Using a Twitter Hashtag to Get People on the Bike

We haven’t had to do much work in promoting #30daysofbiking at all. It’s like hundreds of people were waiting for a push to bike, and then tweet about biking, and all this has done is give them that push. It’s been immensely viral. We have bikers in China, in Korea, in France, in England, in Indonesia, in Australia, and in tons of other places. I haven’t kept a record. I’m continually surprised by how far this has reached.…

People fill up the stream with #30daysofbiking tweets on a daily basis — hundreds a day, bunches every hour. Our site had almost 1,000 hits on the very first day and it’s been exploding ever since. The proudest accomplishment of this, for me, is that it inspired my dad, who is 58 years old, to bike to work for the first time this morning. He left me a voicemail, “Hi, I rode my bicycle to work! Bye.” It’s giving people a reason to ride with their families. Family-time shit, away from the TV and the computer and the fkn iPods. It’s a push to get out and do something, like eat at a restaurant or see a show, when you would’ve stayed home — because you need to get those miles in.