/u/MLBOfficial has harnessed Malcolm Gladwell’s principle of “The Power of Context” to its full potential in its active contributions to /r/baseball. Given that context is massively important in an online community, /u/MLBOfficial is creates content that is timely and relevant to the baseball environment. The sender’s field of experience has seen incredible overlap with the receivers’, which was a major turnaround for MLB.

This has been no more effective in the communication process than in the realm of driving messages between /r/baseball and other platforms. In its social media creative strategy, /u/MLBOfficial is masterful in creating and sharing viral content between the subreddit and other social media platforms. For example, the Bryzzo Souvenir Co. campaign, which was highly successful in its 2016 introductory season in which the Chicago Cubs rode it all the way through the World Series, was extended through a second season that saw an “expansion” with more beloved Cubs players pitch their ideas to the “company.” One of the highlights was a cameo by now-retired fan favorite David Ross, which was a pleasant surprise and excellent segue from one season to the next. Now in full retirement, the campaign did not explicitly state who David Ross was, but instead turned him into an intern for the climactic laugh at the end of the video. /u/MLBOfficial, knowing that the peak of David Ross’s popularity was in its peak, shared teasers of the “intern” throughout its social media platforms to drive engagement to the campaign, as seen in the Snapchat screenshot below:

The account has solicited ideas from the community, indicating a high commonality between sender and receiver. In this thread from Spring Training 2017, the account asked the subreddit what it actually wants to see, and, no matter how tongue-in-cheek the request, /u/MLBOfficial actually delivered:

One of MLB’s strongest historical objectives has also been to engage users in MLB Cut 4, which is one of MLB.com’s media centers. Actual engagement on these pages is, actually, less-than-stellar, such as in the screenshot of empty comments on a postseason post:

Comparatively, the activity on /r/baseball for the same posts has resulted in a number of higher success metrics, including actual user comments and reddit Karma (the number of upvotes for a single post, to the left of the image in between up and down arrows):

/u/MLBOfficial’s first season was so successful that the manager of the account reached out to the community after the 2016 season to sincerely thank them for the participation, and let them know that the first year was just the start. The community, in kind, also thanked the account and gave them high praise:

The community is so engaged that they actually gave constructive feedback to improve the company itself:

/u/MLBOfficial is an excellent model for all brands and voices to aspire to in their integration with their existing consumers, how to share one voice across multiple properties, and increase their reach to new fans.