Facebook Funeral

In a plot twist few soaps fans could have seen coming, ABC pulled the plug on two of its longest running daytime TV programs, "One Life to Live" and "All My Children," earlier this month. The shows were born in the era of boxy TVs and a good decade before cable. In a sign of the times, ABC posted the details promptly to its Facebook fan pages, home to nearly 700,000 die-hard fans combined, alerting them that the final episode for each show would run in the coming months. The message was clear: enjoy it while it lasts before the mourning period -- the entertainment business prefers the term "sunset" -- sets in.

Bernhard Warner

Fans aren't happy, but the broadcaster went where few brands and organizations are willing to go these days: to their warm and fuzzy fan pages to announce the death of a loved one, be it a discontinued show, a terminated product or a suspended campaign.

Brands and organizations spend increasingly greater marketing funds and manpower to build a virtual community around new product launches and ad campaigns. They're very good at starting the party, but have failed to master the art of the poignant goodbye. In a few cases they've even abandoned the community altogether when a show's over.

To be sure, marketers aren't the best equipped in an organization to talk publicly about death and loss. (That's the job of the PR pros, apparently.) But surely death and loss are inevitable discussion topics that will arise in any community. Social media communities are no different.

How then have organizations chosen to communicate the end? Here are a few notable examples from the past few months:

1) A few months to live

ABC's "All My Children" and "One Life to Live"

Death notice: Citing "extensive research into what today's daytime viewers want," broadcaster ABC on April 14 announces that this will be the final season for daytime soaps "All My Children" and "One Life to Live." They will be replaced by new shows that glorify good cooking and, respectively, nutrition and weight loss. The 670,000 "AMC" and "OLL" fans on Facebook are informed the shows will "sunset" over the next few months; their final episodes will be in September and in January, 2012. The details are posted to the Facebook fan pages of both shows where many of the fans first hear of the news.

Remembered for: Heroically, the network continues with its dutiful Facebook postings, even if the travails of characters like "AMC's" Tad and Cara and Griffin seem somehow trivial in comparison to the faithful. Fans beseech the network to reconsider and even form an ABC protest group, vowing to, among other things, boycott the network's coverage of the royal wedding. But the inevitable is starting to sink in among soaps die-hards. One fan ominously predicts doom for the genre: "NBC is getting ready to cancel 'Days of our Lives.' They will not be picking up more soaps." These are not happy times for soaps fans. At least they have each other to commiserate, and a few more months of shows to savor the moment.