Digital Death

It is distressing to be asked to endorse on LinkedIn the skills of a colleague who has died or to be prompted to recommend a post on Facebook to a friend who has passed away. So how does your social platform, gaming network or other holder of your digital profile, deal with death?

The issue over what happens to your data and profile online after death is a difficult one for any online provider but one that is becoming increasingly important as we begin to transact so much of our life online.

A network with millions of users will face the probability of a certain but tiny percentage of its users passing away on any given day. This is not the easiest thing to calculate given there are so many variable determinants such as age, lifestyle and location but the chance of any individual dying on any day is probably somewhere in the region of between 1 in 30,000 to 1 in 250,000.  So a community with 1 million members will probably find that between 4 and 30 of them will die on any day. This is not an insignificant number. When you consider that Facebook boasts more than 1 billion members it is likely that more than 4,000 of their members die every day. In the USA alone more than 580,000 Facebook users will die in this year this according to an article in the Pepperdine University of Law Review by Kristina Sherry. In the same article, Sherry ponders the legal issues that death poses for online profiles. Facebook has introduced a memorialising feature allowing friends and families to have the dead person's account frozen. However this raises issues for how long such a memorial should stay online and whether it is actually what the deceased would have actually wanted.

While Facebook has memorialisation, Google has recently introduced the interactive account manager which allows you to choose to have your data deleted after 3, 6, 9 or 12 months of inactivity. It also allows data access to trusted friends and contacts depending on how you configure your settings. Google says it hopes the new feature will "enable you to plan your digital afterlife in a way that protects your privacy and security and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone".

I sense that the bigger operators such as Google, Facebook or LinkedIn will implement more robust processes to deal with data after death.  However it remains an issue for many of the smaller platforms and communities who do not have the resources to provide a smooth and dignified solution that can be initiated for users while alive and does not cause distress to family and friends later.

A potential solution that goes encompasses issues beyond dealing with death is that of maintaining a generic digital identity online and providing instructions for processing online profiles on death.

This is not an easy topic but one that affects every one of us alive today and reading this.

UK university use of Weibo

China is the top market for international students in the UK with nearly 79,000 students enrolled in the academic year 2011-2012. (HESA) At the current 17% rate of growth, this could mean upto 12 5,000 Chinese students on campus by 2015.

While this is growth, the US is even more successful in marketing itself as a destination with a 25% year on year increase in their Chinese student enrolments (Open Doors 2012).

A key task for UK institutions is how can they fully tap the China market and differentiate themselves from other UK universities in what has become a dramatically more competitive marketplace.

Ernie Diaz who directs the work of a Weibo services agency in Beijing, says “the Internet has made connecting with prospective Chinese students eminently possible and it's a great irony that so few of these schools effectively use this approach," (China Daily News).  With Facebook and Twitter effectively banned in the country this means that universities need to engage on Weibo, now the world’s second largest social media channel.

Diaz continues, "Any study abroad candidate in China is actively online waiting for some direct communication with a university. The web presence is enormously important because the one thing that sells in China is word of mouth. If a school had a Mandarin speaker or a Chinese alumnus who could answer questions on popular message boards, students would be so knocked out the universities are taking time to connect with them, they would soon be telling their friends,"

While a 2012 survey of UK institutions on Weibo reported that 58% of them have a Weibo presence. However, the actual use of these accounts is patchy. I have examined the use of Weibo by the 10 biggest universities in the UK in terms of student numbers, (excluding the Open University) and the result is disappointing. Three of them have no Weibo presence while only half of them have an official account.

Leading the way is the University of Central Lancashire with its account operating out of Beijing http://weibo.com/uclan  attracting more than 26000 followers. The university of Nottingham’s China Campus has nearly 11,000 fans http://e.weibo.com/unncweibo.

Engagement with the accounts of the other universities is much more sporadic with Manchester Metropolitan University’s Tencent Weibo account having a mere 65 followers.

Worth a mention is University of Manchester’s account dedicated to helping Chinese students through orientation. Its 2000 followers show the potential; for using this medium in a more strategic direction.

UK universities are clearing missing out an opportunity for engaging with their number one market and building their reputation. The time to act is now.