The MLB Home Run Derby is taking place tonight as part of the All Star festivities. Lost Remote has learned exclusively that ESPN will be making the broadcast more social by offering prizes for those following @ESPN and tweeting with #HRDerby. Here are the details.
In honor of 2012 State Farm Home Run Derby fans will be able to win prizes for “correctly predicting the number of home runs and the farthest distance of home runs in each round,” according to ESPN. The prizes will be signed balls from the derby contestants and the network will show one small on-air graphic during the intro before the Derby. The sports network already has an extremely unique partnership with Twitter that could help the platform tap into the TV ad world. They also ramped up their use of social for Wimbledon, which they aired for the first time.
Twitter has of course always been a huge part of networks’ social TV strategies. Now that it’s a standard for every network to tweet and curate tweets, the challenge is to continue to come up with creative and genuine strategies to use the platform to engage with fans. IFC’s Bunk has also been using Twitter creatively in a way that doesn’t require tons of development work, but instead complimented the show itself on the social web.
While there are now many different sports apps you can use during the Home Run Derby, following ESPN during the broadcast will probably end up being the most rewarding.