As a living thing powered by billions of people, the web is constantly evolving and currently one thing above all others is emerging. It’s a trend we’ve been talking about with clients for a while, it’s the rise of what we’re calling the expressive web.

According to Techcrunch, Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. It is one of the top 10 social media sites in the world.

Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Foodspotting are challenging original titans of the web like Flickr and Youtube in a serious way. They’re offering an altogether more sensual and collaborative type of social platform that provides people with greater opportunity to express themselves, in new ways, that’s proving highly attractive.

Four main drivers are powering this shift.

1. The expressive web creates extra value
We’ve laid the basic groundwork of the web, so what now? Reveling in the sensuality of rich, interactive content feeds into a basic Maslow desire for advanced self-expression. Increasingly people are finding their voice. That voice is creative, it wants to be expressed.

Smart brands will enable this and make it part of their culture. This is happening as a shift towards co-creation, too. As the web becomes more democratic, users also want to become more compelling by seeking out and adopting content platforms that are built on co-created expression, around them and their desires.

2. Masses of data makes socially powered curation attractive
Two years ago when we were saying to brand managers that brands of the future will need to be good at curation, many of them didn’t understand what we were saying. Now, reputations can be rapidly built and brand associations can be recast by good curation skills. Curation as a sense-making skill is only going to increase in demand. Platforms like Pinterest, Scoop.it and Storify that make curation easy are becoming big winners because of this.

3. Rich content contains more information
Ever since the logo was identified as a cool shorthand, a body of scientific evidence’s been amassed about how much information is conveyed by ‘the pretties’. Analytic types may gasp, but a good image contains substantially more information than the equivalent in words or numbers (up to 20 times more information in fact) which goes some way to explaining the popularity of the infographic.

Interactive features, responsive web design, sound effects all create what we’d call a ‘visceral’ reaction. A moment of interactivity that fires synpases has engagement potential and is also expressive.

So while words will always be around, the web’s giving us a whole new way of communicating in cool shorthands and it this has big implications for information architects and content managers.

4. Doing a job is harder these days, being expressive’s an antidote
In fact, 225m people in Europe don’t have a job at all. Those that do have full plates and can be pretty stressed out. It’s a sideways issue perhaps, but the expressive web is providing an alternative to traditional spoon-fed entertainment that enables escapism and self-discovery in ways which are just as highly accessible but where the user is in control.

The expressive web is therapy. It generates ideas and sparks the imagination. Another reason that explains people are taking to it in such numbers.

For marketers this is a very big deal. It’s a signal that, thanks to the social web, the essential nature of communication is taking a turn and it’s demonstrating how the quality of the co-created user-experiences becoming key performance indicators.

IBM’s Global CMO Study shows around 70% of chief marketing officers are unprepared for the explosion in data and the social web that the expressive web intersects. Many of them are in organizations with legacy structures finding it hard to turn around the way they do things.

As sites like Pinterest show, the expressive web has just ramped up the communication challenge a notch. It’s making it even more important that communication isn’t being seen as boring or difficult to use. It’s asking marketers to think about the way they define and serve up content in a fundamentally different way.

The expressive, artistic, web is the high touch equal-and-opposite to high tech functionality. It was never not going to happen. Are we prepared to make the most of it?

One definition of genius we really like round here is genius is ‘the ability to connect two seemingly unconnected things’.

Truly successful social businesses do this, they make connections between ideas and people. They also stimulate responses to create action potential, like synapses do when they fire. Social businesses make things happen, powered by affinities and the connective tissue of networked technology. And there’s no doubt that 2012 will be hallmarked to no small degree by the impact social business will have on it.

This raises some significant considerations for marketers. For social marketers that concentrate mostly on the ‘media’ part of social media, the ultimate aspiration and the holy grail of social, is to go viral. Social contagion’s the big win, the coup. The crucial key performance indicator is to make things shareable.

