What happens to a picture with data loss.

It was late 2005 and I had just finished a meal with Jeff Barr at what used to be one of my favorite restaurants in Bellingham, the Big Fat Fish Company.  Why that establishment used to be my favorite is a topic for an entirely different blog post.

As we were leaving I asked Jeff what kind of digital camera he used. What I’d hoped would be a quick recommendation for a replacement camera turned out to be an eye opening experience.  Jeff said he didn’t like the concept of digital pictures and digital video because he didn’t know of any viable way to store digital files for the long term.

What?  Nobody told me that. I’d been using a digital camera for years. Was he saying that all of my pictures were in jeopardy?  Turns out that’s exactly what he was saying. Jeff works for Amazon as a technology evangelist and is a pretty credible guy in my book.  I paid close attention and felt compelled to do some research of my own.

I already had a sense that hard drives were problematic since I’d experienced several platter collapses or other hard drive failures in my life.  I also knew that hard drives had the additional problem of being a magnetic media. (Those of us who can remember cassette tapes and VHS know how poor magnetic media is for long term storage and playback.)  I learned that USB drives and memory cards only had a limited number of read/write cycles.

What about online storage?  In theory, storing files across the internet on redundant systems seems like a good idea, and until recently it appeared to be the only real solution for long-term storage. The problems associated with online storage is fodder for a future post. Let’s just say it did not meet my criteria for permanent storage.

My search led to a solution that will outlast my requirements, perhaps keeping my information safe for centuries. I understand that I probably don’t need my files to last that long, but I do need them to hold out until another viable permanent solution is available.

The answer came from a smart group of professors at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (more on this later), and I ultimately invested in the company that licensed the technology from BYU. Right from the beginning I could see that the company was hyper-focused on the enterprise and government markets.

But I wanted access to this for the public’s personal use.  My company, Humanicity, operating under the name “Cranberry,” has since secured the exclusive rights to this new technology for the consumer marketplace. Now, people like you and I can use this state-of-the-art digital media storage.

And it all started with a simple question over dinner with a friend.

Need more information?  Stay tuned to this blog or the Cranberry Web site for more details as we get closer to our public release of the Cranberry DiamonDisc™.

• Does my participation in this social media or social networking site add value to my online marketing efforts?
• Am I able to generate content within this space that is relevant to the audience?
• How can I use this tool to extend my brand?
• Am I committed to using this service to advance my brand (specifically am I willing to expend time and creative muscle)?
• Does this service allow me to create outbound links (regardless of their follow/no-follow state)?

With the above questions in mind, I started PeoplePond around a concept I call, Elastic SEO.  By using an elastic approach, I have seen my PeoplePond profile jump to the #2 spot in Google while my social media and networking content has seen a related boost.

This is basically a 4 step process:

1. Develop a single brand profile page.  Being partial to PeoplePond mine can be found at http://www.peoplepond.com/davidmcinnis.  The important thing here is to build a single online home for your brand profile to reside.  Notice my personal brand, my name, is in the URL. That’s important for your profile page to provide.
2. Create outbound links from all your social media profiles that will point to this central brand profile.  Twitter is probably the obvious example.  Log into your Twitter account and paste the link to your profile in the More Info URL box.  You cannot see the entire URL in the screencap below, but trust me, it is http://www.peoplepond.com/davidmcinnis.  Most social media sites have a place for you to include a link to your primary online location.  Make it count by linking each to your centralized brand profile.
   
   Take a look at http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmcinnis. Notice again that the link goes to my single brand profile page, in my case PeoplePond.

   LinkedIn is uniquely powerful for this since they offer the ability to add hypertext links to your profile.  Once you are logged in, add or edit your website links by clicking “Edit My Profile” and then “Additional Information [edit].”  Select a link type of “Other” and a space will appear for you to enter a link label (aka anchor text).  I choose the label, David McInnis Profile, when I have this option as a way to tell search engines this link points to what I consider to be my profile.  The result is now on my publicly visible and search engine crawl-able LinkedIn profile page.Do this over and over again with each social application that offers you the ability to link out from your public profile page within their system.

3. Finally, link out to all of the above services from your single profile.  Make sure that, if possible, you use the XFN tag “me” in the hyperlink so the search engines know the destination URL is part of your online brand.  This is as simple as including the rel=”me” tag in your hyperlink.  More information on XFN tags is available here: http://gmpg.org/xfn/
4. Now that you have created an elastic relationship between your social media content and your brand profile, concentrate most of your SEO efforts on your brand profile page.

As your brand profile rises in the search engine results your social media profiles and the deep content you create in those spaces will begin to experience a similar and very beneficial organic SEO lift as well.  Give it a try.  It’s fun to watch.