I use Twitter and think it is a great micro-blogging service. And now it has been credited with finding a missing runaway 16-year-old girl, Manessa Donovan, believed to have been with a 38-year-old man. This is what her family says:
In truth, the search had stalled out after 2 weeks of depending solely on local law enforcement. Once you guys were involved, we had locations, eye-witness sightings, an extended campaign on multiple fronts, and a boatload of information about the guy we believed she was with. Within one week, Manessa had basically been found. It took another week before she was where we consider ’safe’, but its unbelievable how fast things moved once you all got involved.
In retrospect, there really was no doubt that you would step up, which must be why we approached the Twitwork before even emailing our friends and family.
Those first crucial hours and days are vital for tracking down eye witnesses. Twitter can only be successful in these cases if it is used by the missing person’s social network, but it is easy enough to set up. I wonder if this is something that police and the Missing People charity will consider using in their searches of people who have vanished inexplicably.
In memory of those who are still missing.
A wonderful outcome – I’ve never twittered but the fact that it helped reunite one family is absolutely fantastic.
I’d like to make one small adjustment to your assessment of Twitter’s usefulness, since Manessa doesn’t use, and perhaps has never even heard of Twitter.
I’m Manessa’s brother-in-law, and in our case, what happened is that twitter brought together MY twitter network and made them aware of what I was going thru.
In turn, dozens of knowledgeable folks began offering advice on where to look, who to call, what needed to be done, and what information still needed to be gathered. A large core group of people who have lost friends and family in a similar way really knew the ins and outs of this kind of operation. This was all information that we simply didn’t know, and to be honest, was not readily forthcoming from the police. One would think that when someone goes missing in your family that the police would sit you down and hand you a play book, but in reality, they simply don’t. They open a case, tell you they’ll look, and the rest is on your own. So, having recommendations come from people who have gone thru all of this before was priceless.
The one piece of help that proved to be our turning point also came from a twitterer who was VERY well versed with MySpace. Since Manessa’s social network lived on MySpace, Christopher Penn (@cspenn on twitter) volunteered his time and expertise to set up a MySpace page and invited all of Manessa’s online network to help join us in searching for her. This was something that no one in our family really knew about, and we might have ended up waiting for days before it happened if left to us. Immediately after this site was up, however, we began receiving all sorts of information.
There were also twitterer’s who offered time and support in other ways, all of which were appreciated.
So, I guess that’s all. If you use Twitter as a ‘broadcast’ tool, you might not get as much out of it. But if you use the time to build even just casual relationships with the folks you meet, you’re really building a support network of hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of people who all have a very diverse set of backgrounds, skills, and strengths.
Thanks for writing about the subject,
@Aithene
That’s amazing and it’s so good to read of a happy outcome. Thank god she is safe.
Chris, that is really helpful information, many thanks for your detailed comment. So delighted too that Manessa is safe.
That’s fantastic! These online programs should be used to find missing people more often, including the ever-growing Facebook! AND the bonus with facebook is that people actually use their real names… instead of nicknames. Personally, I don’t use my real name, but yeh, they do!
Great story!
No problem.
We really weren’t sure what to expect when we threw the ball out there, so the exact response was quite a surprise to us.
All I was hoping for at the time was for a force of friends to help digg the article and get it some attention so that the local media might pick it up and help us spread the word via TV and/or local paper. In the end, we ended up with a very skilled task force. It was like opening an unmarked box and finding a small treasure inside.
It was touching, surprising and mind-opening. It gave me a new perspective and a tremendous new respect for the power of social media, something until before then had just been a playground for me.
@Aithene
Thanks again Chris, I do not think that Twitter is widely used in the UK like Facebook, yet I really like it,and you have shown how effective it can be.