So glad this story has gotten more attention. Excerpted from the article on the Army website:
A massive outpouring of support from Fort Hood, surrounding communities and social media helped a potential nightmare for one Fort Hood family end happily last week…..
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“Facebook provided great information,” Fort Hood Garrison Commander Col. Mark Freitag said. “It was a great community and post effort to find a missing child.”
More than 100 volunteers from Fort Hood and surrounding communities flooded Kouma to assist with search efforts, prompted by a posting on Kouma Village’s Facebook page at 5:42 p.m. that announced the missing girl.
“The community involvement was overwhelming in a good way,” Caylor said. “We had a group of selfless people who wanted to come out and volunteer.”
That initial Facebook post quickly spread across the Internet as volunteers came out to search, others re-posted the alert, and well-wishers posted hopeful messages for her safe return.
http://www.army.mil/article/71843
I know we’ve been talking about social media and collaboration tools a lot here at GovLoop, and it’s no secret that I use the tools a lot and generally like what I see. What do other folks think about how social media was employed to find this little girl?
By the way, if you “like” Ft. Hood and Kouma Village on Facebook, you can watch how this developed on Facebook. It was very compelling.
This is a very important aspect of social media that isn’t utilized nearly enough. I make it a point to RT or post to Facebook when something like this happens, especially locally. The problem is that there are so many posts and Tweets for causes that turn into spam that a lot of people don’t do it. I make sure it’s a legitimate concern before I post about it.