Update (3:26): Family Friend @spike_jones reports there is no actual news but there are indeed leads. Also stresses this is not an Amber Alert situation, doesn’t believe girl was abducted. Search for McKenzie Church continues.

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I am currently tracking a story that everyone hopes will turn out alright about McKenzie Church. There is a 14 year old girl in South Carolina that has been missing. Her father is a twitter user and a friend of his sent out a tweet about the situation in hopes others would retweet.

The community has responded at amazing levels. The first message put on Twitter was from @orangejack at around 11:30am eastern time. The message started spreading. Only 4 hours after the original tweet I scanned anyone passing on the message doing a search for the father’s twitter name*. The message or some form of it was being retweeted at a rate of 250+ tweets every 5 minutes!

The ability for people to process and pass on information using Twitter and other social media tools is changing everything.

Our thoughts are with families involved in this. We are all wishing for the best. Click here (could be down because of traffic issues) and here for more info on the girl and her search.

*This is not a scientific search. I put the father’s username that was a part of the original tweet and put it into twitter search. Once that search was in I started counting to 5 mins and read the number it tells you how many times this search term has shown itself since you last searched. I did this 5 times and got an average of about 250 tweets every 5 mins.

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