...human resources

The Question: What happens when we die?

Part of what I do for clients sometimes is act as their social media “proxy”.  I share content with their community members and listen on behalf of organization, reporting common themes and distributing important questions to the right individuals within the organization for the swiftest response.  Often times I play this role while the members of an organization come up to speed on platform functionality and best practices for using social media to achieve their business goals.  After some time, I transition from managing their social media presence to simply being an adviser and reviewer of content and practice.  Yesterday one of my clients, who has made this transition successfully, called to ask me a question I hadn’t considered when we worked through their social media policy and plan.

What happens to these profiles when someone dies?

Unfortunately they have unexpectedly lost a member of their very close company family. This individual had created accounts on several social media platforms, at the initiation of the business, and now my client needs to know how to go about removing those profiles.  This is an unfortunate circumstance but it is one we must consider and prepare for when developing social media plans and policies, especially when we ask people to participate in these platforms for business purposes.

It should be clear in your policy what you will do in this event.  Will you notify, delete, deactivate, or memorialize social media profiles of deceased employees?  Will you leave that to their friends and families to decide?  Who owns that content?  If you delete it and the family of the individual wanted to keep it, can you be sued? These are questions that may not have precedent just yet.  Better for you to ask and answer them as a business, and in conjunction with the individuals that make up your organization, proactively.  These decisions may need to become part of your human resource information.  Your HR Manager may want to go so far as to document and record the discussion and agreement of these procedures with each employee.

In the unfortunate event that you need to remove social media profiles for a deceased business or family member, here are your options and links for action on each of the most common platforms.

Facebook

Facebook handles this well by providing options to deactivate, delete, memorialize or simply report on an account.

Deactivating your Facebook account basically turns your account temporarily “off”, meaning you’ll disappear on Facebook.  All of your information however is saved, so if you want to reactivate at some point everything will be just how you left it when you deactivated.  If you are going to do anything about someone’s Facebook profile, this might be an appropriate response while notifying friends, family, and community members of the situation as it still leave the information intact.

Deleting a Facebook account results in all personally identifiable information associated being purged from the Facebook database. This includes information like name, email, address, and screen name(s). Copies of some material (photos, notes, etc.) may remain on Facebook servers but it will be disassociated from the user profile and completely inaccessible to all Facebook users.

Memorializing a Facebook account prevents all login access to the account. It also means that certain information on an account will be removed like status updates and contact information. The profile’s privacy settings are changed so that only friends can see the profile or find it by search. The Wall remains up and accessible so friends and family can leave posts in remembrance.

There have been debates over who has the right to take of any these actions, so again I encourage to talk about this with employees and encourage them to discuss the situation at home. It will take careful consideration to determine the most appropriate response for your organization. If you choose to report the individual as deceased (anyone can do this) you can fill out this form but keep in mind the consequence of that action (family member will no longer see their loved one’s notes in feeds or threads, all notifications (like pokes) will disappear, videos and pictures of them will be gone etc.).

Linked In

On LinkedIn you can only close an account. To remove a profile from LinkedIn you’ll need to log into the account. Select “Close Your Account” from the “Settings” window and provide a reason for closing the account. Know that once the account is closed, there will not be any way to access to the account or the contact information contained in it. The only other option on LinkedIn is to notify customer service of the deceased member and they may remove the profile.

Twitter and Skype

I actually expected Twitter to have been more prepared for this question. So I was surprised when I searched Twitter Help Resources for information on notification of deceased members and came up empty. The only thing I found were rules and policy concerning inactive user names. I tweeted to @support but so far no response. I had the same experience with Skype. No information to be found in the knowledge base or forum and I’ve sent in a support question but no word from them yet either.

Twitter is interesting because a Twitter handle is a unique identifier, a brand really. The Twitter handle of an individual may represent the role in the business or may more truly represent the individual or even their family. It might even be that I pass my handle on to my daughter when I die so she can continue to share my life’s work with my followers (#itcouldhappen).

Please Share

If you’ve had to work through this experience, I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you’ll add your advice to this post to help along those of us who may have to find our way through this in the coming months.

KTF
-KSL

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