25: Why Major League Baseball Hits a Homerun Marketing to Fans

Foreign. This week on the podcast, looking at America's favorite pastime for a little insight on how your brand can hit a home run in social media. So if you're a business owner or responsible for your company's social media game, or you are way high up in your company's lineup, but you have absolutely no idea what your roster of employees do on your brand's social media accounts, then step right into the batter's box and listen for insight on how to crush it on social Courtesy of the Boys of Summer for the Confident Communications podcast. I am your host, Molly McPherson. Let's go learn some social media strategies and oh yeah, let's go Red Sox. You can look to any major league sport or national sporting event to gain insight into how they use social media to market to fans. But baseball has to swing for the fences with their marketing efforts because of the sheer number of games and the length of the season, from sunny spring training in March to the cold October nights of the World Series. So on this episode of the podcast, we're going to cover all the bases on the top social media strategies your company or organization should be following to reach your fans. And if you consider yourself a minor league in this social media game, listen for easy to follow ideas for knocking your company's social media presence out of the park. For many of you listening, you know that reaching your fans and engaging them on social media is a challenge. There are so many social networks to choose from, and when you do, you you have to figure out who gets the most love and who do you abandon. Which social media network gets all your time and energy? Then you have to keep up with all the changes. For instance, every March, Facebook likes to change things up with its algorithms. That's the artificial intelligence that's behind the scenes, making it virtually impossible for the casual social media user who is just trying to build a brand or manage their business page. Stay on top of things. So if this sounds like you, keep listening, because I will give you five quick hits for using social media and the one swing and a miss you want to watch out for. I'm covering all the bases from lessons that I've learned attending Social Media Marketing World last month. And I know, I know, enough with the baseball metaphors. I can't help myself. I started using the bases as my metaphors for the lessons, but the euphemisms kind of got in the way there, if you know what I mean. So hits and misses it is. And if you can't tell, I'm a baseball fan, a red Sox fan, which makes me a World Series champion kind of a fan. But you know what, they're now sitting in fourth place in the AL east at the time of this recording. So it's all a lesson in not giving up. Everyone has a challenge that they need to overcome. Now, what is your problem when it comes to social media? Do you need more followers and fans on social media? Do you just need to understand how to use it? And you know what, baseball, Major League Baseball is just like you. They have the same issue. How do you keep people interested in you or your event when there's so much competition? In baseball's case, how do you bring the young fans to the ballpark? Or in your case, your Facebook page, when younger people are using social media like Instagram and Snapchat, but you have no idea how to use it or any desire to use either, either one of those social media networks. The challenge of businesses trying to reach customers nowadays is no different than MLB trying to get a 14 year old boy and their mother to get interested in their sport. If you don't feel relevant using technology or social media, you likely feel the same way as the head of marketing for the last place Miami Marlins. Who is even going to care? But does that mean you give up? Nope. Because you're still in the game. So what do you do? How can you fix the problem? How can you up your social media game? We just need to think a little bit out of the batter's box. Hey, that's the sound of our first hit, which is following the tech trends that will help you stay relevant. If you listen to the podcast last week you heard me talking about hashtags, especially how the sports teams and sporting events use them to gather momentum and energy online around their brand. Major League Baseball does an excellent job with their use of hashtags. The first time I took notice of this is when I was teaching a social media class a number of years ago at New England College. And just like the brands in baseball, I needed to catch the attention of a younger crowd, in this case, millennial students. And many of them were young men who were interested in social media. And it's funny, they all wanted to work for espn. They all wanted sports jobs. And I knew I needed to reach them and I needed to teach them where they lived. So in this case, it was about sports. I came across a video online that Major League Baseball was using as part of a promotion. Now, I knew these guys in this class. They weren't necessarily baseball fans, but they were sports fans. And I Thought it would be a great example of how MLB was trying to attract their fans or bring fans back into the ballpark. So I want you to listen to a clip from that promotion. I'm not going to run the entire promotion. It's a little difficult because they use a lot of imagery in there, so it doesn't translate that well into a podcast. But listen to the language, listen to the copy that they're using, and through this, you might be able to discover why MLB found that social media just might be the answer to their shrinking fame. Fan base. Future fans are on social media, and that's where they can be found. The name of this campaign was this. More specifically, it was this. Take a listen. The game's being played better than it ever has