Viral Fan Page Formed To Cancel The NYC Marathon Post-Hurricane Sandy : Social Media and The Big W

About the Author: Jason Small is a digital marketer with 10+ years of digital experience working with 20+ brands via various agency roles. Small's expertise includes broad digital strategy, social media strategy, SEO, website design and development and he has led teams to produce results for brands online such as Peoples Choice Awards, ChapStick, Centrum, Dial, Honeywell, Renuzit, Castrol, Sears, Hertz, CoverGirl, John Deere, Advil, ThermaCare and more. As Director of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development for a fifty-person startup, Small led initiatives uniting value propositions and technology across 10+ companies while generating press in trades like TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal.

Viral Fan Page Formed To Cancel The NYC Marathon Post-Hurricane Sandy

Jason Small | Nov 02, 2012 | Comments 1

Cancel the 2012 NYC Marathon

A public movement is forming to cancel the NYC 2012 Marathon.

Michelle Clearly, creator of the Facebook page “Cancel the 2012 New York City Marathon” decided to create the page on Wednesday, October 31st. She is one of three sisters from Staten Island, all of whom decided together during a post-Sandy conversation that the Marathon should not happen.

The page is (as of this writing) at 42,000 likes in three days and accelerating. I’ve watched it grow by 2,000 fans in just the past 75 minutes.

It’s always amazing to watch as something literally ‘goes viral’ as I’ve seen only a few times over the past several years. As the page has taken shape, Michelle has demonstrated some remarkable composure in responding to positive and negative comments while also working towards creating a useful resource for those that wish to contribute to the recovery efforts.

Michelle Clearly also realized the value of explaining herself in a video, which allowed her to explain the details of her decision to promote this effort. In the video, she addresses some ‘ground rules’ for communicating on her fan page; encouraging the community to communicate in ways that promote a genuine debate and an authentic respectful exchange of thoughts and discussion. She also mentioned that post-poning the Marathon would be a potential solution, however she cannot change her fan page name and remove the word ‘cancel’ since the title of the page is un-editable at this time..

She faces a unique challenge, in that one would assume that she has a very, very small window of opportunity since the Marathon will take place on Sunday and she is at the critical ‘hockey-stick’ curve in fan growth.

However, she has pledged to maintain the page and continue to use it to share resources for those wishing to help with post-Sandy recovery efforts. She has the timing, network and message aligning for the movement right now and it will be interesting to see how the initiative grows, evolves and survives after Sunday – regardless of whether or not the Marathon takes place.