NASCAR Dir of Social Media Content & Platforms Chris Littmann (@NASCAR) believes motorsports has a unique position on social media -- a position that allows a sport like NASCAR to better utilize a range of platforms compared to approaches taken by traditional stick-and-ball leagues. NASCAR has shown little fear in innovating for the social media space. The governing body's efforts have included creating driver emojis that appear on each of the Cup Series cars and streaming live in-car camera angles for its social feeds. Littmann, who has been running NASCAR social for around two years now, said, “The emojis are a great example. Also the Our Story we do with Snapchat, I go back to the beginning of the season and the access we gave fans of Bubba Wallace on Facebook Watch. Or showing old races from Darlington in 4K on social. We’re not the NBA and don't have a dozen games a night. Knowing we have fewer events to dissect and disseminate, we have to really innovate.”
SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follows: UCLA Athletics Creative Dir Josh Guereque.
Favorite apps: Instagram.
Average time per day on social media: Passively my whole day. Actively, it can be four hours.
Improved content:
It used to be just one person at the track, tweeting lap by lap. But social has evolved to where you have to develop stuff for platforms that didn’t exist five, six years ago. As we’ve added resources, we’ve been able to add people, and that’s allowed us to do more content creation for specific platforms. It’s not as simple as taking a video produced for NASCAR.com and slapping it on Twitter. We are creating a value proposition across all of our channels. The challenge is thinking about how we serve all audiences.
Anticipating what will happen to create better content:
If you go back to 2017, brought a broader content team together, whereas it used to be social was separate from dot com. Now, when we go to a track, we are one unified group and have a better understanding of how we can deploy people. After a race, we use all kinds of group chat elements, so if Driver X wins, we know someone needs to be at his pit box. And not all of the people we are deploying come from dot com or social. They may come from different internal groups, but are fully capable of capturing content. It just gives us a better hit rate.
Importance of social media to drivers:
They understand, increasingly, that their platforms are a way to tell their stories and their sponsors’ stories in a way that, hopefully, feels organic and reaches new fans. There was a tweet that went out recently from the NASCAR feed that revealed the playoff drivers' emojis. It was sort of an anthem video and all 16 drivers replied on social with their own piece of creative.
"Behind The Wall: Bubba Wallace" On Facebook Watch:
The timing was perfect. We already had a good working relationship with Bubba, and we saw the opportunity to do some different content. It allowed us to show Bubba in a lot of different places -- Bubba working out, Bubba with his girlfriend. Also hanging out with (Hornets G) Malik Monk, where there was some interesting crossover. It ended with great access during Speedweeks down in Daytona. The cherry on top was him finishing second at the Daytona 500 followed by a really emotional postrace. Getting that sort of story onto a relatively new distribution platform product was a huge win for us, Bubba and Richard Petty Motorsports as a team.
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