice president of business. In any case, those are ancillary goals at best. Brosnan’s primary aim was to inject MLB into the ongoing social media conversation, which he and Hill Holliday dubbed the “digital water cooler.” In prior generations, “the water cooler was a place where folks gathered around to talk about everything and nothing,” Brosnan says. Nowadays, that chatter is happening on digital devices.
During the season and among hard core fans, no doubt some of that dialogue involved specific games. Brosnan wanted to augment that conversation and make it potentially more relevant to non-fans. “What was not being generated was the pop culture stuff with a baseball theme in it that we thought the Fan Cave could generate,” he says.
As Brosnan learned early on, doing so wasn’t merely a matter of letting O’Hara and Wagner loose. The two needed something to react to. Have big-name players with prodigious social media followings like José Bautista and David Ortiz drop by the Fan Cave provided a big boost in engagement. But there was some entertainment crossover as well. Brosnan believes that the Fan Cave was one of the first venues in New York to host LMFAO, the electro-pop duo.
Aside from celeb cameos, Brosnan says that skits also worked well. The video below, featuring Bautista, had a little of both:
Getting fans to talk about Bautista’s awesome acting chops, rather than his home run the night before was a preferable shift in subject matter for Brosnan.
Did MLB need the Fan Cave to do that? Not necessarily. For instance, MLB could have generated chatter by producing videos and holding events without a physical location. Instead of hiring two guys to watch every game, it could have deputized 100 “ambassadors” on Twitter to do the same. But Brosnan and the league are happy with the approach, which is why the Fan Cave will return in 2012, though MLB has tweaked the format a bit.
The biggest change: Instead of the two guys, the league will select “multiple” fans to live in the Fan Cave this season. (Those interested have until January 31 to make their case at MLBFanCave.com.) Otherwise, expect things to play out much like they did in 2011, only with more celebs and events. Recognizing the draw of stars, MLB has announced that 17 celeb players, including Bautista, Bronson Arroyo and Jay Bruce, will stop by the Fan Cave this year.
Now that the format has proved itself, there’s also talk of bringing advertisers onboard. Yet monetizing the Fan Cave isn’t the point. The idea was to make MLB relevant to a new type of fan. By that measure, it’s been a home run. Says Lefton: “Did it do well? Who knows. This stuff is notoriously hard to measure. But [the league is] experimenting in new and interesting ways and that may be more important.”
Series supported by Oneupweb
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, a relentless digital marketing agency focused on search, social, and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Our new social media conversion tracker, ROSI trax™, can show you the value of your marketing investment. Learn more now, and gain access to our free digital marketing magazine, The Merge® for ideas to ignite your marketing strategy.
MLB Fancave dwellers Ryan Wagner and Mike O’Hara tour the MLB Fancave in New York, March 29, 2011. Photo by Jeff Zelevansky.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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