in the history of it. Pretty good. Run the bases. These are the good old days. They are. So did you hear some of that language? The game is being played better than ever before. If you don't come out to see these players, you're missing out. The other content was all about this idea of coming back to the ballpark. This ad and this campaign targeted the fans that they once had and were now missing. The young fans and the hashtag and the title says it all. I think that Major League League Baseball learned something with this campaign. I don't know if it worked or not necessarily. I only saw it for one year, but they put a lot of marketing dollars into trying to reach people, the fans, where they are. And a hashtag was the exact thing that they needed to do to get that momentum moving. Now, if you follow any Major League Baseball team on social media, you're going to see the use of hashtags. They do an excellent job of evoking a feeling, a mean, a movement. For example, I listed in the show notes a link to all of the team Twitter hashtags. In 2019, for example, the Boston Red Sox is gored Sox. Or hashtag dirty water. Arizona. Hashtag rattle on. The Minnesota Twins. Hashtags MN Twins. That's not very exciting. St. Louis Cardinals, time to fly. Philadelphia, Ring the bell. The Washington Nationals. One pursuit. And if you look at the link, you'll see that each one of these hashtags comes with a branded emoji. So it's a branded hashtag, which I mentioned last week in the podcast, is that brands will pay money to have a special emoji attached to the hashtag. So these branded hashtags, they bring a little color and they bring a little fun to any of the tweets or posts. That you use, they want the fans to use these hashtags. Now are these 76 year old fans using the hashtags? Maybe. But who's more comfortable using a hashtag? Probably someone that's a lot younger and maybe you haven't reached them in the ballpark yet, but you're reaching them on their phones and you're going to get them excited about coming to the game. Our second hit, video. Video was the big takeaway from social media marketing world this year. Everyone talked about video. Video creates engagement, video creates higher scores on social media. Facebook, for instance, they keep a score of everyone. And every business that uses Facebook video has the highest score. In other words, they get the most runs. The more people that share that video, comment on that video, engage on that video, the higher the score of the account. Also the more traction that that post is going to get. Video, it's sound, it's pictures. And if you don't have sound, you're going to have captions at the bottom of the video for people to still engage with that post. Look at any baseball related post in the feed and most of them are video. People will stop their scroll to watch. Even if they're not baseball fans, they might stop to look if they know that someone's going to hit like a bullet out of the park or it's going to be a grand slam. The algorithm wants to know, is this a good piece of content? Who will be interested in it? If it's a home run, anyone's going to be interested in it. And if people spend the time they stop there and they watch and the watch time increases as well, then that post is going to get priority distribution in the newsfeed. So Facebook, all the other social media networks, it's all about meaningful engagement. And the more meaningful engagement or the most you're going to get is through the use of video. So if you are using video, you want to encourage people to comment, you want to encourage people to watch. Watch time is a very important metric. And if you can tag friends as well, if someone is watching and they tag so and so and say watch this hit or type watch this hit, that is going to increase the, the staying power of that post and it's going to get a higher priority in the newsfeed. Now I know what you're thinking, all right, I get it, people use video. But if I'm watching a video on Twitter and it's from a ballpark, it's going to be from a professional camera with professional editors, professional broadcast network, I'm not a professional broadcast network. I get it. And a lot of programs get it as well. That's why there are a number of online programs and software programs for the layperson to use to be able to edit video. And I would say even in the last six months I've noticed a huge change in how to edit video. I too was someone that stressed over video and I didn't use it as much because in my brain I thought, oh, I got to hire a videographer and an editor to do this and it has to be this whole big production. I think back to the money that I've just invested in a lot of the video that I just put on social media. Now I don't want any videographers or editors out there to freak out. There's plenty of business for long form video. But these quick hits on social media that you can do yourself and engage with on yourself. There are programs out there that are really easy to use. Anyone can use them. A program that I found when I was at Social Media Marketing World is Wave Video. It's Wave Video. I'm going to include a link in the show notes. I've just become an affiliate with them and I started using them recently because they make video production for promotion incredibly easy. All you do is you upload a video. You can edit it within the program, you can add imagery, you can add captions, they give you templates. I'm telling you, it is super, super easy. The promotion for this podcast I filmed using my phone and Wave Video, it's super easy. So check it out if you to see how you can use it or you can give it to your staffers. If you're running a company and you know that you need to use video, send it off to your communication staff. I just did it this week. I was working with an organization and they were coming to me about an