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Where Does Your Facebook Content Go When You Die?

Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio broadcasting out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 5 to 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly to SoundCloud, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry and Heather B. morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.

This week we discussed:

What’s with this no “Family Day” in Quebec? Not fair! Still, please don’t move away from Montreal because of it 🙂
David Carr passed away last week. You may not know him, but you should. Carr had a killer column in The New York Times called, The Media Equation. There are just a few writers who get me going like David Carr did. He was one of the best. He was 58. He collapsed in The New York Times’ newsroom. He, literally, died doing what he loved best. Still, I found myself trolling his Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, and seeing things he had posted only a few short minutes before he died. It was eerie… and it reminded me of this idea of a digital will… still, those tweets and posts are the last we see from him. I will miss him and his words.
On that subject, where does your Facebook page go when you die? Too morbid for a Monday morning? Still, think about it: if something does happen to you, what happens to all of that content, and can you create some kind of “digital will”? Not everyone is going to entrust someone with their passwords, but Facebook recently added in a function called, Legacy Contact, that allows this virtual next of kin to change the deceased user’s profile picture, pin a memorial letter to the top of the profile, and respond to friend requests. The legacy contact can also download an archive of photos and posts. The functionality is currently only available in the US, so you may want to consider some kind of digital will, if you live in somewhere else in the world.
Everyone’s favorite online social network of the day, Pinterest, is now looking to flex its muscles and figure out how to make some serious cash. This is coming in the form of a “buy” button (which makes perfect sense). The picture-based digital scrapbooking site will make a killing if this is done well. Why not be able to both “pin” and “buy” without ever having to leave the site? Rumours abound that this buy button could happen any time in the next 3 months. Get those PayPal accounts in order!
App of the week: Boomerang for Gmail.

Listen here…

https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/191410302

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.