Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski walked up the dugout steps. He waved to an adoring crowd inside Fenway Park, with fans cheering and clapping as he made his way to the mound for the first pitch to his grandson Mike Yastrzemski, an outfielder for the San Francisco Giants.
Amid the melee of cameras and flashes and chaos, Kelsey Doherty darted from behind the dugout railing to get in place at the backstop. Her colleague Maria Schroeder wasn’t far behind.
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Like thousands of others in the ballpark, they couldn’t miss capturing this Yastrzemski first pitch moment on their phones. But unlike everyone else, the images and video Doherty and Schroeder snapped were about to be uploaded to the Red Sox social media accounts for millions of fans to see.
They have images from the team photography staff and video from the Red Sox productions crew as well as a clip sent from the official broadcast, but getting the raw phone video is a pillar of their jobs as the social media managers for all Red Sox accounts.
As soon as the pitch was thrown and the hug exchanged between the Yastrzemskis, Doherty quickly exited the field, opening a gate in the fence behind home plate and weaving up through fans trying to get in their seats. Out in the concourse, she swam against the current of people pouring and finally made it out into the air of Jersey Street.
Kelsey Doherty, left with camera, at work prior to a game at Fenway. (Cameron Pollack / Boston Red Sox)
“That’s the hardest part of the day,” she laughed. As she headed back to her office on the second story of a nondescript brick building across the street from Fenway’s ticket office, the park buzzed in the background.
Technically it was already nine hours into her workday, but time is relative when you’re a social media manager for the Boston Red Sox.
Five hours earlier, Doherty and Schroeder had been going over their plan for the day, one scribbled on the whiteboard behind their desks in an office complete with a replica Pesky’s Pole in the middle. It hardly stood out: A Wally the Green Monster poster that doubled as a child’s growth chart hung on the door, a J.D. Martinez big head leaned against a cubicle desk and a slew of bobbleheads crowded the desktops.
Yaz was their big content “get” for the day, but they also had to account for Brock Holt being honored as the team’s Roberto Clemente Award nominee and a golden ticket fan appreciation giveaway. There was a photo shoot with Jackie Bradley Jr. arriving at the park on his scooter. And then there would be the game itself.
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Managing the Red Sox social accounts — with their 5 million Facebook followers, 2.1 million Twitter followers and 1.7 million Instagram followers — is a massive, 24/7 undertaking. There’s also a Snapchat account catering to younger fans, a growing YouTube channel and a newer social medium called TikTok that they’re still figuring out. And yet all of it is managed by just two 20-somethings — Doherty and Schroeder. Doherty is the senior partner at 28, with the title of manager of digital media. She has been with the Red Sox since she was an intern in 2012. She started out in the fan clubs department, helping with day-of-game preparation in 2012 and 2013. Then a job as a social media assistant opened up a month before she graduated from Emerson College in 2014.
“Going into college I wanted to work in marketing and sports marketing and then realized social media was a job, it was just becoming a job for people as I’d started school,” Doherty said. “I started in 2010 and it was like, ‘Oh you can get paid to be on the internet?’ I didn’t realize that was all the time, constant. But it seemed great.”
Meanwhile, Schroeder, 23, graduated from Bradley University in Illinois last year. An internship in the commissioner’s office led to a social media role with MLB, and the Red Sox claimed her off waivers as Doherty’s sidekick in August.
The social media industry caters to a younger demographic, which baseball badly needs and actively courts. So it makes sense that young employees are the ones behind the team’s voice. Nevertheless, serving as the team’s internet face to the world can be daunting.
“People don’t necessarily realize the power of it and I think across baseball most social people are our age,” Doherty said. “We know how to do it all, but like, it’s like, ‘OK you’re going to let me hit send?’”
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Crafting an online personality
Each social platform has a different personality. Twitter is informational and Instagram offers snapshots. Instagram Story has become almost separate from Instagram with the ability to string together video clips. Snapchat is generally for the quirkier, goofy content.
“I’d consider Twitter and Instagram Story as probably the two places we can get our voice out the most and truly tell a story, where Facebook is just highlight, highlight or Instagram timeline is just some carousels of a moment,” Doherty said. “You can tell a story or show some of those quirky things or fun player high-fives so that I feel like is a whole shift for us. Snapchat we’ve seen go up and down, but ultimately it’s a younger audience on there, even though it’s one of our smaller followings, it’s an audience everyone talks about that we need in baseball and that’s who we want to be talking to.”
The job is a mix of planning certain posts and spontaneously capturing moments, all with the purpose of giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at the team. The job truly is a round-the-clock endeavor, since fans can interact with the club’s social platforms at any moment. For a 7 p.m. home game, the day begins around 9:30 or 10 a.m. with planning meetings. Sometimes Doherty or Schroeder will accompany a player at a community event before the game. They’ll head to the field for batting practice to capture players’ pregame preparation.
