On Friday many people’s faith in humanity here in the United States was restored. It was all centered around Miles Scott a five year old who was diagnosed with Leukemia when he was one. He is now in remission.
Because of his illness young Miles was eligible to participate in the Make A Wish Foundation. He had one wish, to be a super hero, Bat Man. Now the Make A Wish foundation gets super hero wishes all the time, but what Make A Wish of San Francisco did for Miles is something short of a miracle and it took a village, actually a whole entire city.
Many of you have read the stories about Miles and BatKid but to summarize this past Friday San Francisco was turned into Gotham City. Miles received Batman training from a stunt and acrobatic coach who accompanied him on his Batkid journey. So with a partner, his little brother as Robin and Lamborghini’s as Bat Mobiles Miles was ready to be BatKid.
The city transformed itself into Gotham City. Over 10,000 volunteers and thousands more bystanders Miles got to rescue a damsel in distress, stop The Riddler form robbing a bank and rescue the Giants Mascot from The Penguin. After his day chock full of crime fighting Miles was given the key to the city in front of tens of thousands of people at the Civic Center in San Francisco and he even received a personalized vine from President Barack Obama himself.
The reason this particular wish got so much attention was social media. We heard about it in Atlanta two weeks prior after one of the staffers at Make A Wish in San Francisco posted it to their Facebook wall.
How did the rest of America hear about it? Social media and the internet of course.
Mashable ran the numbers on BatKid’s social media adventure and here’s the rundown:
- Tweets on Friday: 409,960 with the hashtag #batkid or #SFBatkid
- 377,048 unique Twitter users tweeted about batkid
- Mashable’s story on Batkid was shared 125,000 times
- Batkid was discussed in 117 countries
- @BarackObama @Instagram @Funnyordie @SportsCenter @PerezHilton and @EnriqueIglesias sent original tweets about Batkid
- The Make A Wish website saw 1,000 hits per second on Friday
- 21,683 Instagram photos
- The photos were reportedly seen 120,439,533 times
The overall numbers?
Mashable reports that social media agency Clever Girls Collective 750 million people saw Batkid across social media if you add up all the followers of everyone who tweeted about Batkid. If you add in all of the retweets and their followers the number swells to 1.7 Billion.
Image: IGN