Tuesday 11 December 2018

Social Media Success

I'm often intrigued as to how things circulate on Social Media (and how fast they seem to do so). Yesterday I had the opportunity to see this more directly with a post I made on Facebook to attempt to find the owner of a digital camera media card I found on the side of the road (walking taking sunset pictures). To me SD cards from cameras filled with memories of trips and partners and family are more valuable than the camera itself.

As the world has presented me enough encouraging stories of people working together in a "team" who don't know each other I decided that perhaps Facebook would give me my best shot of finding the owner (and I was right).




I within minutes some of my friends had shared this, and then it went (as they say) viral. By the end of that evening we had found the owner (I'm going to post it off to them this morning) and the share count was amazing



So the magnification of my friends x their friends x their friends, (as not all of my friends shared I'm assuming a similar portion for others) resulted in 3,565 shares by the evening.

Wow

To me it was simply amazing to see how many other members of the general public felt as I did that it would be good to re-unite the owner with their memories.

The only down side to the story was that the owner grumbled to me about not being on facebook and not wanting his pictures up there, so could I take them down? (thanks would have been a good starter). Of the over 2000 pictures (spanning 3 years) I put up a small selection to allow anyone to make identification, and nothing with compromising data like vehicles or rego.

Respecting his wishes, I complied and have also taken the faces off the images on my blog.

So basically everyone who took part in re-uniting the lady on the right in the above picture with her card take a bow for your roles in this great social media experiment and success story (... but the fella on the right made me wish I'd erased it and kept it).

So sadly you don't always reap what you sew

1 comment:

gnarlydog said...

Strange reaction from the owner of the card but not totally unexpected.
I understand that some stay away from the destructive nature of antisocial media but I think in this case I would assume that the memories on the card are worth the little "exposure" that one gets in the effort for reunification?
Would it be inappropriate to ask the owner of the card if he would have rather not have been contacted/"exposed", like the event never happened, and the card simply recycled?