What an amazing week for I Am Traffic! When we woke up on Tuesday morning, we had no idea that our message would be shared so far and wide in just the span of a few days. To give you an idea of what’s been going on, I wanted to share some data with everyone.
Before Tuesday, our Facebook page had around 500 “likes” and many of our posts were being seen by an average of around 800 people. Then, on Tuesday, Keri Caffrey posted this image:
We all watched in a little bit of awe as the “Share” ticker started flying up. As of the writing of this post, the total reach of the image is at 25,312 people, there’s been 4,184 shares of the image, 36,688 people are “engaged” with it, and it has received 1,300 likes.
That same day, I posted the image to reddit’s bicycling community. Pretty quickly the post moved up to the #1 spot on /r/bicycling and right now has gained 96,005 views, 1,449 upvotes, and 519 comments.
The image has been re-shared by several bike gear groups, a few blogging lawyers, and many local bicycling organizations.
The 245+ comments generated a lot of common questions and discussion. I will be working next week on distilling a lot of our answers into a FAQ for the site so that we can have a quick reference for common bicycling concerns.
For our total page reach…. we hit a high of 344,378 people this week. Unbelievable.
Global
One of the most interesting things that we’ve been watching is the international response. From the very beginning of this site, our focus has solely been the US. Little did we know that our message would resonate with cyclists all over the world. To name just a few countries that we’re getting a lot of response from:
- Saudi Arabia
- Portugal
- Ireland
- Germany
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Brazil
- Chile
- Australia
We are in talks with several groups who are willing to provide time and resources for translating our infographics. Internally we cannot set new translations on the graphics nor maintain them. However, if you are interested in working on a local translation that is true to our intent and message, AND have graphic design resources then drop us an email.
Polite Discussion
While watching the conversation unfold on Facebook, we realized that we needed to step in and provide a “rules of engagement” and some strict moderation. None of us are interested in seeing our efforts turn into a platform for the same, tired arguments of the anti-cyclist and anti-motorist rants. We’re trying to do something different with I Am Traffic. We want to be a positive change agent. Allowing derogatory, hateful, and downright dumb comments does not foster a Better Conversation™. With that in mind, we decided to enact a Policy for Polite Discussion. Our goal with this policy is not to squash differing opinions, but to silence idiotic and hateful comments. It’s a difficult path to ride, no doubt about it.
The Colloquium
It’s very energizing to have such a positive reach just a few days before our very first Colloquium. Cyclists from all over the country are flying, driving, and biking into Orlando, Florida this weekend to discuss exactly what the future of this organization will look like.
I’m excited about where we’re going and I hope that you’ll join us in this journey. Be sure to Like our page, follow us on Twitter, or sign up for our email updates. And feel free to keep on sharing that image!
Update on 2/23/2013: Facebook had a bit of a delay on the statistics. I should have waited until today to write this post to get all the big numbers to you. Forgive my early excitement… the new numbers are far larger than I originally posted yesterday.