overall public relations plan and how they can kind of create more engagement on social media. And I told them about the use of video because a lot of the content now needs to come within the four walls of your building. Facebook in particular, they don't outside organizations posting on behalf of an organization. So the more that you can do inside the ballpark, the better off you're going to be. And a program like Wave Video makes it really easy to do. So video creates emotion. You get sucked into video. I mean, look at all those pet shelter videos or kid adoption videos that you see on Facebook. How often do you stop and watch? I know I do. And I don't even need Another pet. But I'm completely sucked in. Fans are going to get sucked in on your video as well. Our third hit, build your ambassadors from inside and from people, not things. What does that mean? Many times the biggest boost to your brand or your online presence comes from the people who know you or the people who work with you personally. It's your friends, it's your family. Professionally, it's your employees, or maybe your colleagues. Now, Major League Baseball, they were frequently criticized by fans and industry observers for not doing enough to market their top stars. They would rather market the teams alone and not the stars themselves because they didn't want the baseball players to get all the promotion. And recently they liberalize the rules around the use of licensed content by the players, meaning themselves, in an attempt to make their social media feeds more exciting and more vibrant. So the league now is allowing its players to use that material, the protected material, for their own video highlights and their own MLB produced still photos and graphics on all of their social media feeds. So it's taking the step of providing the material to the baseball players to proactively allow them to promote themselves. So Major League Baseball made the players now the ambassadors for not just their team, but for the brand of baseball. So the players have their own feeds. Instagram and Twitter are really big with all athletes and now they share that information and they get more people and fans excited about them. Why does this matter? I have a theory. This is just the Molly thesis on sports, but maybe you're like me and you notice that a lot of the younger fans aren't quite as excited about sports as much as the 14 year old fan from let's say 1963. The differences in sports and let's look at baseball. You had the same players playing on the same team for their entire career. For example, when you think of Ted Williams, you think of the Boston Red Sox. When you hear Mickey Mantle, you immediately think of the New York Yankees. Blech. By the way, when I was young, in 1987, the Minnesota Twins won the World Series in the dome with the home run hanky at that time on that team, Kirby Puckett, Kent Herbeck, Gary Gayetti. These are names I can pull out of my head because those were iconic Minnesota Twins. That's funny. Even how I said that. Iconic. That sounds so Minnesotan. Anyway, the point is this is that something that has changed a lot in sports, that it's not about the team and then the player, it's about the player who happens to be on the team. And Major League Baseball really All of the major league sports have figured out that the future fan is much, much different than the fan from the past. Kids do not have loyalty to that one team anymore. I mean, they do, they care about the team, but they care just as much about the player. I'm basing this thesis, of course, from my own home. My kids, they're huge Boston fans. So my daughter, she plays hockey, she loves the Bruins. My son, born in Massachusetts, die hard Red Sox fan, die hard Patriots fan, die hard Celtics fan. But he's also a Minnesota Timberwolves fan and a Minnesota Vikings fan. Why? Well, his mom's from Minnesota. As his grandparents, his Uncle Mike, his cousins who all love Minnesota sports. But he also loves the Thunder because of Russell Westbrook and he loved Duke because of Zion and says that he will follow Zion to whatever team he goes to and he gets drafted. He does not like the New York Giants. In fact, he hates the New York Giants, but he loves Saquon Barkley. And last night he was so excited to tell me that he saw a post on Instagram of Saquon going to his younger brother's basketball practice. Do you see the change? What happened there? Here's an example of a 14 year old kid who is obsessed with sports to the point where I think he's going to grow up to be a gambler in Las Vegas. But he loves the idea of the brand, but the brand behind the person. And my son Connor is like many, many other future fans and the Major League Sports, mlb, NFL, they all know this. The same applies to your business. You need to look out for those younger generations. I've mentioned this on the podcast before. I hear this objection a lot from baby boomers. Primarily these younger generations, they're not loyal. They flit around. They don't care about one business. They just want what they want. They're narcissists. You know, whatever I've heard, I've heard it all. But that's not exactly it. What they're feeling is correct. They're noticing that they do popcorn around, but it's not because they don't have loyalty. It's because they're wired to like a lot of things. And that's a good, good thing. We don't want to push these people away. So if you are running a business or you're responsible for your business's marketing campaign or social media, remember this, that the generations, their loyalty is there. One could argue it's even stronger. And you need to reach to them where they are and get them excited and loyal about maybe just a part of your brand. If you sell a whole array of things, maybe target one thing. Maybe if you're an organization that provides something boring and dry, maybe