In the 18 years John Fisher has owned the Oakland A's, he's avoided facing the public. Now his social media team seems to be doing the same.
In the past two weeks the A's Twitter account has three posts. The first was a tweet saying that their hearts are with all of the people affected by the tragic events at UNLV on December 6th. On the 10th they wished pitcher Adrián Martínez happy birthday. Then last night they officially announced the signing of relief pitcher Trevor Gott.
Only the happy birthday tweet had the replies left on for people to comment on. Understandably the UNLV post, which mentioned a tragedy in the A's potential new home city, was the first post to have no comments.
But yesterday's announcement that the team had signed Gott is an interesting one to turn off the replies for. Sure, the person in charge of social media is tired of fans in Oakland flooding the comments any time they post. But this was the team adding a player that the fan base should be excited about. That's kind of the point of having social media, is to get people excited about your product and to interact with your fans.
That's not the route they took, and the fans and media alike let them have it.
Here's the thing with posts on Twitter: You can post something and then just mute the conversation, so any replies you receive don't result in a notification. They'll be there, but you can just ignore them when you log in again.
By leaving the comments off, they made it so that people's only recourse was to quote tweet the crap out of their signing and dunk on the team for leaving the comments off. Instead of isolating fan's frustrations to their own comment section, they let it spread.
Let's be clear: This isn't advanced-level knowledge about how Twitter works or anything. This is pretty basic stuff.
What's funny is that after a few hours, the team actually decided to turn the replies on, thinking that they would be in the clear once the initial barrage ended. They would have been wrong.
There was a point when the comments were turned off that you had to wonder if getting quote-tweeted was the plan all along. They could have been going with the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" marketing strategy in order to get their account seen by more people. You see people employ this strategy on social media all the time and it can be pretty effective. The A's turning the comments on later got rid of that thought pretty quickly.
One thing that the A's seem to keep forgetting is that Oakland doesn't quit. With everything that has gone on with relocation, the fans are pissed. They're angry. They're also going to be a nuisance for years to come whether the comments are on or not. Even if/when the A's move to Las Vegas, you can bet that the fans they left behind the in Bay Area will revel in tormenting John Fisher at every chance they get for taking the team that they loved away.
But hey, at least John Fisher is going to put some of his family's artwork in the new ballpark, because nothing screams "I'm at a baseball game!" like an art gallery.
More must-reads: