Fairfax Media had asked a social media strategist to crunch those numbers, and upon hearing them, Paul Taylor, an IT worker and former grade cricketer,  said: "I'm just Joe Blow from the suburbs. Before this, I had 14 followers on Twitter. I had only ever written 22 tweets."

As of 10am on Thursday, the headline number that defines the emotional response was 197,031 mentions of his "putoutyourbats" Twitter hashtag across public digital media since he first tweeted it to @smh at 4.08pm last Thursday.

That was just eight minutes after Taylor, 48, heard the breaking news – 25-year-old Hughes had died in hospital, two days after a bouncer struck the Australian cricketer on the back of the head during a Sheffield Shield match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

"I picked up my cricket bat," Tayor said, replaying his actions in his lounge room at Westleigh, near Hornsby. "And I swung it around a few times and padded it down on the ground."

He had begun to cry. He took his bat outside and placed it at the front door, and perched his blue Mosman cricket cap on its handle, as a mark of respect. He went back inside. But then he thought, "We've got to get together to show our grief."

He went outside again and photographed the bat and cap with his iPhone, then tweeted a simple image in response to a story he read at smh.com.au, including the hashtag: "#putoutyourbats". Using his handle "@squizabilly", he sent it to the twitter accounts of the ABC and Channel Ten's program The Project.

 

At 5.20pm, he read a post from a man on the Facebook page of Richard Glover's radio program at ABC 702: "was waiting at a red light listening to news of Phillip Hughes on the radio, wiping the tears from my eyes. Looked at the bloke in the ute next to me, he was doing the same. We nodded and quietly shared the grief of the nation."

Four minutes later, Taylor posted his photo and hashtag on the ABC Facebook page.  "It exploded," says Taylor, who had refused international requests for interviews until after Hughes's funeral on Wednesday. "I don't want this to be about me."

But hundreds of photos followed in response to Joe Blow from the suburbs, across social networks, evidence that people were copying his simple tribute, their cricket bats photographed at their front doors.

Despite some murmurs that the media manufactured a mass over-reaction to the Hughes tragedy, digital media expert Tiphereth Gloria, who conducted the analysis, says: "This is proof that this is not the case. This was not manufactured. This was not confected. It was not a brand or a campaign. It was a heartfelt expression of grief and respect by one man, with a beautiful and simple visual message which struck an instant chord."

Gloria used monitoring tool Salesforce Radian6 to track all public mentions across social networks, such as YouTube, Twitter, mainstream news, blogs, public forums and public Facebook pages and public Facebook profiles.

#putoutyourbats missing the little fella. #408forever pic.twitter.com/elDAKzFZ89 — Steve Smith (@stevesmith49) November 28, 2014

"The reaction was spontaneous and overwhelming," she said.

Some motorists, so overcome at the the sight of cricket bats appearing on doorsteps, tweeted that they had to stop driving.

Gloria likened the reaction to the biggest social media events in Australia, such as the Australian Open tennis tournament, which attracts more than 500,000 mentions over a month.

@JackieMoshtaghi I don't know cricket, never heard of Hughes, but the love being shown to him is making me cry. #PutOutYourBats #Lovely — babzee vee (@rosycoast) December 3, 2014

In Australia, it has outrated the mass reaction generated in 2012 in a campaign to catch the Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, who was turning children into sex slaves and soldiers. Kony  attracted 80,000 mentions for the whole month of March that year and 4.7 million internationally, 85 per cent of them on Twitter.

The figures for #putoutyourbats are for less than a week. Twitter accounts for 94 per cent of its mentions globally.

It is truly global. Of the total #putoutyourbats mentions, 34,228  – or 17.4 per cent – came come from Australia. But more, almost 70,000 (35.3 per cent) came from the United States, 26,799 (13.6 per cent) from Britain, and more than 20,000 (10.2 per cent) from India. Morocco, with 3035 mentions, accounted for 1.6 per cent.

Add to these figures the 18,672 mentions, with mis-spellings or slight variations of the hashtag –  such as  #putyourbatout and #putoutyourbat.

Another 5984 people who had posted photos on Instagram with the hashtag #putoutyourbats.

It does not account for most Facebook users who communicate privately, nor the flood of good wishes to another poplar hashtag, #63notout, with 95,856 mentions, which took the lion's share of responses following Hughes's funeral in his home town of Macksville on Wednesday.

All of this for a cricketer known personally by few of the people who sent the messages, such as the English folk-punk artist Billy Bragg, who tweeted: "Not a cricket player, so don't have a bat, but shocked and sad to hear of the death of Phil Hughes." Instead of a bat, Bragg put out a picture of his gleaming green and black guitar.

Not a cricket player, so don't have a bat, but shocked and sad to hear of the death of Phil Hughes #putoutyourbats pic.twitter.com/IjBy5ufloz — Billy Bragg (@billybragg) November 28, 2014

The US-based British journalist Piers Morgan tweeted:  "Social Media can sometimes be a vile cyberspace cesspit. But at other times, as with this #putoutyourbats hashtag, it can be magnificent."

Jason Yat-Sen Li put out his father-in-law's bat from 1946. West Indies great Viv Richards posted a picture of his bat. Google Australia added a tribute – an image of a cricket bat – on its home page. A picture landed of children sleeping in Wales, bats by their beds. Adam Gilchrist tweeted a picture of four bats from the "Gilly kids".

The traffic peaked last Friday night, a day after Hughes died, with 91,798 mentions. Paul Taylor  was out the next day in his car in his neighbourhood.

"I called my partner, Rowena. I told her there were all these kids on the street. They all had their bats out. She said, 'I know, babe.'  I just bawled my eyes out."

Taylor has three of his own children and another two with his partner.

He was a junior with Balmain and played grade until he was 30 with Mosman. But he never knew Phillip Hughes.

"Still, so many of us have played cricket. Many of us have been hit by the ball. We all know this can happen, and it has happened. But when it did – like this – so tragically, it was just terribly sad."

He is especially touched that young boys have been able to express their emotions, with the gesture of the cricket bats, and he lauds the reaction of Australian captain Michael Clarke, who showed them it was okay to cry.

Last Saturday night, lying in bed with Rowena, Taylor told her: "I'm embarrassed by this reaction."

"She told me, 'You shouldn't be. You should be proud.' "

with Ben Grubb