United Kills Puppies & Can I Write For Sprite?

By David Erickson | March 16, 2018

Beyond Social Media Show, Episode 221

BL and David discuss United Airlines’ recent customer service fail that resulted in the death of a customer’s puppy; the students’ national walkout over gun control; Facebook testing voice status updates; #AskEddie has a new gig; the best cover letter in the history of cover letters; a Time’s Up agency; Twitter verification for everyone; Quartz’ obsessive emails; Google’s encryption drop-dead date; Rihanna snaps at Snap; Melania Trump wags her finger at social executives; news coming to Facebook Watch; YouTube’s Wikipediafication; a massive fake news study; and much, much more. Image courtesy of Guian Bolisay.

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Best Digital Cases

National School Walkout

Hundreds of thousands of students walked out of their schools – worldwide – for 17 minutes to honor the Parkland dead and protest gun violence.

National School Walkout: Thousands Protest Against Gun Violence Across the U.S.

Facebook Voice Posts

Facebook is testing a voice status update feature for a select number of users in India.

Micropodcasting? Facebook tries Voice Clip status updates (Google cache version)

Facebook tries Voice Clip status updates https://t.co/wpUZE5M4jV

(As per my tweet about it a week ago) pic.twitter.com/uSkSg7xTSj

— Matt Navarra (I quit X. Follow me on Threads) (@MattNavarra) March 2, 2018

Most Successful Internship Ever?

A one-week internship with UK’s Southern Rail’s Twitter account made him a star. Now he’s @AskEddieSmith<, soon to star in mini-series on Extraordinary Teenagers, speaking at digital media conferences and offered a BBC internship this summer.

Who remembers #AskEddie? Eddie became a viral sensation when he took over the @SouthernRailUK Twitter account. This is his extraordinary story!

Watch other extraordinary teens' stories over on @All4: https://t.co/umZFH1mo6n pic.twitter.com/50ogPnPxxR

— Am I Normal? (@C4AmINormal) January 11, 2018

Best Cover Letter In The History Of Cover Letters

Chase Zreet really, really wanted to get a job at Wieden+Kennedy on the Sprite account. He got his wish.

The Best Cover Letter Ever To Get A World-Class Ad Agency Job

Want to be a creative @WiedenKennedy @wknyc ? This is the resume bar. 🔥🔥
Brilliant and the best song ever written about working in advertising

HT @CoryMcCollum https://t.co/l9NJ2aNsuM

— faris (@faris) March 8, 2018

#TimesUp Advertising

A major initiative to address sexual harassment and systemic inequality in the workplace has been launched by more than 180 female C-suite advertising agency leaders have formed Time’s Up/Advertising “to drive new policies, practices, decisions and tangible actions.”

#TimesUp/Advertising

You Get A Blue Badge! You Get A Blue Badge! EVERYONE Gets A Blue Badge!

Jack Dorsey says Twitter’s verification process is very broken. It’s been suspended but when it opens again, verification badges will be available for everyone.

Twitter wants to open verification to everyone

Email Newsletter Publishing Lessons From Quartz

An interview with the Quartz email team yields lessons for email marketers.

Worst Digital Cases

United Kills Puppies

Continuing in their attempt to be awarded “all-time worst customer service airline,” a United flight attendant forced a passenger to put her adorable 10-month old puppy in the overhead compartment, where it died.

HT/Scott Monty

HTTPS Drop Dead Date

Google and Firefox will flag your site with a security warning if you haven’t yet implemented the Secure Sockets Layer protocol by July 2018. Thanks. For that.

Rihanna Blasts Snapchat – Shares Immediately Fall

An Ad ran on Snap today asking “Would you rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown.
Rihanna took to Instagram to call Snap out and their shares immediately took a dive.

Snap Declines Amid Uproar Over Rihanna Domestic Violence Ad

Melania Trump Plans To Wag Her Finger At Social Execs Because Cyberbullying

Until she gets Twitter to ban her husband, she has zero credibility.

Melania Trump will meet with tech giants including Facebook and Google to talk cyberbullying

Facebook to Launch News in Watch

Given how unreliable Facebook news has been to date, I am not optimistic.

Scoop: Facebook aiming to launch News for Watch this summer

TL;MR: Fake News Works &; It’s Not Them, It’s Us

Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.

The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News

YouTube Moves Against Conspiracy Theories

The company suggested that this is just a first small step in the company’s efforts to provide more information about videos on its platform. But Wikipedia has been gamed many times.

Shiny New Stuff

Yumpu

Yumpu offers free and paid ways to create embeddable PDFs in WordPress. You can add video, and make them interactive with the paid programs.

- Yumpu

Obsession Emails

The Quartz Obsession is a daily digression into the most fascinating corners of the global economy.