by Kristin Swartzlander | Oct 4, 2013 | Racing Social Media
As you might already know, this month I’m participating in the 2013 Social Media Success Summit. Going forward, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on how to apply what’s presented in the seminars to racing social media. Not surprisingly, the opening sessions of the Summit started out with social media theory and building influence. This is somewhat unsatisfying for those of us who like tools (duh) but these topics are the most important blocks of the foundation for your social media house. Or garage. If we’re talking about what’s important. Without a strategy on how to build influence, you’re just shooting in the dark with your efforts. And you know most of us don’t have time for that. If you’re trying to build a real racing program, with sponsorship and loyal fans, you have to figure out how to build influence. And since we don’t race every day, one of the most effective ways to do that is online. So here’s the deal with influence: the things that might make you powerful offline don’t apply to social media. This includes power that comes from an organization, hierarchy or job title. Maybe you’ve made it to manager at your company. The Internet doesn’t care. Maybe you’ve got a diploma from a great college. Internet also doesn’t care. Maybe you’ve got lots of money. Unless you’re rolling around in it on YouTube a la Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the Internet (mostly) still won’t care. The Internet hates real-world rules. And that’s a great opportunity for racers. One of the best presentations of the week so far was Mark Schaefer’s seminar on How to...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Oct 1, 2013 | Racing Social Media
Just a quick note to let you all know that I will be posting quite a bit about social media over the next few weeks, as I’m attending the 2013 Social Media Success Summit. I often attend conferences and workshops to benefit both my own business and to help my consulting clients. It’s crucial to my business to be on the cutting edge of the public relations, marketing and social media industries so I can give them the best advice possible. This one is especially worth the investment, as it’s broken out into multiple sessions over four weeks. This is not the first social media event I’ve attended, but it is the first month-long workshop I’ve taken part in and I’m looking forward to being able to take the content and digest it before moving on to the next sessions. I’m hoping to share a number of insights from this social media conference on how it relates to racing, from motorsports sponsorship to fan marketing and public relations. I’ll be posting at least once a week on my takeaways from a variety of seminars, possibly more often if I’m able to balance the workload. Below is a list of the nine sessions I’ll be attending just this week. If you have specific questions on any of the topics, you can email them to me or post them below and I’ll do my best to address them as I go through the material: KEYNOTE: Why You Need to Rethink Your Social Media Marketing – INSTRUCTOR: Jay Baer How to Improve Your Facebook Marketing: 7 Power Techniques – INSTRUCTOR: Mari Smith How to...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Sep 20, 2013 | Racing Social Media
The title is pretty self-explanatory. Feel free to share wherever you’d...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Aug 6, 2013 | Racing Social Media
If you’re a sprint car racing fan, there’s no doubt that you’re tuning in to the Knoxville Nationals this week. Below is an updated list of Twitter handles for the 2013 410 Knoxville Nationals drivers that I issued last year. This list includes drivers on Knoxville’s pre-entry list and their Twitter handles, broken into groups based on their qualifying night as of Tuesday, August 6th. New drivers or drivers that have joined twitter since the 2012 list have been noted in bold. Wednesday Qualifiers (by car number): 0 Jonathan Allard – @allard0 1 Sammy Swindell – @1sam91 1a Jacob Allen – @JacobAllen1a 1D Justin Henderson – @Henderson_racin 1K Kyle Larson – @KyleLarsonRacin 2 Dale Blaney – none 2K Kevin Ingle – none 2L Ed Lynch Jr – none 2LX Logan Forler – @forlerracing 2MF Brad Foster – none 2s Lee Sowell – @leesowellracing 4x Dakota Hendrickson – @dakota_joshua 4J Lee Grosz – @leegrosz 05 Bill Boles – none 6 David Gravel – @DavidGravel89G 7x Dustin Selvage – @sprntcar7 7s Jason Sides – @SidesMotorsport 7TAZ Tasker Phillips – none 9 Daryn Pittman – @darynpittman 9W Brandon Wimmer – @brandonwimmer 10V Glen Saville – none 11K Kraig Kinser – @kraigkinser11k 11N Randy Hannagan – @hurricanerhr 12 Lynton Jeffrey – @lyntonjeffrey 12P TJ Peterson – none 15 Donny Schatz – none 17 Josh Baughman – @Josh_Baughman17 17A Austin McCarl – @austinmccarl17a 17W Cole Wood – @wood17w 18 Ian Madsen – @IanMadsen 18T Tony Bruce Jr – @tonybrucejr 19 Bob Weuve – none 19M Brent Marks – @Brent_Marks 20PK Ron Krysl – none 35 Skylar Prochaska – @ProchaskaRacing 35AU Jamie Veal – @jvr35...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Aug 31, 2012 | Media and Public Relations, Racing Social Media
Over the last few weeks I’ve been extremely busy with a few projects, including shooting and editing video for one of my clients, PreciseRacing.com. The racing parts supplier was looking for a way to add interactive elements to their brand and video fit the bill. Shooting video is easy, and it can add so many layers to your racing PR program – from branding to marketing to actual, direct sales. To create videos that will make people want to subscribe to, you should have a mix of messages, not a stream of sales pitches. What are some of the things you can do with video? Action Views – nothing beats on-the-track racing action, with the exception of a really good interview, for race fans. You can also show fast-forwarded material of your crew working on the car at the track or in the shop, washing it, loading it, etc. Interviews – ask questions to your driver, crew, owner or even fans. Or, create question slides in your video editor and answer fan-submitted questions! Tours – give fans an inside look at your trailer, race shop and other places that would be interesting to a race fan. How-Tos – show fans how you do certain tasks on the racecar that they might not know about. To shoot the video, you can use an actual video camera like the Sony Bloggie Sport (I use a Flip for track videos, but they have discontinued it) or use a regular camera that has video capability. For the PreciseRacing.com videos, I used a Nikon Coolpix. I’ve also used a Panasonic Lumix with pretty good...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Aug 16, 2012 | Racing Social Media
Donny Schatz was the big winner at the Knoxville Nationals last week, banking the $150,000 check that over the nearly 100 teams gunning for the coveted A-Main win. But who was the big winner on social media, specifically on Twitter? Since Schatz doesn’t participate in the Twitter conversation, we know it wasn’t the #15 team. Looking at the pre- and post-race data from last week’s Knoxville Nationals Driver Twitter list, I’ve highlighted a few of the racing social media standouts below. Number of New Followers: Standouts: Kyle Larson (+372) and Shane Stewart (+256) Surprises: Justin Henderson (+105) Although Larson and Stewart are the two standouts above, Brad Sweet actually gained the most followers with 429 new Twitter fans. But, I don’t classify that as a standout performance as Sweet’s many new followers only made up 2.7% of his followers versus Larson’s gain of 5.8% or Stewart’s gain of 8.9%. He also only tweeted twice throughout the entire Nationals week, while Larson was active 59 times and Stewart put out 75 tweets. Sweet’s gains were based solely on his name, and not his social media performance. Larson and Stewart supplemented their fantastic on-track performances with great information online. Larson had a stream of commentary on the event and other drivers’ performances, autograph session announcements, and a photo. Stewart did the same, tweeting responses to fans and other drivers, Larson included, and more photos. Henderson was a surprise gainer last week as a Knoxville, gaining 105 new followers or 13.8% of his Twitter fan base. Henderson did so with a combination of on-track performance, winning Friday night’s A-Main, and providing racing...
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