it's power or water, you know, whatever. Get them excited about maybe how you do your business or the employees behind the business, whatever it is, you don't want to reach your customer the same way you always have. You want to reach your fans where they are and with the content that they care about. Okay, our fourth hit, Stories and Quotable quotes. Now, everyone loves a good stories and sporting events provide plenty of stories. Think about the traditional three act structure of a story. Act one is the setup. Act two is either the confrontation or the rising action. Act three is the resolution. And then you can wrap it all up with a great quote. There have been so many historical stories that happened in baseball. Remember when the Boston Red Sox finally won the first World Series? The Cubs, they won their first World Series. Let's go more recent. When the season started this year, one of the big stars in Major League Baseball was Bryce Harper, one of my favorite players. He left the Nationals, a team that he had played on from the very beginning after signing a $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. So he's going to ride out his career in Philadelphia. Now, Bryce Harper was coming back to Nat's park for the first time ever in a Philly uniform and where he wasn't wearing a Nats uniform earlier in the day, Bryce posted on Instagram to thank all the national fans with a post, hoping that perhaps that it would bring some goodwill to the fans. Maybe he was hoping that they would all cheer for him when he came up from that for that first bat. So Bryce Harper walks to the plate. Max Scherzer is pitching. What do you think happens? Take a listen. Of course everyone booed. That's the story. That's exciting. That's the confrontation. So next after that strikeout, what does Bryce Harper, the $330 million player, do? Well, you can guess in the air to deep right field. This one is gone. Well, Boom. So Bryce has an epic hit and then he has an epic bat flip. And then the big story became all about the bat flip. So here's our quotable quote. The general managers of the National, Mike Rizzo was asked about the bat flip and he said, you hit the ball that far, do whatever the hell you want. Now that's a great quote. And that's a great quote from a leader, but a leader who was also speaking highly about a former player that he brought up through the majors, who now left to go on to the Phillies. It was a great story. So you're thinking, okay, Bryce Harper doesn't work for us. How can we create an exciting story about our business? It doesn't matter how dry your business is. If you provide a service for customers, if you provide a product for customers, if you have employees, you have a story. There are plenty of stories that you can tell. You can tell stories about your clients. You can tell great customer stories. What's changed? What transformation has happened because a customer has used your product or service? Tell a story about your employees. Make it a heartwarming story. Make it a funny story. Tell the story about the CEO or the president. Tell a story about your board members or your board of trustees. Go behind the scenes. Tell the people how the sausage is made. Also tell stories about the leaders. We want to hear stories about them as well. Just this past week of this recording of this podcast, I spoke with three clients who all heard me say the exact same thing. You must put your leader in this case, it was either a CEO, a president, or the head of this organization on camera in front talking to the customers. We don't want spokespeople anymore. We want direct from the source's mouth. We want the customer to see you. That is the future of business and branding and reputation management. Major League Baseball knows this. That's why you hear from the players. You're also going to hear from the general managers and the presidents and from the owners. That's why people and the fans know everyone that works for a team because they're marketing as well. So remember, everyone loves a good story. And where can you find your stories? Right within the four walls of your business. And if you can't, just go ahead, throw in a great quote while you're at it. All right. And now it's our time for a swig and a miss. Employees going rogue on social media. This is the not so good part about social media and how it can affect a brand. And baseball is not immune to this at all. I've mentioned in the past this podcast the importance of having a social media policy at your organization. Everyone in your company needs to know where it resides, so you want to put it on a shared drive or someplace where anyone will have immediate access to it. And this social media policy doesn't just speak to how your company uses social media in a front facing manner to your customer. It also lays out the rules and the policy for how your employees use social media and what is expected of them, Major League Baseball. They had a bit of a Twitter problem as well because there were a lot of old tweets coming back to haunt baseball players that had not so great tweets when they were younger. Sean Newcomb, the pitcher from the Atlanta Braves, Trey Turner, the shortstop for the Nets, Sweet. Trey Turner, the Milwaukee Brewers, Josh Hader. All of them got caught up in a Twitter crisis in the last few years, and all of their teams had to respond to it. It was kind of a big deal. So you want to make sure that your employees are not saying anything or doing anything or filming anything online that can impact your brand because it will come back to hurt your brand, but it will also, you know, hurt them. Curt Schilling, the former Red Sox. The bloody Sox Curt Schilling, remember him? He may have tweeted himself out of the Baseball hall of Fame because of a lot of his, let's say, rather too conservative tweets where he may have