People who think they know me well are still stunned when they find out I am an auto-racing freak. I love NASCAR. I watch it most Sundays during the racing season and have since I lived in Virginia and followed Ricky Rudd’s no. 10 Tide car. (My family used Tide to wash our clothes. Ricky was from my home state. A racing fan was born. Go figure.)
So as we come upon the opening of the 2013 NASCAR season with the running of the Daytona 500 this weekend, I thought it time to reflect on lesson’s learned from last year’s race that involved a spectacular crash, a driver tweeting from his car, and the “ah ha!” moment that moved Twitter and TV out of the dating phase and into true love.
Last year at the Daytona 500, as one of the drivers was rounding a turn, his car’s steering column broke and the racecar slammed into a large Jet Dryer truck on the track. The crash set off a huge fire ball explosion which was carried on live television in prime time. Remarkably, neither driver was hurt. But the accident caused a two-hour delay while the track maintenance crew had to figure out how to clean up all the spilled fuel on the track before they could resume racing. (As an aside, the solution they came up with was covering the fuel spill with Tide and then washing the detergent off with a fire hose. Once again, go figure.)
During this lengthy delay, the cars were stopped on the track, the drivers were wandering around the asphalt and clearly getting bored. Turns out, one of the drivers started Tweeting photos live from the track while the race was stopped. Thanks in large part to live TV coverage of his tweets, Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) nearly tripled his Twitter followers that night, increasing from 65,000 followers when the race started, to nearly 200,000 following the two-hour race delay.
What started as a spectacular crash resulted in some of the most notable lessons in social media in the past year. Among them:
Twitter needs TV and vice versa. Whenever a new communication technology enters the market some are quick to say, “This will be the death of radio, print, TV, or (fill in the blank).” In reality, most media compliment each other, because each has its own unique properties. In this case, Keselowski gained Twitter followers because FOX TV broadcast his tweets from the track, showed live images of the other drivers gathered around his phone, and broadcast a graphic of his rapidly increasing number of followers.
Under most other circumstances in most other sports, a two-hour delay would kill television ratings as viewers tune out. In this instance, viewers stayed to watch what the drivers were doing. It’s logical to assume some heard about the crash on social media and then turned on their television to see what happened. Today, we see hashtags embedded on the screen during many of our favorite TV shows. Social media references are now incorporated into other live shows, like the Oscars or the recent Grammy Awards. But what has become commonplace today was unusual just a year ago.
“Bubbas” have smart phones too. According to the 2012 Pew Internet and American Life Project, 46-percent of American adults owned smart phones at the time of Daytona 500 last year, noting that “nearly every major demographic group—men and women, younger and middle-aged adults, urban and rural residents, the wealthy and the less well-off—experienced a notable uptick in smartphone penetration over the last year.” This is a reminder that communication plans and strategies should be multi-faceted and involve as many channels for distributing information as makes sense for your audience. It also shows that market research is important to avoid stereotyping your audience. The Pew Internet study did not include racing fans as one of their research groups, but if you consider the amount of technology and advanced engineering involved in racing today, it makes sense that race fans would be considered early adopters of smart phones and own Twitter handles.
Tweeting, while in a car, is a bad idea. It’s worth repeating that Keselowski’s car was parked and not running when he began tweeting from the track. He did not get fined by NASCAR that night for his actions either, since there were no rules against tweeting from the racecars at the time. There are now. Keselowski was fined for tweeting from his car in November of last year after NASCAR disallowed it.
Keep creating content. Sometimes a person or a company can have their 15 minutes of fame but is never able to capitalize on the initial attention. No matter how brightly your star shines, you need to keep creating content and engaging with your audience in order to keep growing. Just three months following the 2012 Daytona 500, NASCAR and Twitter created its first ever sports and social media sponsorship when they joined forces and encouraged fans to tweet while watching NASCAR races on live television, thereby moving Twitter closer toward an editorial media than a pure social media.
So, whatever happened to @Keselowski? He went on to win five races in the season and claimed the Sprint Cup title in 2012. He now has more than 360,000 followers on Twitter.