This past week baseball fans from around the world voted for players to make the final spot on their respective league’s roster. All told, 68 million votes were cast. Shane Victorino, the winner of the National League roster spot, received over 15 millions votes. He narrowly edged out Pablo Sandoval who had the support of both his San Francisco and Venezuela fan bases. Our friend John McCain backed another losing effort in his endorsement of the third-place finisher, Arizona’s Mark Reynolds.
In the American League, Brandon Inge of Detroit benefited from the “Bran Torino” alliance formed with Victorino supporters. Both Inge and Victorino were in second place in the early stages of voting when their campaigns teamed up to support each other.
Fans were allowed to vote an unlimited amount of times for both a National League and American League representative; they only needed to submit their name, age, email address, and a challenge-response question consisting of 5 squwiggly numbers. MLB teased fans throughout the 4 days of voting by releasing percentage results and claiming different players overtook the lead each night.
This is a win-win situation in online engagement. MLB is collecting millions of email addresses from people who more than happy to give them. It played on civic and national pride to give people incentive to participate and provided tangible results. MLB also offered a rudimentary widget to help the campaigns go viral and it did. Blogs, local organizations and even governments got involved to support the GOTV effort.
For all the hype surrounding last week’s campaign, the entire idea (voting for an All-Star spot) and functionality (an online poll) contrived by MLB remained very simple. Yet it was one of the most effective methods to engage people online and build an email list.
