RamBam uses social media in a quest for love

Today is Valentine’s Day, the international day of love. Cynics may call it a carnival of commerce, but the fact remains that it can be a great theme for television (or blogs for that matter). The Dutch investigative journalism program RamBam thankfully exploited this fact during last night’s episode.

Every week VARA's RamBam investigates topics that seem fishy and tackles them in a ‘creative and humorous way’. Yesterday’s installment showed their search for Nanda, a girl that their reporter Noel Deelen had met via the dating website www.frunniken.nl. After days of sms-contact they arranged a meeting, for which Nanda failed to show up. This led Noel to jump to the most logical conclusion available: something terrible had happened to the love of his life, which prevented her from meeting him. He started searching for her in her (so-called) hometown, and even contacted the owner of the website, but all to no avail. And that’s when social media came into play.


The RamBam crew started a campaign to find Nanda. They used their facebook page and twitter accounts to spread the message and requested everyone who knew her to mail to a special e-mail address created for the cause. Even 3fm DJ Giel Beelen supported the initiative. However, in the end they failed to find Noel’s heartthrob in time for Valentine’s Day, leaving the poor boy to wallow in his misery alone. But even though their social media use didn’t pay of, it helped to create enjoyable and eye-opening television.

• If you want to watch last night’s episode (13 feb) and the episode from the week before that started the whole Nanda saga (6 feb), you can go here.

• Happy Valentine’s day everybody! We hope you find as much love as Noel didn’t.