"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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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.
- Songwriters Remake Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ for Video’s 25th Anniversary
- Watch Runaway Train video with geolocation of missing children in your area.
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.
- IKEA Recreates The Famous Living Rooms From The Simpsons, Friends And Stranger Things With Its Products
- IKEA Real Life Series
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.”
- Crossfit statement
- CrossFit DELETES its Instagram and Facebook accounts over privacy concerns and denounces Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire as ‘utopian socialists’
- Morning Chalkup
Google Translatotron
Google is working on retaining the original speaker’s voice when doing voice translation from one language to another.
- Google’s AI can now translate your speech while keeping your voice
- Google Translatotron Comparison Samples
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
- Guns Down America Has a Message for Agencies: Don’t Work With the NRA
- Guns Down America’s “Blacklist the NRA” petition
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.
Tech Company Antitrust Investigations
The Justice Department will handle Apple and Google, while the Federal Trade Commission will take Facebook and Amazon.
- FTC Gets Jurisdiction for Possible Facebook Antitrust Probe
- Antitrust Troubles Snowball for Tech Giants as Lawmakers Join In
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.
- Google recovers from outage that took down YouTube, Gmail, and Snapchat
- That major Google outage meant some Nest users couldn’t unlock doors or use the AC
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.
- North Face tried to scam Wikipedia to get its products to the top of Google search
- Why The North Face manipulating Wikipedia confirms our darkest fears of advertising
- North Face Apologizes For Wikipedia Search Marketing Blunder
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
