Socializing From the Great Beyond
I’ve been thinking about a topic covered over at the BlogHer site last week. Do you unfriend someone on Facebook after they die?
The topic is a bit of a personal morbid fascination of late, but it could also have implications for marketers as well.
Two of my Facebook friends passed away earlier this year. One was my favorite uncle, and the other was a friend from college. Once they died, unfriending them never crossed my mind. But, as the BlogHer post notes, it is a little unnerving to get reminders from Facebook encouraging me to reconnect with these folks.
For marketers, there’s (at least at the moment) no National Change of Address type-service to alert them when their fans and Twitter followers have ceased to, um, follow them any longer. And the medium is too young to tell what that will ultimately mean. Could a pleathora fans who have clicked their last “like” hurt a campaign?
For example, if Ben & Jerry’s suddenly starts getting less response to their Twitter questions for where to send their ice cream truck, would they know to check the obits? And V-8’s juices won’t wake deceased Facebook fans, no matter how healthy they are.
Do you have a plan in place for what happens to your social media accounts after you die? One friend recently posted that she’d given another friend permission to change her FB status to “….is chillin’ with Jesus” when she goes on to her reward, which I thought was rather clever.
On a more lively note, I’ll be in “chillin’” in New York attending the BlogHer10 conference this Friday. If you see me, please say hi.
