However, MLB has taken its social media involvement to another level with the announcement of its partnership with Citizen Sports, a developer of social networking and iPhone apps.
What specifically are they working on together, you ask? The core of the partnership is advertising - MLB, specifically its digital branch (MLB Advanced Media), will sell ad inventory on all of Citizen Sports' baseball applications, the best-known ones being Salary Cap Baseball and Beat the Streak.
The Beat the Streak application makes this an especially interesting partnership. Beat the Streak is actually an extension of MLB's Beat the Streak fantasy game, where you pick a player a day that you believe will get a hit in a game - a streak of 57 wins you $1 million. Citizen Sports extended that functionality to Facebook and MySpace.
With this partnership, MLB now gets to reap the benefits of Citizen Sports's reach. A major sponsor and advertiser of MLB's Beat the Streak game is Burger King. With the partnership, the Burger King sponsorship deal is extended to Facebook and the Citizen Sports applications.
Clearly MLB understands the reach, power, and engagement that social media provides and is partnering with companies that have expertise in the area, rather than trying to directly compete (and to their credit, MLB has done other Web partnerships in the past).