While I understand Major League Baseball’s excitement over the use of Twitter during the second half of the 2009 season and all of post-season play, I find myself taking issue with the aggrandizement and bravado the MLB Advanced Media Twitter operators showed during Game 6 of the World Series.
I may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but please, stay with me.
Last night, @MLB declared that all 10 of the trending topics were about baseball. Only, they weren’t. It was crammed down our throats by @MLB that #losemynumber and Glee were somehow relevant, but in reality, had aboslutely nothing to do with the World Series or MLB. #losemynumber was defined by Twitter’s trending topics results page as “People are tweeting reasons they would like other people to refrain from calling them.” – hardly relevant/related to baseball, no matter how hard they tried, and Glee wasn’t about how Glee sang the National Anthem in Game 3 of the World Series (as @MLB would have you believe), but rather about how the World Series game had preempted that night’s new episode of Glee. So, while technically about baseball (a very tenuious connection, mind you), it had more of a negative connotation than something positive.
So now, completely obsessed and drunk with the idea of having all 10 trendings topics baseball-related, MLB is running a promotion based on owning the trending topics list — all centered around selling Yankees World Series merchandise, natch.
This smacks of a marketing meeting where someone said “I bet we get enough people tweeting about the World Series to shape a promotion around taking over Twitter for the evening” or “We’re so cool, I bet everyone talks about us tonight or tomorrow if there’s a game 7 — let’s run a promotion about how great we are!” The major flaw in this plan is that it’s not very organic and it shows. When you have to declare yourself the first-ever 10 of 10 trending topics winner in Twitter histories(!!!!!!!11), you _ just _ don’t _ get _ it.
Besides, everyone knows the NFL will take over Twitter talk for the Super Bowl.
That’s a given.
