Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Dan and Gil Harrington (center) meet with volunteers before they head out to help in a three-day search for their daughter last weekend in Charlottesville. The search drew about 1,700 volunteers.

Map and timeline

Matt Chittum | The Roanoke Times

Click to see a map documenting the timeline of sightings of Harrington in the hour before she was last seen.

Ongoing coverage

• Follow the search for missing Va. Tech student Morgan Harrington of Roanoke County

The message from Gil Harrington, the normally soft-spoken mother of missing Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington, was precise, prickly, even a bit menacing: "I am starting to get angry. I am slow to anger, but once it takes hold I am relentless. I will tear apart this world to find Morgan and get this guy."

The statement, which captured the frustration Gil and Dan Harrington feel as the search for their daughter nears the end of its fourth week, did not come in the middle of a news conference or television interview: Gil Harrington posted it on her blog, the latest online tool the Roanoke County family has turned to in a cutting-edge effort to shape media coverage and assist investigators. In the process, the family is helping to rewrite the playbook for how American families respond to a child's disappearance.

If the Harringtons are any indication, gone are the days when families of missing children hunkered down in their homes while reporters beat on their doors, police officers quietly conducted their investigations and neighbors passed around fliers. The Harringtons have used an arsenal of online social networking tools to become a go-to source of information in the search for their 20-year-old daughter, largely taking it upon themselves to feed the public's appetite for news -- any news -- about Harrington. Wednesday's blog offered readers an essay Morgan Harrington wrote on "empty nest syndrome."

Gil Harrington's soul-baring blog is on the Web site, findmorgan.com, which was created by a Roanoke webmaster but is now partly driven by a public relations firm working for the Harringtons. The Web site also features links to a Facebook page devoted to finding Morgan Harrington, a Flickr page where myriad photos of the 20-year-old are available, RSS and Twitter feeds, and YouTube videos related to the missing woman. Message boards associated with the sites have become lengthy scrolls of commentary from people around the nation.

"This is certainly state of the art -- if not groundbreaking," said Bob Smither, whose 12-year-old daughter, Laura, was abducted and killed in 1997, years before families could fully use the Internet to involve the wider community in searches. The group Smither co-founded, the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center for Missing Children, has participated in more than 90 searches for missing children in the past decade, he said, and he could think of no prior instance when a family used such an array of networking instruments. The recovery center led a search for Morgan Harrington over the weekend that involved nearly 1,700 volunteers, many of whom learned of the search effort from findmorgan.com and Twitter messages, or tweets.

So many armchair detectives have used the Web pages to post their speculations and raise questions about Harrington's disappearance that the Virginia State Police has tasked two agents to constantly peruse the sites in search of useful information, spokeswoman Corinne Geller said. "We think, if it's out there and if it's surfaced, let's look into it."

Case in point: One woman wrote on Facebook that she had seen Morgan Harrington at a Sheetz gas station in Orange County; police checked it out but were unable to find any corroborating evidence.

Even so, the Harringtons social networking approach is influencing the investigation.

"We've found, over the past several years, that online digital media is the best, fastest and most efficient way to reach specific audiences, and it's especially important when you reach out to young people," said Gene Grabowski, senior vice president of the Washington-based Levik Strategic Communications, which is behind the sophisticated online effort. Levick has six of its 50 employees working to keep the Harringtons online presence up to date.

Harrington vanished Oct. 17 during a Metallica concert she was attending with friends at the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville. She was last seen about 9:30 that night walking along the Copeley Road bridge just south of the arena. Her purse, with her ID inside, was found the next morning in a nearby grassy parking lot, along with her cellphone. The cellphone's battery was missing.

While the state police have set up a tip line (434-352-3467) and announced a $150,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the missing woman, Gil and Dan Harrington have actively sought out reporters, taking a proactive approach to keeping their daughter's disappearance in the public eye. The Harringtons have appeared on the "Today" show, "Nancy Grace" and "America's Most Wanted" and are scheduled to appear today on the "Dr. Phil" show.

Three weeks ago, though, their efforts to grab media attention veered sharply to the Internet when the Harringtons contacted the Levick public relations firm, which, Grabowski said, agreed to help the Harringtons for free. "We're treating this as if it's our top client right now."

The agency immediately turned to social networking sites, which more than 55.6 million U.S. adults visit monthly, according to a report this year from Forrester Research.

Levick helped streamline findmorgan.com and turn it into a polished, comprehensive site that offers original content while linking to news sources and social networking arenas. Levick integrated the site with Twitter and Facebook and launched YouTube and Flickr sites. Together, the interlinked sites include the latest news updates, notices of upcoming events and television appearances by the Harringtons, photos of their daughter, statements issued by the family and the comments from a large community of readers.

Findmorgan.com is now the number one Internet source for information on Harrington, according to Grabowski; meanwhile, the Facebook page has more than 26,500 friends and is signing up 1,000 new friends daily, and the Twitter feed has doubled since Levick's arrival. The agency has also dealt directly with Google and enlisted the aid of bloggers to publicize the hunt for Harrington.

The Harringtons innovative use of online social networking sites is the right approach but may already be obsolete, given the rapidly changing nature of technology, said Joshua Fairfield, associate professor of law at Washington and Lee University. Fairfield said victimized families will soon be able to focus their efforts on getting information to the latest hand-held devices -- iPhones and Blackberries, for instance -- instead of computer screens. Amber Alerts are already a free iPhone application, he noted. "Push it out to the mobiles. The idea that we're going to use the typewriter is past."

Geller, of the state police, said the use of social networking tools is good for investigators overall because "you can never have too much information." However, she noted, statements posted on message boards and on Facebook are often repeated as facts, and misinformation has a way of proliferating rapidly on the Internet. She said reporters who monitor the sites call her in an effort to verify bits of information, "and I spend my time chasing down rumors."

Robert Lowery, executive director of the Missing Children's Division of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said the Harringtons and Levick deserve credit for finding a way to reach people of Morgan Harrington's age, which could prove critical to finding her and serve as a template for families who find themselves in similar circumstances.

"I don't see a downside," he said. "We were used to being spoon-fed information, but now we have an overabundance of information. That's a good thing."