How Lance Armstrong Won Us Over Using Social Media In This Year’s Tour De France

Lance Armstorng has always been a prickly character (you have to be to win 7  back to back Tour de France’s) and although he has won thousands of fans thanks thanks to his tireless work for charity he was not always flavor of the month when competing. Part of the problem was that he was perceived as arrogant and aloof and only spoke through the official media channels leaving us with very little insight into the great man himself.

Fast forward to 2009 and after a 4 year break Lance returned to professional cycling at the ludicrous age of 37 to have another go at the Tour De France and this time he had a much more powerful weapon with him to win over the fans than just his incredible skills as an athlete…Social media.

Lance had his Livestrong charity to promote and he has taken the job of raising awareness about cancer at least as serious if not more seriously than he did the job of winning any of his seven Tour De France’s. The Tour is special because millions of people line the streets to catch a glimpse of the peleton (the group of around 200 riders who take part) as it flashes past through the French countryside but this is the first year that we have heard directly from the cyclists involved without it being diluted by the media and the fact that the greatest sporting champion of his generation was the one guiding us through the process really meant that the tour reached a whole new audience and Lance gained an even bigger place in people’s hearts. Here are some of the combination of tools Lance use to win the public over by using social media…

Video

Lance gave us updates every morning from all sorts of locations including the serenity of the Tour bus as 100s of people tried to catch a peek from the outside.

Facebook

With just shy of a million followers Lance was able to post great content to his stream including videos, exclusive photos and behind the scenes shots that were liked by up to 10,000 people at a time pushing his message into millions of other people’s streams.

Twitter

With over a million and a half followers Lance didn’t just Tweet during the race but those following himwere taken on an amazing personal guided tour of his training schedule from Aspen to Hawaii and even suffered with him as he broke his collar bone. When his Astana team mate lLevi Leipheimer feel during the race and hurt himself it wasn’t the world’s media that broke the story of him being forced to quit the race but instead Lance Twitpic’d it

Flickr

Fans from all over the world could tag photos with key words that would show up in one shared group chartering his travels all over the world training and during the race itself. The results are one of the most impressive photostreams you could ever imagine and give a stunning gallery of shots.

The results

As you can see from the graph below The livestrong site had modest traffic of under 100k Uniques but because of Lance’s (and I would imagine the people who advise him) smart use of social media that has grown over 700% in the last few months. This is yet another example of just how powerful social media can be and in this case it has not only boosted traffic and profile of the Livestrong charity but also massively changed the public opinion of a living legend and given us an insight into the man behind the steely glare. For the first time in over 100 years we really saw just how hard the Tour De France was from a rider’s perspective.
Key Finding : What you need to take from this is that all the tools used here are 100% free. Lance would have had to spend millions of dollars in traditional marketing to get this sort of coverage normally. You can apply these same tools and principals to your business no matter how small it is!