What social media like that thrives on however, and not entirely healthily, is often a shareability based on the open-mouthed factor of things that are either insane or incredible, spread out of disbelief, or momentary pleasure, and not much more.

Are we shattering an ecosystem we can all thrive in by doing so? As this mildly amusing article in 2002 accurately predicted, and Nick Carr’s book The Shallows has covered since, our attention spans are getting shorter.

We’ve slowly been turning into digital goldfish where everything competes with a ‘best ever’ or ‘awesome’ kind of hyperbole for share of mind, in the place of simply being interesting and sustainably relevant to a particular group of people with a shared interest, purpose or sense of communal identity that has longevity.

If the two chief gratification buttons in life are ‘fun’ and ‘meaning’ what’s relevant in this context is how, as Thomas Friedman and the historian Walter Russell Mead have both observed, after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, the Russians had a saying that seems particularly apt today:

‘It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.’

Have a think about that for a moment. It’s the essential reason why some viral social media campaigns can actually be unhelpful to brands. The sticking plaster on a short and increasingly unpredictable sales cycle, social media campaigns that are designed to go viral can end up fostering audience relationships based only on instant and temporary engagement in a similar way.

In 2012, social media tactics unconnected to core social values can serve up content that at a deep level devalues rather reinforces the impact of a social brand and its sustainability. Social business brands need a purpose beyond profit or product and a core sense of the big picture.

The good news is here though. Beyond going viral, is going scalar.

To make a mark in 2012, the genius of making connections between two seemingly unconnected things is the kind of social media integration that can quite literally scale your business. Going scalar is pulling people into your business who are advocates beyond the act of sharing.

Scaling business through the harnessing of participation and deep insights that go beyond likes, +1’s and unique views can mean walls can become permeable membranes between a brand and its users, that business becomes designed around connections instead of divisions, that being ‘on brand’ can happen anywhere by anyone, and that talent can be brought into the business; that target audiences can be replaced by shared experiences that have lasting impact.

There’s no internal and external in the social organization, so the costs of managing another marketing channel (as social is so often seen as being) or of outsourcing your voice (as agencies so often encourage) become part of a leaner, more connected and more empowered constituency of committed users that can co-create the future fuel for business strategy with you.

It’s a sustainable strategy for how a brand’s or organisation’s social voice can get bigger, and have lasting impact. That’s why the two words embedded into Visceral Business are ‘is us’. We really believe in enabling the kind of social business that can create shared value, long term stakeholders and sustainable cultures.

If you want social business success in 2012 going viral’s not necessarily a bad aspiration, but going scalar’s possibly going to be a better one.

So the question is your business sufficiently adapted and suited to scalar, or will it rely on the flash in pan of short-term virality? Can deep authentic connections help you make your mark in 2012? It’s a genius opportunity.

They were the firstly ‘product’, the tangible good or an intangible service that’s mass produced or manufactured at large scale with a specific volume of units.

Then ‘price’, the amount a customer pays for the product which the business increased or decreased the price paid if other stores had the same product.

‘Promotion’, representing all of the communications that a marketeer used in the marketplace and finally ‘place’, the way of getting the product to the consumer and/or how easily accessible it is to consumers.

That was then and this is now, and as marketers think about how to corporate social business into what they’re doing there’s arguably just as much of a need for a framework, for the same kind of sense-making.

If we’re doing it all again, what might the 4 P’s look like today? Well, here’s a suggestion:

People. Your core asset. Whether they’re inside or outside the business itself, in social business people are number one, they’re both the creators, and the carriers, of your media and messages. As things turn out, no amount of viral agency cleverness comes close to doing the job without them; so get to know them, connect with them, create relationships with them in and across the communities in which they exist. The people are the new product that powers any form of social organization.

Platforms are the conduit of that connectedness. Platforms can be proprietary, like Facebook, Twitter and Google +, they can be bespoke as your own communities inside and outside the business, and they can be shared, as places of connected interest, the places of old, where people will gather.

