{"id":10278,"date":"2012-05-19T12:20:16","date_gmt":"2012-05-19T16:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=10278"},"modified":"2012-05-19T12:24:37","modified_gmt":"2012-05-19T16:24:37","slug":"twitter-and-nascar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/05\/19\/twitter-and-nascar\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter and #NASCAR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Just a quick post this Saturday about Twitter partnering with NASCAR to cover the Pocono 400. Via Mashable<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Pocono 400 partnership will revolve around the #NASCAR hashtag, according to a joint press conference Twitter and\u00a0NASCAR<\/a>\u00a0held Friday.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the race, we\u2019ll curate accounts from the NASCAR universe and surface the best Tweets and photos from the drivers, their families, commentators, celebrities and other fans when you search #NASCAR on Twitter.com,\u201d reads a post to the official company\u00a0blog<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Full disclosure: I know next-to-nothing about NASCAR. The most\u00a0idiosyncratic\u00a0thing I know about NASCAR is that the headlights are painted on, and not real. Other than that, someone could tell me that you get extra points (less points?) if the car crash looks really cool, and I would believe them. But let’s blackbox the sport for a moment and take a look at the role Twitter plays in public events.<\/p>\n

Social networking sites have been co-hosting election coverage since 2006<\/a>. This makes sense, since Americans have been going to the Internet for their news for a while now.<\/a>\u00a0But why has it taken this long to get a social media company to recognize sports? Sure you can “Like” the Super Bowl on Facebook<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0follow North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Women’s Soccer team<\/a> on twitter, but there’s no Pinterest-sponsored Indy Race car team and the Brazilian Football league isn’t covered in Orkut banners. \u00a0The domain host Go Daddy has objectified Danica Patrick for some time now (double sports points for doing it during the Super Bowl<\/a>)\u00a0but they aren’t a social media company.<\/p>\n

Here’s my theory on social media’s mum stance on sports: Most sports teams are geographically based, and you do not want to pledge an\u00a0allegiance\u00a0to one team and lose the loyalty of other areas. These are global public spaces and to align yourself with something even the size of a country, means preferring one geographically bound community over another. Why doesn’t this apply to other companies? Well, it does- but selling trucks, bandwidth, and Doritios is a different beast than social media. Social media is public space, and public space is meant to facilitate and enable communication, not take sides in it.<\/strong> (Unless, of course, the ability of your customers to engage in communication is up for debate<\/a>.) Twitter’s move into NASCAR keeps with my theory. NASCAR teams are not geography based, and Twitter is covering the whole race, not a single team. Just like a presidential debate, Twitter will be taking on the role of curator, not partisan.<\/p>\n

Secondly, consider sports\u00a0franchises\u00a0as the first social media: Companies who look to draw in large crowds and sell their eyeballs to advertisers.<\/strong> They do not need these young bucks running around claiming that information wants to be free: the NBA, MLB, and NFL all have proprietary paywall systems and are doing just fine. I’ll leave the last word to a good friend of mine that works at ESPN\/ He had this much to say on the matter:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/altonncf\/status\/203645657251196931<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/altonncf\/status\/203645135886618624<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/altonncf\/status\/203644105476149249<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/altonncf\/status\/203644312263725057<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/DA_Banks\/status\/203689456862117888<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/altonncf\/status\/203690610325073921<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You can follow david on twitter, wherein he will almost never talk about sports: @da_banks<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a quick post this Saturday about Twitter partnering with NASCAR to cover the Pocono 400. Via Mashable: The Pocono 400 partnership will revolve around the #NASCAR hashtag, according to a joint press conference Twitter and\u00a0NASCAR\u00a0held Friday. \u201cDuring the race, we\u2019ll curate accounts from the NASCAR universe and surface the best Tweets and photos from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967,9549],"tags":[942,16087,108,184],"class_list":["post-10278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-news-and-announcements","tag-facebook","tag-nascar","tag-sports","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10278"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10341,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10278\/revisions\/10341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}