Doherty, in pink pants on left side, and Schroeder, in black pants by dugout fence, snapping away. (Cameron Pollack / Boston Red Sox)
On this day, Doherty heads into the stands for the chance to play Willy Wonka. An unsuspecting fan will find a golden ticket under a seat and win tickets to next year’s home opener, and Doherty will tease that on Instagram Story later. Before heading to Alex Cora’s pregame media session, she catches up with team photographer Billie Weiss and the team’s two photo interns, Cameron Pollack and Maddie Malhotra. While some of the videos on their social platforms will be shot from iPhones, most phone photos don’t meet their quality standard. Almost every photo they post is shot professionally from Weiss and his staff.
“If it doesn’t come from a real camera, it’s not getting posted for the most part,” Doherty said.
So how do those high-quality pictures travel from the photographers’ pit to your phones in a matter of minutes?
In normal games, the photographers pull photos off their card in their cameras onto their laptops, give the photos a quick edit and send them to Doherty and Schroeder. But for the postseason or other big games, it’s a different story. The photographers hard-wire their cameras to send images back automatically.
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Either way, though, it’s fast.
“Our day-to-day game (flow), we just ingest them ourselves,” Weiss said. “The whole process still only takes a minute. We do it so much it’s robotic so it’s a constant flow of shooting, ingesting, editing and all happening at the same time.”
To keep up with the ever-changing industry, the Red Sox added a social media video editor this year. The Red Sox have long had their own video staff to supplement broadcast cameras, but the content would be set aside for commercials or rain delay entertainment. This season they decided to cut video taken in-game for their social accounts.
Kellan Reck, the manager of Red Sox Productions, oversees the process in an office behind the Fenway press box. There’s typically one editor and one videographer at every home game.
“Our shooter is filming from the seats or photo pit, wherever they film game action,” Reck explained. “If something happens, like if Devers hits a home run, that person who’s social editor will run down (to the field) and get the (video) card from them, bring it back up here, turn it into an Instagram Story, turn it into something for Twitter, and send it off to Kelsey like 10 minutes later. So it’s all happening live. If Devers hits a home run, it’s up on Instagram an inning or two later.
“We used to never do that and now we do it all the time.”
Doherty, Schroeder and the rest of the social and video staff don’t travel often in the regular season, so they rely on MLB photographers stationed at every park. Doherty will message the live content creator, or LCC as they’re called, to ensure they get photos for anything specific, like a player returning from injury or a celebrity fan visiting the team. Mimi Murad is the LCC at Fenway. She deals mostly with visiting clubs because the Red Sox photo staff is out in full force at home games, but Doherty can use any of her photos if needed.
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When there’s no social staff on the road with the team, Schroeder and Doherty will trade off tweeting about the games while watching from home. They’re hoping next year to have at least one person on the road with the team at all times.
For home games, after gathering the pregame and first pitch content, Doherty and Schroeder head to their office where they sort through the content they’ve collected and wait for the photos and videos from Weiss’ and Reck’s staff. Once the game starts, they’ll be tweeting and posting any key plays while watching from a big screen.
Capturing the big moments
It’s all a little bit different in the postseason. While Doherty was around in 2013 as an intern, she wasn’t nearly as involved. So managing the accounts last year during a run to the World Series title proved all consuming, in a good way.
“It was a dream as someone who’s hungry for content all the time,” she said.
The games themselves were nerve-wracking, but the most stressful part of the postseason came when Doherty was running between batting practice and the office ahead of Game 2 of the American League Championship Series at Fenway. In a moment familiar to so many, she dropped her phone and shattered the screen. The phone had already been cracked, but repairing it would have meant going without it for a period of time, and that wouldn’t work for someone in Doherty’s position.
“It was cracked all season and I literally didn’t want to go without it for the hours it takes for it to be repaired,” she said.
This drop, however, proved too much. She couldn’t even enter her passcode.
Thankfully, the Red Sox IT department had a spare phone they allowed her to take. Not only was it the ALCS, but Doherty was leaving right after the game for Houston with the team, so she needed a new phone as soon as possible. Her phone was backed up to Dropbox, so Red Sox IT was able to transfer the content relatively quickly before the game, but she still needed to sign in to all the apps for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, each with complicated passwords to ward off easy hacking.
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“That was probably one of the more stressful moments of the postseason, non-baseball related,” she said.
Another moment of panic came, ironically, right after the Red Sox won. In the euphoria at Dodger Stadium, cell service failed.
“We put out the ‘win’ stuff then it took another half hour before we could get anything else out, and I was losing my mind,” Doherty said. “We’ve prepared for this for so long. It was utter chaos in the best way possible.”
