Growing Demand Blog

With the Tour de France now in full swing, coverage of the event is running full speed ahead. And while you’ll find plenty of “news” and even behind-the-scenes looks at the Tour, we wanted to go very far beyond traditional coverage on LIVESTRONG.com. In fact, we wanted to bring to Tour coverage what you’ve heard me call SOUL – a word we use to describe passion, authenticity and cadence of a community experience.

In this case, we took a big step back and asked ourselves how we would like to experience the Tour if we could not be there (since we’re not). We call this doing the “Self-Test”.  Importantly, we wanted to leverage our strengths, not just recycling generic news and coverage from other sites. 

When it comes to Tour coverage, there are many things we do to make SOUL happen. These are what I consider the five most important ones:

Taking video beyond the highlight reel

Fortunately we have great behind the scenes, direct access to Lance, and that is something we really wanted all the users to see and feel. Videos of Lance with his friends and other tour competitors are just things you cannot get on major sports networks or the specialized sites covering the tour.  The voice of the coverage is authentic as you can get when it is Lance and his crew.

Live coverage for stages

We also wanted to focus a lot on how these pieces of content all fit together.  We always strive to create a symphony of content and social media for the user to replicate how they might experience the tour if they could be there.  Stage by stage coverage—not only through live and recorded video—but also through live blogging and firsthand accounts from people on the scene were the foundation and users commenting and giving their thoughts really helped to round it all out.

The power of our site community

The people who make up the LIVESTRONG.com community make the site feel alive. It’s their personal stories and interactions with each other that drive the “crowd” feeling that you experience. This highly social feeling connects with the site’s Tour de France coverage and, better yet, connects users to each other around the Tour specifically.

The rush of voices from the rest of the social web

Obviously though, not all of the conversation about the Tour and Lance’s other activities takes place directly on the site. Our coverage harnesses the thousands upon thousands of voices of fans and followers from Twitter, and weaves them right into the fabric of our Tour experience – bringing yet again more personal perspective and an incredible level of diversity to the site.

Getting brands involved

More than sponsorships, we’ve worked closely with our supporting brands to go far beyond the banner. By giving them opportunities to participate in relevant ways, like Clear2O’s water hydration focus themes, Nissan’s presence in the “loops” section where we show detailed interactive maps of tour routes, Oakley’s “tour question of the day”, and Giro’s support of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, consumer brands are afforded a rare level of relevance and purpose. Further, the brands supporting the Tour on LIVESTRONG.com are using these efforts as a natural online extension of what they are doing already with the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Lance himself offline.

In total, each of these aspects of LIVESTRONG.com’s Tour de France coverage plays an important role. It’s the combination of these elements that makes for a SOULful experience, and one that gives long-time community members, casual visitors and passionate Lance fans a way to see, hear and interact with the tour and each other like never before.

Joe Perez is Demand Media’s EVP of Product Marketing & Community. Part of the company’s founding team, Joe drives strategy for each of Demand Media’s products as well as marketing and community interaction approaches. Follow Joe on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joeperez