Social Marathon – The World’s First Twitter Race

How could we use an innovative campaign to improve the online visibility of Paris Marathon partners Schneider Electric?

Context and objectives

As part of the 2015 Paris Marathon, the Amaury Sport Organization (A.S.O) proposed to its partner Schneider Electric that they sponsor the first “social media marathon” in the world. The goal was to ride the digital trend and create an innovative social media operation that was tied to the physical marathon itself.

Challenge

How could we improve Schneider Electric’s online visibility through an innovative campaign?

Insight

2015 saw the rise of running as a hobby and the creation of the first interconnected communities of runners. Nowadays we don’t run run alone but instead we run with others and share everything about our running on social media.

Idea

Our idea was to define and set up an innovative project on Twitter. – the creation of the first “tweet-race” in the world – the first virtual, social media marathon!

Concept & results

The more retweets or favorites a registered participant had on their Twitter account from their community, the more “virtual meters” they would run to reach the project’s virtual finish line 42.195Km later.

The result was a real success for this unprecedented campaign, with more than 40,000 organic tweets generated (without media purchasing), the corresponding hashtag (#run42) trending on Twitter topics, and our social media marathon winners crossing the virtual finish line in only the second hour of the real, 96-hour marathon!