There’s no other place than a NASCAR race where you can share the excitement of 100,000 strangers, as your seat rattles and the roar of the engines reach a deafening level that sends vibrations through your body.  Sure, you can watch the race on TV (or maybe you’ve never gotten into watching 40 cars circling the track continuously for hours at speeds up to 200 miles per hour), but nothing compares to the sense of community and excitement of attending a race. If you weren’t a fan before, I’ve witnessed the experience make a believer out of the skeptical.

Earlier this month, videographer Dave Myers and I traveled to Richmond International Raceway in Virginia to attend the Richmond Spring NASCAR race. We were there to film the experience and interview fans for a video case study on the launch of RacingOne’s new online community, by our customer International Speedway Corporation (ISC).

Check out the following one-minute video that gives you a sneak preview of what’s to come:
 

We invited a few select reporters to share an up-close-and-personal experience with this branded online community – the moment it kicked off. Rather than sitting at their desk and writing about social media and its implications to business, we encouraged them to join us at the track and experience the NASCAR Nation for themselves.

Joining us were Sam Harrelson, a freelance writer and blogger, and Jeremy Nedelka, Assistant Editor for 1to1 Media. Sam is finishing up an article for Revenue Magazine about the event and the RacingOne community that should be out soon. And Jeremy shared his experience in an article for 1to1 Media’s The Marketing Xfactor Newsletter, “Social Networkers, Start Your Engines!” that was published this week. Kudos to both for taking a hands-on approach and contributing to the RacingOne community.

And stay tuned… next week I look forward to sharing with you the completed video case study on RacingOne and what business objectives ISC intends to accomplish with this new enterprise social network.

In my former life as a local TV news reporter, I can't tell you how many times I found myself ignoring or deleting emails, or voicemails left on our bureau answering machine, about story ideas from random people. The ideas came from public relations professionals representing organizations, or viewers that had news tips. Some I grew to rely upon. Others, I slowly realized were a little kooky and could not be trusted for newsworthy items.

It wasn’t that I was inconsiderate. I just didn’t have the time. Often times, my station sent us into the field to cover news stories remotely, with no access to email. And by the time we got back to our bureau, sifting through these messages was the LAST thing I wanted to do.

One of my favorite bloggers and a viral marketing guru, David Meerman Scott, actually talks about this in his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR. David calls it spam: unsolicited messages in the form of news releases and untargeted pitches. And he should know. He gets dozens of these types of announcements into his inbox every day.

Well… you know what they say about karma. Now, I’m the one who has to reach out to the media about story ideas regarding our company. And sure, now some of MY emails are ignored, caught up in a junk inbox, or simply deleted. But would reaching out to the media using social media actually work better (a no-brainer when it comes to bloggers and social media journalists that live in this space)? As David suggests, “start a real relationship.” So I tried it out… and it worked!

As a fan of Media Post’s Social Media Insider, I decided to send an email to Catharine P. Taylor after I read one of her posts where she mentioned she’d be writing about the business implications of social networking. I thought, what a great opportunity to introduce her to our company, since that’s what we help our customers do, and provide her with some real world examples of companies capitalizing on this phenomenon for business gain. After weeks… no response. But because she encourages readers to request her as a ‘friend’ on Facebook, I also took that route. And within days, I got a response! She was interested in the story idea for an upcoming column.

Social networks have great advantages that email cannot offer. You can see people’s pictures and profiles, not to mention keep up-to-date on their personal lives. I find myself reaching out to work contacts through their social network inbox, rather than their email inbox. They response quicker, and it adds a personal touch. There’s been talk about social networks replacing email as the primary form of Internet communication, whether internally at work or externally with your personal contacts, and I’m all for it!

Back to my reporting days, wouldn’t it be useful for media companies to incorporate social networking technology into their websites, and build their own branded online community, to enable reporters to better communicate with viewers and gather story ideas or feedback from them? It’s a more efficient process, it showcases that the news organization is listening to viewers, and it allows reporters to sort out the kooky ones… quicker. It would have made my life a little easier… I’ll say that.