When we sat down just over a month ago to start a baseball card blog we were excited, excited like little kids opening our first packs.
We wanted to share that feeling of opening a fresh pack with anybody who had a few minutes to waste.
Better yet, we wanted to give those cards away because getting mail rocks.
Getting a letter from Grandma is cool but getting free baseball cards in the mail, well that will make your week.
The response to our amateur effort has been huge.
We’ve made new friends, we’ve gotten boxes of cards, jerseys, packs, and thank you cards in the mail.
Best of all we get to talk baseball
& baseball cards with awesome people.
A week ago we found ourselves in a social media “best blog” contest. We reached out to our fans, to our families, to our old high school and college baseball teams. We kept pumping out content for our blog, we kept giving away baseball cards and we even found time to swing by Fenway to be part of the #openingday hooplah - sox win! We also chose to stay out of the drama. From day one there was buzz about whether or not such a recent blog should be included in the voting and there was even a YouTube video questioning whether or not our “television show” was even a blog.
We kept our heads down and stuck to our social strategy, heck we both work in social media in Silicon Valley. We had viewers of our blog contact us with strategies that included getting their little league baseball teams to vote, getting their families to vote and getting their Facebook friends to vote. The support has been awesome, and honestly that’s what social media is about – connecting one-on-one with real people. We started by finding people to vote for us, we energized our most loyal fans and we didn’t waste our time trying to figure out how to game the system or belittle the competition. We saw some pretty awesome activity: tons of comments and tweets, over a hundred cards requested last week and even a few sent to us (thanks!), and ultimately over 1000 votes. Thanks to all of you!
We’re thankful for the opportunity UD created which has driven a lot of buzz about the card 
community online. Getting the most votes doesn’t mean we’re the best baseball card blog. It means we put together a social media strategy we are proud of and worked hard for votes one by one. We didn’t even know you could vote everyday, we just hustled and discovered that there were about a dozen of our fans who decided they were going to bust even harder than we were. For us this competition has been about establishing a deeper relationship with our viewers. You guys are the judge of our success.
We know we're not like other card blogs. We don’t know cards like many of these other blogs do. We’re approaching things from a different angle; we’re shaking it up.
Other blogs have accused us and belittled what we do, and we’ve found it a bit silly. We focused on baseball and baseball cards, we focused on having fun with our viewers and we focused on opening day. We’re still giving out free baseball cards, we’re still spitting sunflower seeds and we still have a ton to learn.
We’re sorry it became necessary to address all the drama and accusations with a written post. But after reading a few things that were said about us, we felt compelled to say something.
Thank you to everyone who cast a vote for Opening Day Cards and a big thanks to some crazy fans out there who hunted down voters for us. Enough with the banter we’ll be back with more baseball & free baseball cards to celebrate tomorrow.
Hang onto your baseball caps there’s a TON of excitement coming your way from www.openingdaycards.com.
Thanks!
Chris & Joe
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