Nascar has a lot of data and fans like following drivers/manufacturers. Twitter wants to create mass adoption. I really like the two together. It provides a compelling entry point for Nascar fans who previously may not of understood why they wanted Twitter in their life.

It also provides a template to show other content producers how Twitter can work for them. Every TV show will want something similar to encourage live viewing.

This will be big for brands, as well. However, launching with a brand would have carried the risk of the conversation being inevitably derailed by customer service requests. Whereas, negativity in sports is usually a sign of passion – not anger or frustration with a service/product.

Good point. As I said, the tracked hashtags works better for content than CPG.

Content will certainly generate more exiting peaks in usage. Meanwhile, Goods and services will help to pad out the quiet time between episodes of Jersey Shore and, in doing so, cement hashtags as a viable alternative to Facebook Pages for engaging with brands.

This partnership makes sense... NASCAR's fan presence on Twitter is somewhat small as evidenced by its official twitter only having 621K followers vs. NBA at 5.29M, NFL at 3.45M, and MLB at 2.15M. On Twitter's side, they have yet to try conventional advertising. This gave them a perfect opportunity to test the waters with a TV ad without the risk that you guys previously mentioned.

It reminds me a lot of foursquare's first partner badge with BART (see: bart.gov).

It also allowed them to tell people why they should follow NASCAR and its associated members on Twitter as opposed to just follow NASCAR on Twitter as most brands typically do.

As much as I like this, I won't be watching guys turning left for 2 hours.

You Ambiturners are such snobs!