NASCAR is spending a lot of time taking on fan opinions and evaluating them.
For a sport that has angered its fans a lot, NASCAR is moving forward by leaps and bounds this season. Changing the leadership, the championship format, and making the cars more powerful these are just some examples of the massive burden that Steve O'Donnell and co. are taking head-on currently. But sometimes, fans do ask the question amongst themselves. Is NASCAR truly listening?
As it stands currently, the NASCAR EVP and Chief Brand Officer has confirmed that the sport is putting a significant emphasis on fan sentiments. This also includes going through the social media accounts in hopes of understanding them better and ensuring that they feel heard. There's no special team involved; it's the leadership directly getting their hands dirty.
NASCAR executive now has a crippling social media addiction
In a recent interview with Sports Business Journal, NASCAR EVP and CBO, Tim Clark, did not shy away from accepting their new method of trying to appease the fans. Not only does NASCAR monitor social media, but they also try to reply and react to the posts from their original accounts.
"Brian made a quote this year, along the lines of: 90 percent of the time, if you just listen to what the fans say, you can get it right. And I absolutely subscribe to that theory," Clark accepts during his interview with SBJ.
"I am embarrassed to tell you how much time I spend on Reddit, reading what our fans say. To the point that now my team has a plug-in in Slack, where every time I post on Reddit, they get a flag in Slack. By the way, that response could be everything from 'I think you're wrong about this and let me tell you why. Or it could be; you're spot on, and I honestly never thought about it that way. But we'll look into this and endeavor to make it better.'"
Claiming to work on the feedback and actually replying to the fans is the thing that separates the current NASCAR leadership from others. While Formula 1 and MotoGP try to brute force their ideas into their fandom, NASCAR is actively collaborating with theirs to make sure that the sport reaches better heights. Maybe other leaders could take note of Tim Clark's pagebook and implement it in their sport.
