Chris Wilson @aithene, a Multimedia Design Specialist at Freelancers

I had been on twitter for several months by by late 2007, and was enjoying a small, but cozy network of just under 200 friends, many of whom I really enjoyed chatting with on a regular basis. As the co-host of the Answers for Freelancers! podcast, I’d started playing in social media, dabbling here and there, and had found the most enjoyment from my Twitter network over any other social media space I’d dabbled in.

Anyway, just before Thanksgiving of 2007, my sister-in-law went missing. When the case stalled out with the Florida police, the family started looking for other means of finding her. As a web designer and new media hobbyist, I fell back on my skills and started a Wordpress Blog with all of the details, and then turned to my Twitter Network.

We were unsure what anyone could do, since this was MY network, not my sister-in-law’s, but we put the call out there, figuring that if nothing else, we might generate some diggs and try to get some media attention and coverage to help out the search.

What really ended up happening, though, was that it made my twitter network aware of what I was going thru, and this awareness began shaping things in a very unexpected way. It became a truly mind-opening experience for me.

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. Many of these were people who had lost friends and family in a similar way and who had experience with the ins and outs of a missing-person search. See, I didn’t approach a network of people who had been involved with missing people, but one immediately formed around me. They provided information that my family didn’t have and that wasn’t provided by law enforcement. The police, in fact, offered very little in the way of advice on what we could do. They opened a case, told us they were looking, and then after they determined that she’d left the state, kind of quit. So, having recommendations come from people who have gone thru all of this before was priceless.

One grand Kudos goes to Christopher Penn (@cspenn) who provided a real turning point in our search efforts. Because of Chris’ marketing background, he is VERY well versed with MySpace. Since Manessa’s social network lived on MySpace, Christ 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, then turned the keys over to us to manage. 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. We knew what state she was in, we knew what friends she’d been hanging around with, and we had several ’sightings’ of her.

There were also twitterer’s who offered time and support in other ways, all of which were appreciated. In the end, this group of friends and colleagues that I had hoped MIGHT act as a small Digg army (which they did very well, by the way) and possibly pass along some links, had self-organized around us to create a small, but very knowledgeable task force in a very relevant, but completely unexpected way.

This was such an unbelievably organic response, it caught my family and I completely off-guard. It gave me another perspective on, and a new respect for something that had beforehand simply been a playground and pass time for me.

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