Sports PR in message boards on Major League Baseball websites

Message boards are possible places for sports fans to actively express and exchange their opinions. The purpose of this study is to explore the typology of message board uses on sports websites. The analysis of 1350 topics on eight Major League Baseball teams’ websites for 10 days revealed that: (1) the cognitive need of using message boards in a sports organization's website was an outstanding motivation; (2) sharing opinions was a new motivation category (compared to traditional uses and gratifications) that was found to be dominant; and (3) winning teams and losing teams’ message boards were significantly different in terms of number of topics, number of users, and optimism score; however, messages seemed to be optimistic. Implications for public relations practitioners suggest that the message board is an excellent monitoring tool for them as well as a fine communication tool between sports organizations and fans.