Protocols. Old processes may still be in place in many organizations, culture change takes time, and neither people, platforms or points of connections can do much without being enabled by them. Social businesses depend on the cohesion generated by protocols, that is the ability to feed information through the pathways that can be easily understood and taken for granted. Softer and more fluid than processes, protocols are ‘how we roll’ the collective, intelligent, agile and learning ways the organization puts in place the means to grow and become more effective.

Points of connection are the pulse points that move people when brands are experiences. They’re the moments that matter, the values that are shared and everything that people come into contact with as the touchpoints of the social brand. As social business fundamentally changes how we ‘do interaction’, that thing we used to call marketing becomes a series of points of connection, a purposeful exchange between you and your people around shared social objects.

Many brands and organizations are just at the start of incorporating social business and media into the way they do things. The four P’s may have changed, but the idea of finding a framework to make sense of what’s needed remains the same, a kind of connective tissue that can unify and help frame what social business means. Ideas people can buy into create elegant transitions. It would be great to hear what you think – does this resonate with today’s networked business needs, what’s missing?

Today at Interlagos, Brazil, it’s the final Grand Prix of the 2011 Formula 1 season. It’s also 20 years since the incomparable Ayrton Senna won there in front of his home crowd (if you haven’t seen the film Senna it’s highly recommend as a story of life, passion and purpose; the racing is a metaphor, just a part).

Brazil is a country of expression, with many valuable lessons inside that, particularly as we enter an age where expression’s now a part of an ever growing universal currency of connection.

This logo is a study in visual design that captures some of those lessons, a study of form, feeling and identity and a combination of the visual and the visceral that matches, in many ways, the peerlessness of the man.

For brands, social business takes the standards of brand expression required to be successful to new levels.

Brand design has to do more to be functional because of social media than ever before. It has to work in compact spaces and express values and a sense of culture and personality that reach out, evoke as well as being capable of being differentiated and distinctive.

Most of all, it has to move people, to jump off the screen and be the beginning of a narrative and a journey of association.

This logo is a balanced blend of identification and communication, graphically arresting and also compact, it is technically focused, informative and articulate.

What sets it apart as a logo is that captures the unique personality of the man – the restlessness of his quest, his dynamic energy that people love and associate with him so much, as well as the cool technical design of his focus that meant he delivered, capturing the imagination, hearts and minds of millions of sports fans along the way.

The red swoosh of the track-fashioned ‘S’ is itself, quite literally, a masterstroke; partially incompleted, full of energy, like him. It’s a racing logo of course, but it’s Senna’s logo reinforced by the simple name below it, in less-is-more lettering with just the right amount of typographical flair.

In the design is implicitly an articulation of the values and personality as well as a graphic shape and form that’s immediately recognisable, confident and authoritative.

This effervescent identity speaks for him and his legacy long after the moment; as a logo it reconnects people to the excitement he created on the track.

In death, Senna’s magic lives on. In life, some brands are barely pulsating. We try to do work that does something about this, combining the visual and the visceral so that at every level, the identity of the collective, connected brand makes a difference.

The two days of the conference explored a wide range of dimensions of wellbeing and the role of play as part of the social agenda, and it meshed very well with Visceral Businesses ideas about social business and how, ultimately, engagement, shared value and co-creation comes through doing things that move people to respond and make a difference.

So, play for us has never been a passive but a highly creative pursuit, and with that in mind it was a great opportunity to be involved in a line of enquiry that was so stimulating.

Those two days, and the number of dimensions explored in them, were a refreshing antidote to the massively overhyped, headline grabbing nature of ‘gamification’ that’s somehow managed to obscure many currencies of play on offer that are less lightweight, more nuanced and in the long term almost certainly more sustainable.

The enormous level of flux being experienced in community and commercial landscapes right now suggests that maybe it’s time we conduct a very conscious consideration into how we develop the ways we can ‘do interaction’. What happens when ‘gamification’ becomes a generic, what then?

