Big Data is a big deal for companies like NASCAR, which have to keep a close eye on social media to keep their audiences engaged. Steve Phelps, NASCAR’s Chief Marketing Officer, shared his company’s social media analytics use case at this week’s HP Discover gathering in Las Vegas.

The heart of NASCAR’s Big Data operation is a massive fan and media engagement center jam packed with 47-inch HP Micro-Bezel Video Wall Displays and LCD Interactive Digital Signal Displays. Stacked up, the monitors in the facility would take up 500 square feet.

The company is putting all that glass to good use. NASCAR recorded 100,000 conversations by the end of the Sprint Cup Series, and up to 60,000 fan tweets per minute during the Daytona 500 races. 80 percent of that Twitter activity was generated by male viewers, compared with 72 percent at HP Discover.

The buzz at Discover revolved not around racing but the launch of HAVEn, Hewlett-Packard’s unified analytics platform. The framework includes 700 data connectors, ArcSight log management software, Vertica’s MPP database and unstructured text analytics capabilities from Autonomy. HAVEn also features support for the three most popular Hadoop distributions.

Andrew Joiner, the general management of Emerging Technologies for HP, explained how NASCAR and other consumer-facing companies can leverage HAVEn to turn social media trends into revenue in a recent interview on theCube. He also revealed that one airliner uses HP software to analyze unstructured social data and identify advertisement opportunities much more effectively than before.

According to Joiner, HP’s technology empowers customers to tame the vast amounts of data they’re trying to analyze. In particular, Autonomy software enables data scientists to test a number of hypotheses and identify the most optimal ones for their data sets.

Click on the image below to see the full infographic and more big data on NASCAR.