On this episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I’m going to be going into social media, and social media for a specific use. Normally when I talk about social media things like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (or X as it’s now called), I’m talking about it from a marketing perspective and how you can grow your business and get more leads and clients. But social media also has other uses, other ways in which you can capitalise on its reach. If you’ve listened to this podcast before and you’ve listened to certainly earlier episodes of the podcast, you’ll know that I’ve used social media quite effectively in in tracking somebody who created a fake Facebook profile of my eldest son some years ago. I’ve even done a TEDx on the subject, which I talk about very often.
Something happened a few weeks ago again to another one of my kids, my youngest. It wasn’t an online thing, it was an offline thing. It’s one of those cases where you feel completely helpless as a as a parent, unless you’re able to use social media the way I did. What happened was my youngest, she’s 19, and she bought her first moped, which I wasn’t too keen on her doing if I’m honest, but she does have excellent balance. She bought a moped and it was to get to and from work. She bought this on the Monday, put it outside the house after driving it around for a bit just to get used to it and within the space of a few hours, it had been stolen. Somebody had essentially just gone “oh I’ll have that” and they buggered off with it. Now, it was brand new, she didn’t think anything would happen that quick, which is why she left it outside the house.
Bike theft is exceptionally common in the area it’s almost every day you see people complaining on Facebook that somebody’s stolen a bike. Now I live 200 miles away and I didn’t really know what to do, I’m feeling quite helpless by this. I thought “what’s the one thing I am quite good at?” and that’s social media. So, I engaged in what I can only describe as my most aggressive social media campaign to date.
I attacked a lot of local groups for the area, essentially putting photographs up of this bike and explaining what needs to happen for anyone to see it and that started to get some traction. We started to get some interaction on the groups, we’re talking hundreds and hundreds now. Then we started to get some messages of people claiming they spotted the bike, but this wasn’t enough. So then I increased it and offered a reward for the return of the bike. It wasn’t before long that we started getting messages coming back with the identity of the person that had taken it and where they were on the time. Throughout this whole process I am communicating with the police, I’m giving everything to the police, but unfortunately when you phone up the police to try and speak to them you need to speak to the officer in charge of the investigation, and the way the police work I think it was another three days before he was even back on. When I send that directly to the police via Facebook, it takes about an hour for the police to respond via Facebook for them to go “what’s this for again?”.
We eventually got the identity of the kid’s name, we knew who he was, that he had the bike we had his bloody name. We had the address of his mother and I think we had the address of one of his friend’s house that he often stays, so we knew all of these different locations.
And then the strangest thing happened. Again, this is all through social media. I had a call on Facebook with a drug dealer who lived at the address that one person had responded back and said that this is where your bike is.
This guy phoned me up and started arguing with me on the phone, which of course I recorded.
It was the most bizarre conversation I’ve ever had. You can listen to the whole thing on YouTube should you want to. So I’m having conversations and arguments with drug dealers all through Facebook, I’m having people sending me photographs with the identity of the kid that stole the bike and his address and where he can be found, but still nothing is happening, still we don’t have the bike back, it’s extremely unlikely we’re ever gonna get it because eventually they’re just gonna burn it they’re going to burn it out.
Until finally, a week after it went missing, we eventually had the message from somebody that we’ve been waiting to hear “How much is that reward again? I found your bike.”
Now I’m telling you this because I want you to know that social media can be used in this way. If you’re a victim of crime in your area, you can actually use social media not only to find the person responsible, but to get the property back as we have done. Now the police haven’t managed to get hold of the kid that nicked it, even with his name and his address and the address of all the different places he goes. I was even told even told that once the police have picked the bike up from where it had been stashed that they wanted to speak to me, they wanted to speak to me about my use of social media throughout this. I suspect it’s that I shouldn’t be naming people and putting locations on Facebook, when in reality what they should be doing is “Hey, how the hell did you manage to do that? Come in and teach us!” But that’s probably not what they wanted.
So, this was a very angry period in my life, a very angry week that I faced. It took up a lot of time throughout my life, but luckily, I had the time to be able to do this and I had the skill to be able to do this because if I had just left it to the police, my daughter would never have got that bike back. She would still be paying a hundred and something pounds a month for a bike she can’t ride and some absolute scally from Newport in South Wales will have had a bike for use for a week or so and then set fire to it, because that’s what was going to happen. And that’s all through social media.