For this conference I was asked to think about the question ‘what possibilities for sustainable wellbeing does networked and gaming culture bring us?’, particularly as we see an emergence of cyberbeings and cyberbusinesses, and this is a summary.

Few people in the modern industrialised world haven’t got something to thank Steve Jobs for. Some of his legacy’s very obvious, some it goes much further than the products themselves and is less so – cultural narratives of empowerment we’re only beginning to fully appreciate in reflection.

Absence is, sadly, often a way to view true value.

The ‘blow the top off my head off’ moment for me, and my first encounter with Steve Jobs’ genius, came in 1984. As a 23 year old account manager, I was given the job of producing the first advertising that Apple ever did in the UK.

It was nothing as glamorous as the famous Ridley Scott ads shaking up the States at the time. The budgets they had over there were way beyond what we had. Apple was still a relatively fledgling company and we were a new market, but we did get to do some classy and arresting black and white advertising in the quality press, perfect for the slightly unconventional architects, creative agencies and other firms that Apple were pitching to at the time.

What was really great about the gig though was the free prize that came with it, an Apple MkII that cost £5,000 installed in my office. £5,000! That alone made it a bit special. But when I got to move that mouse and wiggle a MacPaint digital spray can around a screen that it did it for me. Nothing like it had ever existed. It was a wow moment, a creative wonder that went way beyond working, and I was sold.

I think I can honestly say I can put my entire love affair with geekery down to that moment, just in the same way a stroll down the Kings Road at the age of 11 made me fall in love with creative design. Those moments are visceral, they go deep down and they stay with you.

A whole plethora of stories of Steve’s insight, vision, daring, focus and social impact have been unbundled as he steps down as CEO, and the reputation of the man, how it’s translated into serious dollars and cents in a way that has briefly made Apple this week the world’s largest company, is worth thinking about. Because Apple, despite everything about it that has been about product design, has also been about the quality of its people.

Brands like Apple are personality-led. Their culture, values and ways of doing things, built from and inspired by passion, have set it apart. And what stood out in the tributes for me is Robert Scoble’s take on something very important, nothing to do with the shiny sleek surface design that Apple’s renowned for.

What Robert Scoble’s said about what was special about Steve Jobs was this: Steve’s the ‘only one guy in the industry [that] has ever told me to look at the back of a product to understand its beauty’.

It’s worth considering that back in the day when Apple was spawned, user-friendly was a term that didn’t exist before then. Quite simply, no-one had ever thought of things that way.

Now, user-friendliness has become a holistic user experience. As organisations and all their touchpoints become more social, we can all learn a great deal from that little piece of Steve’s wisdom.

The look and feel of a product, the way Apple approached it, was ground breaking, it still is. Product focus is still important, but needs service and making meaning attached to it, now, to matter.

Today, the ‘back of the product’ is its people.

What makes Apple distinctive is the legions of fanboys and girls, people happy to be defined in no small measure by that ethos and what it’s led to for them.

Social organisations are all about this. Falling in love with the back of the product and understanding its beauty in the social organisation is about bringing out the people who are a part of it, making connections that go way beyond technical.

We can take people out of the boxes they live in within organisations and make more of them, relishing the inventiveness and creativity they have inherently. We can produce things of wonder as connected networks, like Steve Jobs did. The intellectual understanding and emotional commitment is there, often disaffected and unused; as with a technology reinvented and reimagined, with guidance, vision and social leadership, it can transform, in just the same way he did it.

Business didn’t used to be personal. Now it is. 

Steve Jobs’ focus can live on in a new way.

It’s not what you’re thinking. This is about what lies beyond the many tracking, posting, collaborating and measuring apps there are out there, all of which are a veritable supermarket in their own right.

As any supermarketer will tell you, there’s a big shift involved in helping a consumer in from the point they see the banners outside the store – the media – to how they actually navigate through it and the nature of the user experience – the modeling. The point is that social brand architecture, or the lack of it, can make or break a social brand.

