May 18, 2012 by Sam Laird on Mashable
Longtime informal social media buddies Twitter and NASCAR are making things official for next month’s Pocono 400 race. It’s Twitter’s first official partnership with a sports league, and may hint at a larger shift to come for the microblogging platform that has become a hit with sports fans in particular.
The Pocono 400 partnership will revolve around the #NASCAR hashtag, according to a joint press conference Twitter and NASCAR held Friday.
“During the race, we’ll 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,” reads a post to the official company blog.
Omid Ashtari of Twitter’s business development team called the arrangement “part search algorithm and part editorial,” during Friday’s press conference.
More details about the partnership are expected to be revealed before Pocono happens on June 10.
Why NASCAR? Ashtari said one reason is races draw fans of dozens of drivers at a time, as opposed to just a couple teams, which will give Twitter a chance to experiment and learn rapidly about how to curate tweets and step into a more editorial role.
NASCAR fans are very active on Twitter and the league promotes social media use among its drivers. Driver Brad Keselowski made a classic Twitter sports moment earlier this year when he tweeted photos from inside his car on the Daytona 500 racetrack during a fire delay, gaining more than 100,000 followers in about two hours.
It’s hard not to see the NASCAR partnership as a harbinger of future official deals with other sports leagues, as well as a more general shift toward an editorial emphasis by Twitter. The company is looking for at least one sports fan to take on a new editorial role.
Sports are a natural starting point if Twitter wants to become more of a media company across the board. Pro sports moments dominate the tweets-per-second record book, and the network has become a go-to destination for breaking news and fan discussion. The company’s famous avian logo is even named after an NBA Hall of Famer.
Would you welcome editorial input from Twitter for major events? Let us know in the comments.
Source: Mashable
