We tend to think of Halloween or All Hallows' Evening as a yearly celebration imported from America that allows children to go trick or treating and adults to attend fancy dress parties dressed up as ghouls and monsters so that they can then put pictures up of themselves on facebook. By Wanda Goldwag, Non-Executive Chair of True North Human Capital Ltd.

Its origin is in fact European probably from the early pagan festivals of the dead and this led me to think about a much more modern dilemma the dead in my social and business networks and the dead businesses that still appear on Google. Perhaps it’s because I’m now in my 50’s but both on linked in and on facebook I have connections with dead people whose profiles remain there forever. Apart from making me sad and have a momentary worry about my own mortality this issue will soon become a genuine business problem.

There has always been a marketing challenge to ensure that dead people were removed from customer databases and direct marketing activity but this has now been formalised with general access for update purposes to mortality records. It is equally possible to close profiles on social media accounts such as facebook who have a process that as they state allows “When a person passes away, we memorialize their account to protect their privacy. When a timeline is memorialized, we continue to honor the account's privacy settings and implement security features to protect the account”.

However the reality is that very often no-one thinks to close these accounts and similarly any search on Google is likely to provide false information about businesses that have long since closed as no receiver or administrator ever takes the time to remove the entries. As search engines become the key source of reference and social and business networks are increasingly used to advertise goods and services, to source and recruit new staff and to provide business development opportunities these dead entries will increasingly distort and clog up their usefulness.

Perhaps we all therefore need to think about adding to our wills the instructions to remove our personal and business lives from the web so that we do not also become the living dead.