competitive she won’t succeed. For example, Carmen Jorda is nice and sometimes good for advertisement but she just isn’t competitive enough for F1 yet.
Q2: FormulaE recently announced a new venture with Gigya which aims to personalize customer experiences & drive Fan Engagement – what, in your opinion, are the opportunities and threats for social media & motorsport?
NG: In terms of opportunities – on the topic of media content, I like what Brabham Racing are doing (http://www.brabham-digital.com/) – they give fans the opportunity to subscribe and pay for varying degrees of insight into the team; from a deeply technical subscription, to Driver Fitness and Sports plan etc.
That’s the kind of content we are going to have to see to engage fans and keep the sport sustainable in the long term in my view. The irony with Brabham is that it has been created by the fans for the fans by crowd funding also. The Irish Drifting Championship have just launched something similar (https://www.idcnation.com/) where fans can subscribe to their site for streaming and extra content and it is a platform that most sports will have to follow soon.
Also Facebook this week launched their new Superbowl 50 dedicated platform which again gives fans a more interactive experience.
(And on threats or challenges) we have been working on a particular issue with Motorsport Ireland - to devise a solution to the ongoing problem of the misuse and misguided use of social media by younger (and sometimes not so young) participants in Motorsport. From speaking with other professionals in motorsport (right up to GP2 level) and other sports, the misuse of social media by minors and competitors generally is both creating issues with regard to bullying, harassment and intimidation but also there is consistently the difficulty of regulating social media content by governing bodies versus the freedom of speech.
There is a significant rise in intimidation between competitors and officials online that is causing problems for governing bodies. Football, particularly in the Britain, has struggled with this issue for a while now and it seems other sports are experiencing similar problems. MI decided to tackle this issue head-on over the last number of months and Art and I together with MIs Commission have devised a new system of dealing with the issue expediently.
Previously any such issues would have had to go to various tribunals of inquiry which firstly could have been deemed to lack independence and secondly simply took too long to make decisions in an area where speed is paramount to damage limitation. As of this week (end of January) we have in place a new robust Social Media Policy and implementation process.
The policy, we found, is the easy part.
The implementation process however is key, as in the case of football in Britain, the governing body needs to show that it is both dealing with the issue robustly but also individual cases need to be looked at
from an independent panel of experts quickly and decisions made without delay. Penalties need to be appropriate also. The new MI panel consists of legal experts, headed up by myself and child care experts which we hope can assess each case of misuse carefully and decide on the merits of each case fairly, transparently and with full accountability.
We hope that this new process will immediately reduce the level of misuse of social media by both minors and others and that we can also use it as a tool to educate younger competitors about the dangers and opportunities that social media can have on their future racing careers.
We also wondered if this misuse of social media was particular to lower categories of Motorsport only so I spoke to a number of more senior motorsport professionals at International level and in particular also spoke to Mark Gallagher, CEO of Status
Racing (GP2), (ex-Jordan F1). Mark did note to me that the issue continues right across all the motorsport categories (as it does across sport generally) however at a more senior level the issue is generally dealt with via specific driver contract provisions dealing with social media communications and the making of any external statement which may bring the organisation into disrepute with resulting penalties when breaches occur.
At an International level however the challenge is always restricting social media content to prevent issues arising versus using social media responsibly to promote the sport and I suppose the same can then be applied to younger participants where our challenge is to help them use social media responsibly and yet develop their own brand and careers successfully through the use of social media.