Social Insight - Lance Armstrong

Social Insight - Lance Armstrong

It used to be easy to lie low, even if you were a celebrity…

However, in the world of the real-time web and mobile devices, what once was a celebrity’s most powerful tool to communicate directly with fans, suddenly has become their worst nightmare. The sordid tale of Lance Armstrong is unfolding right before our eyes across all social platforms and of course TV in addition to pretty much every other channel known to man. Armstrong who sparked over 4 million mentions this month has been stripped of his 7 tour de France titles after American doping officials produced a dossier that proved he had used drugs and doping techniques throughout his career. The report chronicled an elaborate, 15-years-long doping program led by Armstrong involving a long list of performance enhancers from steroids to blood boosters such as EPO. Moral of his story "cheaters will never win and winners will never cheat" #LanceArmstrong.

So how has public perception changed?

Lance Armstrong’s fall has come fast. In fact it’s been pretty much like an Alpine descent in the Tour de France. Less than 12 months ago Lance Armstrong had managed to maintain a pretty solid reputation through many highs and lows by assuring his supporters that any accusations of him using performance-enhancing drugs were absolutely false and unwarranted. Yet since the official dossier and the Oprah confession, public support for Lance Armstrong has nosedived with many being left feeling bitter, angry, disappointed. It's clear the public are far from ready to forgive Lance Armstrong. Much of this was not helped by even Lance himself, who shamelessly tweeted a photo of himself sprawled out on his couch at home – under his seven yellow jerseys.

If Armstrong was hoping that the Oprah interview would be a first step towards redemption, the social media response would suggest that this strategy has failed.

By collating UK Search and Social data we can see that the ‘Lance Armstrong’ trend proved a similar correlation in the lead up to the ‘confession.’ However due to the impact of that nifty “retweet” button mentions rose to nearly half a million on the date of the interview completely surpassing search. During the interview we saw a 1,600% increase in searches for “Lance Armstrong” and a 600% lift in “Doping “related searches.

Twitter Trends..

The social media frenzy over Lance Armstrong's admissions to Oprah Winfrey has continued to spread, with jokes painting him as a liar. The #doprah hashtag even started to trend on Twitter, alongside #LiveWrong and #LieStrong.

The Future?

Obviously this is all very fresh in our collective minds and the dust is far from settled. So trying to predict the future of the Lance Armstrong brand would be pointless, however we are a nation who likes to forgive?

Plenty of other athletes have destroyed their own career brands, and made some headway in improving public perception, take Tiger Woods or Marion Jones. So may be in time we can find redemption for Lance Armstrong too… who knows, only time will tell.

Aneka Hindocha
Aneka Hindocha is a  Senior Social Executive at MEC in the UK