Forward Slash by Mark Edwards, Louise Voss

that kind of thing.’ I’m using his kind of language, she realized.
    ‘That’s cool,’ he said, in a slightly patronizing way. She was sure he was about to ask her how much traffic she got. But instead, he said, ‘So you probably know a lot of this stuff anyway.’
    She shrugged. ‘I don’t use social networking as much as everyone says I should.’
    ‘A familiar story. Well, like I’m saying, you need to make your appeal have some kind of “wow” factor, a hook. I see a lot of tweets about missing people but I rarely take any notice of them unless they grab my attention. Missing kids, obviously, that always makes one pause. You have to appeal to people’s basic human emotions. Women – you have to make them feel sympathy. Men … um, is Becky pretty?’
    ‘Very.’
    ‘That will make things easier. Make sure you use the best picture you can – she needs to look pretty but not tarty. The girl-next-door type, the sort you’d see advertising yoghurt rather than perfume. And your story needs a hook. Not just, “Have you seen this woman?” but something like … What’s her job?’
    ‘She’s a secondary-school French teacher.’
    He nodded deeply. ‘
Per
fect. Couldn’t be much better. “My schoolteacher sister has mysteriously disappeared. Please help me find her.” You need something like that. Hey, maybe you could get some of her schoolkids involved. No, you’re right, that’s too much.’
    He carried on, explaining how to go about setting up a campaign, the best time to tweet, how often she should do it. He told her that her aim needed to be to get as many people to share it or retweet it as she could, so it spread as far as possible. ‘That’s the power of social networks,’ he said. ‘If you’ve only got, I don’t know, five hundred followers, that’s not going to get you anywhere – unless a good number of them share it, and then their friends and followers share it, and it goes viral. That’s the trick. If you can get a celebrity or two to retweet it, then you’ll really be in business.’
    As Lewis gave her more details, Amy scribbled notes in a pad. Every five minutes, his phone would go off and he’d apologize but answer it, leaving her sipping her water as he talked business. It wasn’t that she was ungrateful – she very much appreciated his help and it was good advice – but she wished he wouldn’t talk about Becky as if she were a product they were trying to sell.
    Finally, he looked at his Rolex and said, ‘Right, I’ve got a meeting to get to. Was that helpful?’
    She told him that indeed it was.
    ‘Give my best to Gary,’ he said, as she left, handing her his business card. ‘And if you need any more help, don’t hesitate to give me a ring. Especially if you need any help with Recycle. Hope you find your sister.’
    He strode away.
Re
cycle. She tutted. But on the way back to where her bike was parked, she paused and logged into Twitter on her phone. No harm starting now, she thought.
    Boris sat on the floor of the bus, his body pressed close to Amy’s calves. Holding him on a tight leash, she put her other hand on his warm back, feeling the way that he rocked in rhythm with the motion of the bus.
    Amy pulled out her iPhone and checked TweetDeck, the app on her phone that she used to check Twitter. It had only been two hours since she’d posted the first appeal for information about Becky’s whereabouts on Twitter, following Lewis’s advice, and she’d done the same on Facebook as soon as she’d got home.
    ‘
MY SISTER BECKY COLTMAN IS MISSING – HAVE YOU SEEN HER SINCE FRI? SO WORRIED. PLS.RT
’
    Along with the message, she’d added a link to a gorgeous photo of Becky laughing at a party, but Amy saw that thirty-seven people had already retweeted it to their followers too, and it had had dozens of shares on Facebook so far.
    She herself only had just over a thousand Twitter followers, most of them members of the crafting community. When she got home,