There were plenty of moments of validation, though, too, like seeing the players in their “Do Damage” hoodies at the victory parade. Doherty helped develop the slogan, and it became the club’s mantra.
There was vindication as well. After a 2018 opening day loss, Doherty fielded a slew of messages deriding the team and manager Alex Cora. The night the team won the World Series, she sent a few snarky replies to those fans from Opening Day.
We’re using this time to now respond to all the @ mentions from Opening Day. https://t.co/v3tBSUJQiL
— Red Sox (@RedSox) October 29, 2018
Fire Cora
— Erik DonFrancesco (@ErikTheDon) March 29, 2018
Nope. He just won us a World Series.
— Red Sox (@RedSox) October 29, 2018
“There’s the brand of the Red Sox and the historic franchise and all those things, but also, let’s not be boring,” Doherty said. “It was kind of like, we should be OK with chirping back at fans a little bit here and there.”
That wasn’t always the case.
The previous offseason had been a rough one with another quick exit in the division series followed by the firing of John Farrell. The negotiations to sign Martinez were dragging on and the Yankees had just inked Giancarlo Stanton.
“We were very safe on social, which is fine, but it led us to a very generic tone and voice, nothing special,” Doherty said. “We were kind of in a tough place where people didn’t love the team after 2017 and then our social on top of it was bland and after the Yankees traded for Stanton there was a tweet that went out with the word ‘Rivalry’ and three flames. It was a bad tweet.”
Rivalry 🔥🔥🔥
— Red Sox (@RedSox) December 9, 2017
Fans were frustrated and the responses showed. Doherty decided then they needed to freshen up their brand.
“I had been working on, how do we tweak things?” she said. “And then that week I was like, ‘We are meeting. We are discussing this. We are changing. We’ve got to be comfortable with being uncomfortable with some of the things we say or do on social.’”
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Doherty made a guide for everyone from graphic designers to marketing executives to the video and photo staffs, describing how to adjust their tone and voice on social media.
“If I were to disappear tomorrow and someone was like, ‘What is Red Sox social?’ Here you go,” she said.
It went over everything from how to handle trolling, to team news releases, to what types of content should go on each platform, to encouraging self-deprecation and an overall more casual tone.
“I talked with a few folks from different teams, like has anyone done this?” she said. “Some teams have very specific style guides. I wouldn’t call this a specific style guide because again I’m a big believer in everything is circumstantial and things happening on social last year that are different than this year. It’s also about our brand integrity across the board. Our whole vibe is not to tell people to screw off. That’s not what we are, but we do want to come across as intense.”
Doherty reports to vice president of marketing and broadcast Colin Burch, but by and large has freedom to direct the voice of their platforms.
“They give me a lot of agency here, I’m very lucky in the sense,” she said. “If we’re going back and forth with a team or if we want to chirp someone, (I might say) ‘This could be screenshotted and put on SportsCenter, there’s a chance … are we OK with this?’ Anything I think might get some pickup, ‘All right what do we think?’ Because I know there will be other people that will have to defend me or I’ll have to defend myself, if it’s like why did we send this? But for the most part it’s understood we know what’s best and how to present the organization and what the right voice and tone is.”
Staying fresh
In the midst of a 162-game schedule, staying creative is always part of the trick. That comes in the form of pop culture references and giveaways of random items found in their office cubicle drawers.
As always, the twitter intern is using the rain delay to clean.
RT now for a chance to win:
– GOT Benny bobble
– Mookie puzzle cube
– 2018 Postseason hat
– 2 used AA batteries
– Grape Dubble Bubble
– Dog tape dispenser
– Empty iPhone box
– Hat feat. jpeg of marketing intern pic.twitter.com/hYgdaqTqZn— Red Sox (@RedSox) May 29, 2019
— Red Sox (@RedSox) May 11, 2019
Doherty keeps a close eye on the metrics for which content performs well, tracking them year over year and week over week. She taps other MLB teams for ideas that they might not have considered. Ultimately, though, she knows everything is dependent on how the team performs on the field. And when they’re not doing well, she and Schroeder are on the front lines when it comes to fan angst.
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A large part of their job is keeping track of the conversation around the team. They have a special tool that pulls every tweet they’re mentioned in into an inbox where they can see the conversation history with that fan. The cacophony of these replies can be overwhelming, but they try to reply to as many as possible.
“There’s always a (browser) tab open anytime we get in,” Doherty said. “Usually when I’m home if I’m watching Netflix this is open. It’s constant and so we’re both always in that.”
The night of the Yaz first pitch, there was nothing but love in the replies.
It was a welcome change.
(Top photo: Billie Weiss, courtesy of Kelsey Doherty)
