Social media success is increasingly being linked to profitable relations between sporting teams and their communities of fans. Through a case study of RallytheWorld, Volkswagen’s social media campaign 2013-2016 for the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC), this paper provides sports marketers with relevant practices on how to develop social media strategies and building relationships with and between the fans. Drawing upon theories of community facilitation and ‘transmedia storytelling’, as well as the method of autoethnography, our finding is that RallytheWorld, through its audience engagement techniques provided WRC fans with a new experience while respecting the championship’s sporting traditions. This combination, we argue, made RallytheWorld a qualitatively better offer to rally fans than comparable social media campaigns in the WRC.

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This study seeks to identify the impact of a commercial turning point in the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) in 1999 and the 2013 takeover by the current promoter's media strategies. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in the WRC coupled with theories of institutional logics, mediatization and strategic legacy, the findings demonstrate that the decisions and culture of the sport can be powerful as the new owners seek to influence the direction of sport in their own image. Sport managers who are dealing with change processes and sport management researchers should identify where an organization's self-reinforcing mechanisms and processes exist in order to balance sporting tradition with organizational culture.

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