crossed the line. John Lester, also another former Red Sox. He now pitches for the Cubs. When all of these tweets came out with the younger players on Twitter, he posted a note. Please spend the 5 minutes it takes to scrub your account of anything you wouldn't want plastered next to your face on the front page of a newspaper. Better yet, don't say stupid things in the first place. Too many young guys getting burned. The more you know. And isn't that the truth? So here's a rule to remember about yourself and your employees. Tell your employees, take a few moments, go back into your social media, maybe when you were younger, before you had this job, and scrub anything that may reflect poorly on you and as a result, on the business. Everyone should take the moment to do that because a lot of people go through different phases in their lives. But when a name hits the news, or if there's a leader in the news or someone who's ahead of a brand, people will go to social media. And there are people that will take the time to go through all your social media accounts. So be sure to scrub it up. All right, so as you can tell, we are now in the seventh inning stretch. And while we're here, I want to let you know about a new program that I'll be launching soon. The Learning Lab is an online resource for leaders at the top of their business game but struggle finding the time to learn about how to use digital online and social media platforms or lack the courage to ask anyone. Because you know what, I get it. Sometimes it's a little embarrassing to have to ask people, maybe staffers junior to you, how to do something pretty basic. It's understandable. The Learning Lab is going to offer monthly online trainings to watch on your time and offer live webinars to help you understand all the relevant social media platforms and get you up to speed on how to effectively communicate in the 21st century. It's important for leaders or bosses, anyone who needs to keep their eye on the ball when it comes to social media, digital technology. Anything you need that can keep you in the game. These easy to follow resources will help you be heard, stay seen, maintain your relevancy. So sign up now. To be one of the first to know when we go live, go to mollymcpherson.com learninglab okay, here we are. It's the bottom of the ninth and we have our fifth hit and it's a home run. It's consistency and dedication. Every single Major League Baseball team has an incredibly strong presence online. If you are not at the ballpark watching the game firsthand, you can follow the games online streaming or through traditional broadcast channels. But you can also follow a game by watching it on social media inning by inning, and you can see all the commentary as well. Twitter and Instagram are great places to see the latest posts and where you are in the game. And if you follow a game on Facebook, you may not get the play by play, but you'll likely have the opportunity to watch the entire game on MLB Live on Facebook. Business Social Media is in the same game. If your customer knows you spend time on a social media site, posting, speaking, replying, then they know that's where they can find you. And you don't need to be on all of them. You only need to use the ones that feel natural to you. If you are comfortable using Live video, make sure you are consistent using Live on the same platform. Whether it's Facebook Live or you're on Instagram. An IGTV person, people will schedule the time to look for your video and watch it. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk. He's a well known social media influencer. He has books and incredibly successful channels and social media profiles on his website. He will tell you exactly how you can stay in touch with him on which social media network and what he does on each. For example, on Instagram he said it's his favorite place. Now that's interesting. I wouldn't guess that, but he puts quotes and stories and a chance to win the hashtag 60 second club on YouTube is where he documents his life through Dailyvee Askgaryvee and this is video. Facebook is his largest platform. That's where he has vaynernation to stay up to date on everything he does. Twitter the most direct and personal way to reach him for one to one conversations. Do you see how that works now he's a social media influencer who is across all the platforms. Again, you don't need to go across all of the platforms. For me, if I ever wanted to check in on a baseball game I might look at an app like the MLB app. But I know if I go to Twitter and if I type in Red Sox, I'm going to get a tweet by tweet analysis of everything that's happening in the game. So if you run a business or the face of your business, if you show up online, you'll gain the trust of your customers right off the bat. So remember the home run. In social media it's consistency and dedication. You have to be consistent with your posts and you have to be dedicated to social media in general. You will not win at the social media marketing game if you do not play to win well. That's all for today's episode of the Confident Communications Podcast. Thanks so much for listening. I hope these tips helped you understand the basics in social media marketing and now you see really how easy it is because I know who has the time. But you can make the time on the strategies that feel good to you, that you like and you feel comfortable with or find the resources in your company or hire out the resources. You don't have to do it all, but you have to show up up to be in the game. For more tips, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple, itunes, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. I want to help you become a modern age communicator in your industry and help you build a crisis proof reputation for you and your business. Oh and by the way, let's go Red Soc Sam.