dpkimmel2001
Team Owner
Yeah, they're listening. Very interesting article on how social media is being used by NASCAR. If you have a short attention span than don't bother reading. If you want to learn something then continue.
Link to full article
USA TODAY Sports spent a Saturday night inside the Fan and Media Engagement Center to observe how it operated during one of the season's most frenetic races.
CHARLOTTE — It was an old-school confrontation viewed through a new-world prism.
As Kevin Harvick leaned into Denny Hamlin's ****pit for the sort of contretemps that has sparked passion among stock-car fans for decades, there was empirical evidence the impact of the contentious conversation wasn't confined to the pits at Bristol Motor Speedway.
On a 47-inch flatscreen monitor inside a room with postmodern deco and glass walls anchoring the eighth floor of NASCAR's high-rise headquarters in uptown Charlotte, chatter was spiking around the world.
A multicolored line graph labeled "social conversation" leapt to life as if it were hooked to an ECG monitor — except this was measuring the heart rate of NASCAR Nation.
At 10:32 p.m., as Harvick marched toward Hamlin's car, the chart displayed 446 NASCAR-related mentions across social media — roughly twice as many as any point during the previous 90 minutes. In the next minute, there were 461. At 10:34 p.m., it tracked 583 mentions — the highest number during the race.
Sean Doherty, NASCAR's director of digital and social media engagement, smiled and leaned back in a swivel chair behind a console that faced a bank of laptops and workstations aligned at angles resembling a miniature mission control.
"Can you recheck to see if we're trending on Twitter now?" he asked.
Edwin Colmenares paused from answering fans on a Tweetdeck application and confirmed that #NASCAR had entered the national trend list, noting it for a report that would be compiled and distributed to chairman Brian France, president Mike Helton and several other senior executives a few hours after the checkered flag.
This is how the race for information unfolds inside NASCAR's new Fan and Media Engagement Center, where every morsel of Twitter and Facebook action — 107,946 social media mentions in the case of Bristol's race day — is tracked, collected and catalogued in hopes of better navigating the information age.
"The analysis that you can deliver is a function of how much data you have," Doherty said. "We use a metaphor that it's like an empty swimming pool filling with data; and as you get more water in the pool, you will be able to dive deeper on analysis and insight."
As NASCAR battles to maintain relevance amidst dwindling attendance and flat TV ratings, it's become more attuned to its fan base, and the FMEC, which opened in January and made its race debut with the Sprint Unlimited exhibition at Daytona International Speedway, is built to ingest as much feedback as possible.
Hewlett Packard built the proprietary software platform through its Autonomy analytics program, which is designed to weed out NASCAR-related tweets and posts. HP also helped construct the dizzying array of 13 47-inch hi-definition monitors that can be configured via touchscreen technology in myriad ways for watching Twitter, Facebook and TV feeds (which can be viewed in a nine-screen display that would be the envy of any sports bar).
Monitors inside NASCAR's Fan and Media Engagement Center display footage from the Irwin Tools Night Race as well as real-time social media and various analytic tools.(Photo: USA TODAY Sports Images)
Read the rest here.
Link to full article
USA TODAY Sports spent a Saturday night inside the Fan and Media Engagement Center to observe how it operated during one of the season's most frenetic races.
CHARLOTTE — It was an old-school confrontation viewed through a new-world prism.
As Kevin Harvick leaned into Denny Hamlin's ****pit for the sort of contretemps that has sparked passion among stock-car fans for decades, there was empirical evidence the impact of the contentious conversation wasn't confined to the pits at Bristol Motor Speedway.
On a 47-inch flatscreen monitor inside a room with postmodern deco and glass walls anchoring the eighth floor of NASCAR's high-rise headquarters in uptown Charlotte, chatter was spiking around the world.
A multicolored line graph labeled "social conversation" leapt to life as if it were hooked to an ECG monitor — except this was measuring the heart rate of NASCAR Nation.
At 10:32 p.m., as Harvick marched toward Hamlin's car, the chart displayed 446 NASCAR-related mentions across social media — roughly twice as many as any point during the previous 90 minutes. In the next minute, there were 461. At 10:34 p.m., it tracked 583 mentions — the highest number during the race.
Sean Doherty, NASCAR's director of digital and social media engagement, smiled and leaned back in a swivel chair behind a console that faced a bank of laptops and workstations aligned at angles resembling a miniature mission control.
"Can you recheck to see if we're trending on Twitter now?" he asked.
Edwin Colmenares paused from answering fans on a Tweetdeck application and confirmed that #NASCAR had entered the national trend list, noting it for a report that would be compiled and distributed to chairman Brian France, president Mike Helton and several other senior executives a few hours after the checkered flag.
This is how the race for information unfolds inside NASCAR's new Fan and Media Engagement Center, where every morsel of Twitter and Facebook action — 107,946 social media mentions in the case of Bristol's race day — is tracked, collected and catalogued in hopes of better navigating the information age.
"The analysis that you can deliver is a function of how much data you have," Doherty said. "We use a metaphor that it's like an empty swimming pool filling with data; and as you get more water in the pool, you will be able to dive deeper on analysis and insight."
As NASCAR battles to maintain relevance amidst dwindling attendance and flat TV ratings, it's become more attuned to its fan base, and the FMEC, which opened in January and made its race debut with the Sprint Unlimited exhibition at Daytona International Speedway, is built to ingest as much feedback as possible.
Hewlett Packard built the proprietary software platform through its Autonomy analytics program, which is designed to weed out NASCAR-related tweets and posts. HP also helped construct the dizzying array of 13 47-inch hi-definition monitors that can be configured via touchscreen technology in myriad ways for watching Twitter, Facebook and TV feeds (which can be viewed in a nine-screen display that would be the envy of any sports bar).
Monitors inside NASCAR's Fan and Media Engagement Center display footage from the Irwin Tools Night Race as well as real-time social media and various analytic tools.(Photo: USA TODAY Sports Images)
Read the rest here.
