Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

You probably remember my previous posts about Dead Man's Switch and the e-mails I've received from the service.  Here's a follow-up to the last e-mail.

Subject: Dead Man's Switch is REALLY worried about you 

Hi, Are you okay? You haven't answered our last two emails. If you don't answer this, your emails will be sent out in one week.

To update your status, visit the following address:

http://www.deadmansswitch.net/update/

Hope to see you there,

Dead Man's Switch staff

 There's only one more week before my test e-mail gets sent out.  I'll be sure to post when it gets to me.  Stay tuned.

 

 

You probably remember my previous posts about Dead Man's Switch and the e-mails I've received from the service.  Here's a follow-up to the last e-mail.  It seems that I didn't successfully confirm my continued existence, so here's my next notification:

Subject: Dead Man's Switch is worried about you

Message: Hey there, where have you been? You didn't answer our first email. If you don't answer this, you will get one more warning in a week before all your emails are sent out.

To update your status, visit the following address:

http://www.deadmansswitch.net/update/

Hope to see you there,

Dead Man's Switch staff

 

It's still kind of creepy, but I do like that the subject line shows a bit more compassion.  I wonder what the final notice will say... stay tuned.

As I said previously, I don't have it setup to send any e-mails in the event that I don't respond.  Although I may set it up to send one to myself, just to see what type of introduction the service might add to the e-mail message.

A while back I posted about www.deadmansswitch.net.  Here's the first e-mail they sent me to confirm that I'm still alive.  I like how it's doesn't assume that I'm alive, but I was hoping that it would be something more formal.  In either case it's still kind of disturbing. 

Hello you,
this is your plain old regular email to remind you that you should check
back with us at Dead Man's Switch, so we know you're doing well.

To update your status, visit the following address:

http://www.deadmansswitch.net/update/

Hope to see you there,
Dead Man's Switch staff

For the record: I don't have it setup to send any e-mails in the event that I don't respond.

I recently did something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. I canceled my print newspaper subscription to the News and Observer.  (Well, actually, I backtracked to a Friday-through-Sunday subscription after my wife pitched a fit over the cancellation.)

For the first time in nearly a half century, I do not wake up every day to find a newspaper at the end of my driveway. When I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, New York, we got two daily newspapers – the Courier Express and the Buffalo Evening News. It’s hard to imagine that level of competition existing today.

Why cancel? Well, money was part of it -- an annual subscription now costs nearly $200 and that particular month all three of my kids seemed to need shoes. And food. And the two big ones were petitioning for yet another cell phone bailout.

There was also the huge pile of paper that seemed to pursue me relentlessly: in my car, in my living room, on my workbench. Read me.  Read me. Read me. I generally scanned each issue, but except for Sunday, never really READ them. (Skim-reading is an occupational hazard for PR people.) I felt like I was falling behind, never, ever, to catch up.

Secondly, hard-copy publications are hardly “news you can use,” Research, client communications, comment and analysis – all this now happens online. That darn hard copy was always somewhere else when I needed it.

Thirdly, my family stopped using the newspaper as an advertising medium years ago. An ad for a neighborhood garage sale costs $26, about half the take for some of our less successful events. Need to sell something? Craig’s list is better, faster and free.  Full-color pictures, unlimited words, and crazy people don’t get your phone number.

Finally, there was the green issue.  I was accumulating hundreds of pounds of paper every year.  Sure, I tried to recycle it, but found out that our town discards newspaper if it gets wet on rainy collection days. So a good part of our hoard went in the landfill anyway.

So I cut back my newspaper purchases.  And then the News and Observer layoffs started. Coincidence? Maybe. But if an English/History major in the PR business isn’t subscribing, what does that mean for the future of newspapers?

Based on what’s happening at the N&O, it means no more true “beat” reporters.  Such specialization is a luxury in the short-staffed bullpen of the future. We can expect even less reporting on dry (but important) subjects like state and local government, taxation or insurance,  and probably not a whole lot of primary research or investigative journalism.  Too time-consuming, too labor intensive, too expensive.

Perhaps most concerning, we can expect journalistic points of view to skinny down to, well, one.  The Charlotte Observer and the News and Observer are really one publication from a business standpoint.  So the viewpoint of Bill Kruger – now editor in charge of the newspapers’ joint state capital staff -- will likely establish the political point-of-view at both publications. One guy decides what news hundreds of thousands of readers will get?  Makes me long for the days of two daily newspapers. 

Oh, I forgot. I killed them.

When the gang here at Capstrat set out to brainstorm some ideas for SXSW 2009, we talked about what "digital will" service might look like. We decided that the basic model would allow a user to write e-mail messages and they would be sent on their behalf posthumously. The user would be prompted to check in from time to time to keep the messages from being sent. It's like having a jet ski engine stop when you fall off or stopping a train if the operator isn't touching the controls. It's called a dead man's switch.

www.deadmansswitch.net went into beta in late July with a service that does just this. From their site:

This is how this works. You write a few e-mails, and choose the recipients. These emails are encrypted with military-grade algorithms, so you can be sure that no-one except the intended recipient will ever read them. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to... happen... to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an "electronic will," one could say.

The concept here isn't new. People have been writing wills and leaving behind letters for centuries, but now we have an online equivalent. I'm not sure how I feel about having a web server send an e-mail asking if I am alive, but the service is designed to give you several chances to verify your continued existence. I also think these guys deserve the award for the most morbid user welcome message on the Internet:

The last time you showed signs of life before today was on Friday, September 19, 2008. Now you can write a new email, or see the ones you have already written:

Of course, the terms of service state that "it comes without any warranty, neither express nor implied (even the actual sending of the messages is not guaranteed, but we'll do our best)."

What do you think about this? Is it something worth using or too morbid to think about?

Last week Capstrat's John Romano asked a few questions about the digital afterlife .  I set out to investigate what might happen to my online identity if I were to pass away.

Here's what a few online services say about the deceased in their terms of service.

Facebook

"When we are notified that a user has died, we will generally, but are not obligated to, keep the user's account active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments."

Yahoo (Flickr)

"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."

MySpace

MySpace does not have an official policy in their terms of service, but I found the following in a CBS News article. "MySpace said in a statement it handles deceased members' pages on a "case-by-case basis" and does not "allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile." Profiles can be deleted if that's requested by family members."

Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Brightkite, ClaimID, del.icio.us and Pownce don't seem to have anything formal in their terms.  So, in short, they aren't obligated to do anything.  My digital identity might live on, or it might not.  What is it going to take to bring this issue to the forefront and force the proprietors of the social web to address it?  I suppose only time will tell.