The Frontier League initiated a social media joke in the last 24-48 hours which an attempt to get some humor during the April Fools Day spirit. The league, through its teams, issued a press release indicating that it would start all at-bats with a 1-1 count in order to speed up games. Quotes from league officials, team officials and managers were all reported.
Here is the recap from the entire escapade:
Here is the Frontier League’s response to the social media reaction:
http://www.frontierleague.com/2014/04/01/april-fools-league-wide-joke-revealed/
While independent baseball should take advantage of its “independence” – a theme long championed on this website – this may not have been the best way to go about it from a business perspective. Here are some of the reasons why:
- In the first link, JJ Cooper – one of the few longtime advocates of promoting independent baseball at Baseball America – evidently was not informed ahead of time. If one is to make a prank, at least have those who are your longtime proponents in on the joke. It is basic public relations 101.
- The problem is the quotes looked legitimate, so the next time the league tries to do something funny it may not be taken seriously. This is the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome which has plagued other minor league sports in years past. Hopefully this will not be the case; but if one is already the “underdog” (as all independent leagues are compared to MLB) you have to be careful with your “arrows” when you want to get publicity
The bigger concern is the economic impact – or lack thereof. Just because the league had this happen and people “started talking on social media” (a nebulous quote from an anonymous longtime industry insider) this is not always a good thing. The reasons why include:
- The team websites and league websites have minimal ways to monetize the one-time traffic they received. There were no reasons given on home pages to join a newsletter for long term customer relationship development, there were no offers of baseball or other sports products, nor were there minimal additional methods to monetize the national audience who otherwise wouldn’t even know that the Frontier League teams exist.
- Ticket sale increases – as well as sponsorship increases – couldn’t have increased that much due to this tactic. While any increase in ticket sales can be deemed good for business by some insiders, this may not have been the best way to do so. Apart from time and money, the most coveted asset a business can get online is attention in a cluttered environment (like pro baseball is online). If you get national attention at most once a year, then you had “better make it count”. If the average Frontier League gross profit is $2 million per year (pure guess, it could be more or less) then EACH team should have seen at least a 5% benefit by this kind of technique. The risk of social media backfire needs to be offset by economic gain, so 5% of $2 million should be a positive impact of $100,000 (at least) per team to see true benefit. Otherwise it just isn’t worth “wasting arrows”. Save the national attention-getting techniques for when the infrastructure is in place to monetize the audience who gives you attention from all over the country because of something funny, unique, or otherwise worthy of their attention. If the infrastructure isn’t in place to generate at least $100K of ADDITIONAL revenues (over a 12-month window) PER TEAM then they should have held off until later. Over 13 member teams (not including the Greys) this tactic should have come close to generating $1.3 million in additional revenues across the league.
Again, this website likes the Frontier League and its consistency as a league since 1993; and we know that the intent was to be light-hearted.
The only concern we have is that humor – designed to get people talking and create buzz across the country- better have a defined game plan to increase revenues across the board. If not, these types of attempts give “nay-sayers” and others who don’t support the independent leagues lots of “ammunition” to use against the independent baseball teams calling them “bush league” operations. This website believes that the Frontier League and many of the independent teams across the landscape are terrific business operations AND they have tremendous upside on a business perspective – especially for making money online where MLB and MiLB teams are not yet gaining a presence. We just like to see attempts to get social media buzz (humor or otherwise) have structure to them so that they benefit the teams, players and fans in ways which bolster the legitimacy of the independent baseball industry since independent baseball gets so few chances to make a name for itself on the national scene.
Again, kudos to the Frontier League for attempting to inject humor into pro baseball – something sorely lacking in recent years. We just wish that it was handled better – primarily for the Frontier League’s economic interests – in order to gain a competitive edge over other pro baseball teams.
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