MLB extends social networking presence

April 24 2009, 10:42am

Both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) have begun to use social media in the form of iPhone and Facebook applications, as well as popular Twitter accounts to promote their brands. However, MLB is taking its involvement with social media to another level with the announcement of its partnership with Citizen Sports, a social networking and iPhone apps developer. The true core of this partnership is in advertising. The digital branch of MLB, MLB Advanced Media, will sell ad inventory on all of Citizen Sports’ baseball applications. Some of the more popular and widely known ones being Salary Cap Baseball and Beat the Streak. Beat the Streak is actually an extension of MLB’s Beat the Streak fantasy game, already live on MLB.com. Here users can pick a player a day that they believe will get a hit during a game. If you are the first to get a streak of 57, you win $1 million. The add-on application, is what makes the partnership between MLB and Citizen Sports interesting. The functionality of the site’s version has now been extended to Facebook and MySpace. What this partnership means is, that MLB now gets to enjoy the benefits of Citizen Sports’ reach. As does a major sponsor and advertiser of MLB’s Beat the Streak game, Burger King. With the new partnership, the Burger King sponsorship deal will also be extended to Facebook and the Citizen Sports applications. In terms of reach and engagement, this is a good deal for extending the presence of major sports on social media. Clearly, more and more companies and brands are beginning to see the power of social media and are partnering with developers that have expertise in the area.