Hunt For The Red Dress
Is the effectiveness of social media and mico-blogging a myth? Read below and make your own judgement.
Hunt for the Red Dress
If anyone out there is still debating the power and value of twitter, they should have been following Duncan Bannatyne (@DuncanBannatyne) and his quest this morning to find his wife’s dress.
His wife had travelled on the 8.47 from Milton Keynes to Euston with Virgin trains and had inadvertently left a bag containing a red dress on the train, said dress was for a ‘do’ tonight in London.
Mrs B distressed at having lost the dress, Duncan tweeted the detail of his wife’s journey and even offered an award of £1000 to anyone that should find and return it.
This was then re-tweeted many times.
The power of twitter enabled John Power, a Virgin Trains train manager, to get in touch with Mr Bannatyne and let him know that the dress had been found and was in the safe clutches of a fellow Virgin Trains employee.
All this in the space of a couple of hours.
Had conventional means needed to be applied the lovely Mrs Bannatyne would not have had her dress returned, as by all accounts lost property at Euston Station was closed! According to twitter feeds, a member of staff had found the bag on the platform 3 hrs after it had been left on the train.
Is the wonderful John Power, aka @johno4501, now £1000 better off, I am sure you are asking.
Well, Duncan Bannatyne has been highlighted before about his brusqueness, which is not always a bad thing, and maybe has been a little maligned in the past, however, he was as good as his word and offered John Power his said reward.
Mr Power did not want to accept a reward of any kind but asked for a donation to the Virgin Trains charity Clic Sargeant .
So, from the result of using Twitter, the important red dress has been returned to it’s rightful owner, John Power’s work ethic and Virgin Train’s employees has been highlighted (well done John), Clic Sargeant is £1000 better off and above all Duncan Bannatyne (and Mrs B) will have an enjoyable evening.
Had this been left to conventional means would the results have been the same? Hmmm, I think not!
To summarise, a win for Mrs Bannatyne (and retrospectively Mr Bannatyne who I am sure is wiping his brow!), a win for Virgin Trains, a win for Clic Sargeant…surely means a win for Twitter. You decide!
Well done John!