MLB’s social media blitz is a home run among fans

That was the idea behind Major League Baseball’s Fan Cave, now pushing into the postseason of its second year. The basic concept is that selected fans—two in the first year, more in 2012—watch all 2,300-plus Major-League games in the season on a bank of 15 TVs in a New York City building and then they blog, tweet, and post to Facebook about it.

Just that aspect has drawn copious attention, but the league has worked to keep the momentum going, and it has done so.

“There was planning, but there was also reactive behavior based on what was going on,” says Matt Bourne, MLB’s vice president of business public relations. “You can’t really plan six months of activity that far in advance.”

First crack

As the 2010 World Series concluded, Executive Vice President of Business Tim Brosnan and Chief Marketing Officer Jacqueline Parks started considering ways to make a splash on social media channels in the 2011 season. They wanted to appeal to a young audience by playing up the “epicness” of the season—sort of like HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”