by

Robin Heppell

Hepp in Wired.com

Wired article May 5, 2008While presenting at the ICCFA 2008 Annual Convention in San Diego, my Blackberry went off and it was a freelance reporter, Marty Graham. She had been monitoring the schedule of the San Diego Convention Center and saw that there was a Funeral Convention taking place in her town.

Wired is the first word on technology. Every month in the magazine and every day on the website, WIRED explores how ideas fueled by innovation change the world. – Wired.com

I made arrangements for Marty to receive a Press Pass and she attended my “Web 2.0 – The New Internet for Funeral Directors” presentation. After my session we had a great interview, and a couple of follow-up phone conversations. Also, she was able to get in touch with pal, John Heald at Tributes.com.

Tributes.com is part of the Eons.com, founded by Monster.com’s Jeff Taylor. In the Tech World, the founder of Monster has a little more appeal than the Funeral Futurist, so Taylor and his efforts are the stars of the article. Marty penned a great story, you should go check it out at Wired: Monster.com Founder Starts Social Networking Site for the Dead.

“People who spend the winter in Florida log on to faraway websites during the winter to check to see who died back home,” the Vancouver-based funeral director and consultant says. “Most funeral homes have websites now, and those that don’t are looking at setting up.”

Word of caution in the comments – there was some whining going on by the folks at Legacy.com that they didn’t get the props that they thought they deserved in the article. It appears that Legacy has some agreement with various newspapers throughout the U.S. It has been reported to me that these in papers, funeral homes are not allowed to include a reference to their website for friends to leave condolences for the family because the paper has this ability via Legacy. This seems more like collusion and less like serving families – what do you think?

For all of the funeral directors reading this, please let me know if you are forbidden to include your website’s URL in your local newspaper’s obituaries – I would love to know!

In:

,

Tags:

2 responses to “Hepp in Wired.com”

  1. Dale Clock

    Hep,

    Legacy does have a big hold on a lot of newspapers. Our papers here in Michigan allow us to put our URL’s in the obits. But they also require us to pay an additional fee on top of the regular obit fee to fund their participation with Legacy, so our obits are actually listed on 2 sites; ours and Legacy. The only way I agreed to this is that in our local paper, Legacy is not allowed to sell, link, or display any of their stuff (flowers, fancy guest books, etc.) on my obits.

    I feel that it’s important to have my obits listed online at the newspaper’s site in addition to my site to make it easy on the consumer. I figure the more places people can find me the better.

    Plus we keep our newspaper obits to just the basic info, with very little fluff, because we write a complete Life Story with pictures and a video and post that all on our site. At lifestorynet.com we have 80,000 unique visitors a week who spend time on our memory pages and are really engaged there. I’m sure most funeral web sites don’t have those kind of numbers.

    Dale Clock

  2. Robin Heppell

    Dale…

    Thanks for the note!

    You are correct – you are the exception as you guys at Life Story Network get it. It’s all about engaging people on your site and Life Story does that very well.

    I just want to make sure that it didn’t sound like I was against the newspapers and / or Legacy having online obits – just when they won’t allow funeral homes to direct people to the funeral home’s website.

    Unfortunately, I hear too many funeral directors say, “Our newspaper has online obits, so we don’t need them on our site.” Besides being able to exponentially increase the number of pages of you website and get the traffic numbers like you do; they are allowing the newspaper to serve the family instead of doing it themselves.

    In ten years, there will be funeral home websites with 30 pages still, and then there will be sites like yours with thousands of pages – who will Google think is the authority?

    Thanks again Dale for sharing – keep up the great work!

    …Hep

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *