What happens to your Twitter after you die?

When you are dead, what happens to your Twitter account? Last week Alltop posted an article explaining what becomes of your Hotmail, Gmail and Facebook accounts with a link to an article on what happens to your MySpace and Yahoo after death. But what about Twitter?

I was unable to find any mention of Twitter’s policy with death when scanning their Terms of Service or Privacy Policy pages, so I sent the Twitter support team an email.

As per Twitter’s Privacy Policy, they cannot disclose account information or passwords to anyone, even after you die. That means that your next of kin won’t have access to your direct messages and they wont be able to send out a message to inform your followers.

Twitter will remove the account for you though, if requested. A family member needs to fax or post a copy of the death certificate in to Twitter along with the Twitter user name of the person who died.

Without thinking too hard about it, I can name two dozen online accounts that I have opened, from blogs to banking, shopping to socializing, but I am sure I have even more. With so much of our lives online these days, do you think people will start leaving instructions as to what to do with their empire of online profiles after they die?

You can find me on Twitter here: @DanHowe.

Gorilla vs. Bear: channel executives decide

From the Five Minute Interview section in the back of MicroScope magazine, where they ask a series of questions to channel executives, this question made me smile:

If a grizzly bear and a silverback gorilla decided to have a no holds barred fight, which would you put your money on and why?

From past interviews, four out of seven channel executives chose the grizzly, citing the claws, teeth and the size of the beast.

Those that sided with the silverback thought that the agility and intellect of the gorilla would help it dominate.

Who’s right? There’s only one way to find out:



Oh yeah, there’s also some IT channel questions in the interviews… but I prefer to focus on what’s really important.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

In a video posted on PRWeek today, Shel Israel spoke about how PR practitioners need to change tactics as social media changes the game:

There are a bunch of PR people who think that their job is to pitch and pitch and pitch and pitch and if they keep going on this route and keep up these practices and bring them into social media, I see a future for them in the restaurant service industry.

One of the changes that social media has brought is the way journalists find sources for their articles.

Last month, work took me to the office of a national UK newspaper. Once we got passed the bottleneck at the security gate (the Canadian papers I’ve visited don’t have nearly that much security!) and made it into the newsroom, we were able to sit down and chat with one of the writers.

He spoke about how he is increasingly getting more and more sources and stories from the comment section of his online articles. Despite the amount of extreme ranting, it turns out that most journalists actually read every one of the comments to their articles.

Instead of pitching clients to a journalist in an email or phone call, there’s a place for PR to identify articles and help clients craft comments to insert themselves into the conversation with an opinion on a subject both of interest to the journalist and relevant to the client’s business. This can be done on the newspaper's website, or in 140 characters on Twitter or even through sites like LinkedIn.

Maybe that’s one of the changes Shel was talking about.

Learning French with social media

In the new year I am going to regain my competency in the French language. Having scored only elementary on International House's online grammar test, I thought I’d get a head start on January classes and see what I can pick up using YouTube and Twitter.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much out there.

On Twitter, there’s a neat game called Tweet French, where users reply to a daily question, but @TweetFrench has not been updated since the summer

On YouTube there’s a lot of video French lessons that look as if they are from 1993, there’s also a few ‘repeat after me’ videos but memorizing words for fruit or body parts isn’t the same as learning conversational French. And there are channels like jremy7, which looks kinda useful, but just isn’t for me.

Where is the excitement in learning French? Where are the cool, funny, interesting Twitter or YouTube lessons? Where’s HotForWords en français?

Anyone have any recommendations?

For now, I'll just stick with watching Coeur de Pirate videos.

Why I buy the news

Despite newspaper circulation dropping, and ad sales falling around the world, I can proudly say that I am one of the Generation Y who is reading the papers.
Even though I get all the dailies at work, I still buy a copy of the Times to read on my way in on the train every morning. Why? It is all down to the freebies:It's like getting a toy with a box of cereal. With a new book every day, my winter reading list is set.

EEEEK!

Today I sent out an email on behalf of some friends and their new website.

For some reason, the email sent multiple times.

And wow, Twitter is a powerful thing. Those who received the multiple messages are venting for sure.

I can’t apologize enough for the mistake and inconvenience the multiple emails have caused.

In response to some of the Tweets, don’t worry. I was helping out friends, they are not my work clients and you wont be receiving follow-up calls ;)

Sorry again,

Dan

PS. My blog traffic is also exploding. Hopefuly, while you are here you can check out my Gambia project.