"Runaway Train 25" Helps Find Missing Kids

Beyond Social Media Show, Episode 270

BL and David discuss the geo-targeted update of Soul Asylum’s hit song Runaway Train devoted to the discovery of missing kids; IKEA’s recreation of living rooms from The Simpsons, Friends & Stranger Things; Crossfit’s Facebook pause; Google’s Translatotron technology; Tiny replica McDonald’s bee hives; David Gilmour’s podcast series telling the backstory of three of his famous guitars; Guns Down America’s challenge to blacklist the NRA; Jeff Jarvis’ superb essay about our Crisis of Cognition; PR pros need to do the legwork; Antitrust investigations heating up for Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google; Google’s suspicious outage; The North Face’s disastrous black hat SEO tactic; the limitations of social listening;…and much, much more.

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Audio version of Episode 270 of the Beyond Social Media Show

Best Digital Cases

Finding Missing Children With Music

Soul Asylum’s 25th anniversary remake of “Runaway Train 25” uses geolocation technology to turn the music video content into a search tool to find children missing from your area.

1993 Runaway Train video helped find 21 of the missing kids featured.
2019 Runaway Train update

IKEA Real Life

The furniture giant has culled items from its vast inventory to recreate the iconic living rooms from The Simpsons, Friends, and Stranger Things.

Crossfit Quits Facebook & Instagram

CrossFit quit Facebook with a litany of complaints, including the platform’s “weak intellectual property protections’ and ‘poor security protocols’ that led to massive security breaches of user data.”

Google Translatotron

Google is working on retaining the original speaker’s voice when doing voice translation from one language to another.

World’s Smallest McDonald’s

As part of its sustainability program, some McDonalds in Sweden have tiny replicas of their stores that are actually bee hives.

Guitarcast

Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is releasing a series of three podcasts that tell the backstory of three famous guitars from his collection of 120 that he will be auctioning off to benefit his charity.

Guns Down America Tells Agencies: Don’t Work With the NRA

TL;MR: Reimagining Journalism

Jeff Jarvis has published a thought-provoking essay that questions the premise of storytelling in journalism and calls for a new methodology for how news gathering and reporting are conducted.

Worst Digital Cases

World’s Laziest PR Person

Last week on the podcast, we ran a GIF and a link to a new software. I gave the PR person the link to the Tweet and to the post on Beyond Social Media Show Blog. The post contains the video, audio and links to everything we covered. She asked me, several times, for the link to the video and iTunes – which are in the blog post. Oy vey.

World's laziest PR person, sleeping at work.

Tech Company Antitrust Investigations

The Justice Department will handle Apple and Google, while the Federal Trade Commission will take Facebook and Amazon.

Unexplained Google Outage

Google’s several hour outage affected Google, Google Docs, Drive, Gmail, Shopify, Nest and many other sites who depend on the Google cloud. Amazing how much is affected when Google goes down, and how long it took to fix it.

The North Deface

The North Face concocted a “search engine optimization” effort that ran afowl of both Wikipedia’s terms of service and SEO best practices and earned a massive backlash in the process.

Shiny New Stuff

Best iOS Apps You’re Not Using But Should Be

These hidden gems are apps that don’t always get a lot of attention or headlines, but deliver great utility and interesting new features.

Podcast Brunch Club

A global group of podcast listeners who want to talk about what they’re listening to.

Libby

The free Libby app allows users to preview, reserve and borrow ebooks and audiobooks from participating libraries.

TweetDeck Upgrades

The desktop dashboard app was last updated in February 2018.

Politics

Jaime Harrison’s Perfect Video

Jaime Harrison is running against Lindsay Graham in South Carolina. In his brilliant announcement video, he takes on Graham powerfully and turns him into a cartoon joke.

The Daily Numbers

B2B Content Metrics

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