Lance Armstrong Tweets Strong

Lance Armstrong was in Edmonton last week thanks to the tireless efforts of Incite, Oomph! Events, and the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.  I had the amazing opportunity to ride 100Km with him and 40 others we helped to recruit to pursue an aggressive million dollar fundraising goal. 

I have always been enamored by the "beating all odds" nature of the man, especially after my Grandfather shared Lance's book, It's Not About the Bike, with me over eight years ago.  We shared delight in watching his comeback from cancer, and then his super-human seven wins at the Tour de France, arguably the toughest cycling competition of all time.

I had planned on delivering an eloquent speech to him during my 15 minutes at the front of the peloton on the Icefields Parkway.  I had plans for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be fraught with deep insights, interesting revelations and poignant questions.  Instead, I blabbered something about my mom being upset that I wasn't able to arrange a special meeting for her during the lunch and that she always dreamed of squeezing his thighs…. somebody shoot me!    Luckily, Lance saved the day and shared some great insights with me, one of them surrounding this amazing field of social media.

Lance has been tweeting for a few years and now has over 2.8 Million followers… unbelievable!  Leaning over his bike, Lance reflected on the power of Twitter: "I tweeted about eating a Quiznos sandwich a month ago and Quiznos contacted me to thank me… apparently their global sales spiked huge over the following week!"  According to Lance, who is ranked amongst the top 15 highest paid athletes of all time, his following on Twitter has given him more clout with sponsors than his official 19,000+ global media hits.

When I asked him about the level of danger involved in doing public rides, he said that it was the tweet rides that get really crazy. "When I was in Australia in January I sent out a tweet with a day's notice indicating that I was going to do a ride out of Adelaide.  I showed up to more than 8,000 people on bikes!   The police went nuts – we basically closed parts of the city down for a few hours.  These tweet rides are pretty sketchy though. Imagine a dude on a motorized dirt bike coming at you at 90Km per hour!  Screw cancer, it's the tweet rides that are going to get me!"

Perhaps there's more to this social media thing than, "I'm riding a bike with @lancearmstrong."   Regardless, I'm going to give it a serious shot.  Follow me!*  @jaredatincite

*To follow Jared Smith on Twitter, go to www.twitter.com, enter @jaredatincite into the search bar, and click "follow".