In the early to mid 1990’s a lot of my time was spent advising retailers. We used fundamental sets of assumptions that were in service to, and all about, how customers shopped a store. Many of them are still used today.

Navigating one’s way through a large supermarket is one of modern life’s complex organizational events. Navigating the web’s and virtual organisation’s a step on from that again, which is why services like Google helping by pushing stuff to us.

A socially branded organisation is somewhere between the two. It has a multitude of elements – social objects – and a complex range of activities going on inside it, similar to the number of lines a supermarket may carry on its shelves.

It has a wide choice of elements that consumer and participants can pick up and engage with. It’s accessible via the web, but is still one with a threshold, a sense of inside and outside in terms of belonging that makes it a virtual environment; a brand is by definition an identifiable space.

If you’re a maker of a social brand or business, or a consumer of and participant in one, the degree to which that social organisation can be thought of as your ‘local convenience store’ in terms of familiarity and loyalty, depends on how well the user experience delivers an interesting and sensible shopping experience that makes it something that’s easy to go back to.

In the same way as those retail principles did out of physical spaces two decades ago, there’s a big need to make sense of the digital cultures of brands today, because the curation and cultural meaning of social brands is crucial if people are going to come along and browse, select activities to participate in and commit to involving themselves in your brand, what we quite quaintly call ‘social engagement.’

There’s the things like the merchandising of your hashtags, how are you doing that?

There’s the clustering of social and digital events. How do people get a snapshot of all of it very quickly? It asks for a framework for social category management.

There’s the livery of your social brand architecture. Just as there are semiotics – colours, images, words – associated with fresh food, the pharmacy, the deli, the meat, fish and diary sections of a supermarket, things that create distinctive associations and triggers of understanding, so there are social semiotics. There are the ways people sense-make online around different parts of the social organization as well as unique and distinctive cultural attributes you can call your own, the social differentiators and protocols, visual and verbal languages and points of focus, that need to be easily known.

Many companies are using social media for rapid fire business as usual in the same way as supermarkets are geared to everyday transactional exchanges. The social media supermarket today is a trolley-filling of Likes and +1’s and Share buttons and clickthroughs. But these items are not where the value is for consumers. The cultural value of store environment, the ranging, matters just as much, the social ambience and the ease of shopping.

No social consumer’s going to go out and put 10 Likes and 5 +1′s’ on the shopping list of their social activity today. That’s why brands must become ‘go-to’ destinations to be truly socially potent.

Consumers shop the stores they like because they know where the categories are and because they’re easy to navigate. It’s not just about what social media can do to get people ‘into’ the social organization, it’s what you’re going to do with them once they’re in there that matters. The modelling of your social environment makes sense of the media and the platforms that support it.

What we see is that many organizations are currently frantically trying to put social media on their shelves while ignoring the basic layout of their social environment, but without a social brand framework at an operational level it’s an approach that can only lead to a shallow depth of engagement and restrict the size of user buy-in.

Beyond the frenzy of tooling up to be social, social brands and organizations have the challenge of creating special ambiences, experiences and making sense of what’s on their shelf.

They should be considering the question  of how they’re going to create a compelling user experience, because when there’s a high volume of goods and competing calls for their attention on offer, what really matters is the means to navigate through it in a way that’s capable of continually connecting with a consumer’s desire to shop.

(With apologies to Seth Godin for riffing off one of his favourite pictures).

There’s a phrase we’re all familiar with, ‘So and so’s on fire today’. You hear it all the time.

Being on fire’s a state that talks about the temporal nature of influence, how it’s no longer a permanence, as well as the patchy nature of knowledge, and how it’s lumpy.

Another phrase I like describes what I think is the true nature of talent, and it’s ‘everyone’s a genius some of the time’. Einstein apparently couldn’t navigate his way home from the office too well. We’re all better at some things than others. Peak experiences are peak experiences because they do exactly that – they peak. Elizabeth Gilbert in her TED talk speaks about creative genius as a divine attendent spirit and Ruth Stone, the poet, who first encouraged her to recognise that genius as something that comes to visit, when we’re ‘on fire’.

