Rowdy's Social Media Success Story

We've been doing a lot of business development lately, and during that process we have been reworking our materials, message, and sales pitch. In so doing we have had to really think about where we've come from, what we've accomplished, and how it's all happened. The story really reveals how a brand can grow through all the values that we as social media professionals claim to espouse: openness, honesty, connection, and involving everyone in the conversation. Here's the story--what do you all think? 

For the past five years my partners and I have been neck-deep in a really great social media experiment called Rowdy. It started as a mobile phone show targeted at NASCAR fans. Folks could call in and listen to racing news, headlines, gossip, and driver interviews six days a week. Cingular carried us on their network until the AT&T merger, when they dropped many of their content offerings. 

The show naturally migrated to iTunes as a podcast, and is now the highest-rated NASCAR podcast out there. We have tapped into a winning idea--connection with the fans by representing their point of view in a public way and involving them, as well as advertisers, in the conversation. Our show is produced six days a week "by fans, for fans." We get over 60,000 downloads a month and the show is 30 minutes long. It's also hosted on about 12 radio stations, although we really have not pursued that.

We then started adding video, producing 5 shows a week that address the Big 3 issues in NASCAR each day. They are funny and informative enough that Yahoo! made us one of their headline commentators on their NASCAR page. We are also locking down more distribution with some other major brand partners for 2009. Good stuff.

All along, there was Rowdy.com, which is where I spend most of my time. It is the web community that has sprung up around the shows. A year ago we launched it with 1,200 e-mail addresses from Cingular: we now have over 21,000 active race fans as members and have one of the more vibrant social networks around, even though it's not the biggest. All we did to grow it was some targeted SEM/SEO and talked about it on our shows. We have figured out how to connect people, what they respond to. Our members average 3-4 visits a week, at ten to fifteen minutes per. And they talk racing, as opposed to a lot of our competitor's sites. We have VERY few community management issues, and they resolve very quickly. We have developed a very unique and innovative advertising and promotional model that gets advertisers involved in the conversation. We really have built something unique with the Rowdy brand.

As for me, I have touched all of this stuff along the way. I produced the podcast for years, then got back to my roots when we launched the site. I am a long-standing user experience and online marketing guy, have become a community, analytics and social media geek because of Rowdy, and love it all. Lately, it's been all about business development and sales, which I also really enjoy. 

I am looking for new ways to share what I have learned to the benefit of some smart visionary. I really love what I call the "conference mentality," which is talking through and helping others take advantage of what I have learned. I have a consultant's mindset, I guess. I know what we learned at Rowdy can be used with great success in almost any area, if a company has the courage.