This approach to creativity and talent development is a substantial shift in thinking away from the imperative of ever accelerating performance that people have been conditioned to, where there’s no room to relax in driving operating performance to new levels.

When it comes to talent development, the phenomenon of metaphorically being ‘on fire’ asks us to recognise that genius and flashes of inspiration come at the least expected moments.

Eureka breakthroughs involve accepting the nature of value is undulating. Social community expects that people will ebb and flow in their interest levels to us, in fact it’s part of the attraction. In being this way, it offers the opportunity to create human resource principles for developing social business equity that are more sustainable.

Fortunately now, there is the ability to aggregate the responses and contributions people make through social CRM. We can recognise and accommodate undulating performance, more easily and more of the time. We can develop a body of work as a part of our online credentials, the tracks and markings of the digital footprints we’re making, individually and as organised social brands collectively over time. And we can create a contribution economy in which people are freer to play to their peaks.

So now, the question is, what can you do to enable your fans and supporters and employees to be on fire, more of the time? What can you do to enable your organisation to do the same? What is your strategy for embracing imperfections and off days? Is your brand capable of fostering and holding the fire in people, or is it in danger of going downhill by saying ‘use the stairs’?

There are a lot of people trying to put their finger on the special sauce that makes a social brand succeed, to seek and find the Holy Grail as far as where all this wired up connectivity is headed.

We think in a nutshell it come down your brand’s EU IQ. A brand’s or organisations EU IQ is a combination of Enjoyment and Usefulness. It’s how well the brand’s proposition offers this and how well it connects, communicates and stimulates conversation around it.

The big win in raising any brand’s profile is to amplify the sense of purpose, mission and cause it has, and that’s a strange muscle for many brands to flex because logos have mostly been badging devices and the ticket of entry to transactions.

Social brands ask for involvement and the fostering of relationships, where the intangible value of gathering around a cause to support a cause, to solve a problem and to pursue a goal has a big part to play.

And then there’s the enjoyable part. It’s got to be fun right? Social brands can work out how they enrich and add something to the quality of people’s lives through sheer interest and enjoyment, especially when brand moments are throwaway conveniences and utilities that you’re using but it isn’t going to change the world. Unless you want to compete on price and convenience, a brand’s Eu IQ is a core differentiator.

We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at where the business drivers in today’s markets are headed and think it’s time for new models of organisation to push the boat out beyond what Sara Roberts calls Qwerty thinking. As I said in my TEDx talk last year, there’s progress to be made by moving away from a mechanical approach to a biological one and reframing organisational transformation so that it promotes the organic strengths and capabilities within the brand and its essence.

The acid test, we think, consists of 5 markers for successful social organisations.

1. They’re Networked, incorporating network principles into their behaviour and operating via a
 distributed model, either in terms of how they’re structured and/or how they reward people.

2. They’re Seamless. Community blurs the lines between the inside and the outside of the organisation 
and collaborative, two-way dialogue’s built into all interaction.

3. They’re Open. The business model demonstrates transparency and user-centric perspectives.

4. They’re Compelling and the brand is congruent and credible. It has social and commercial
 value, comprised of people, rituals, symbols, values and behaviours that create competitive edge
 beyond the logo, that are the platform for a sustainable business.

5. They’re Beyond Profit. Their operating framework’s neither ‘for profit’ or ‘not for profit’, it’s ‘beyond
 profit’, satisfying a triple win for the business, the quality of life of its people and for the planet. They recognise social currency includes time, money, love and attention as part of the mix.

The blend of this may vary, depending on the business and the type of business its in, but as conventional business models find it harder to sustain business margins and deliver returns in value, hitting the mark on these is becoming a good bet for investment, participation and buy-in.

What do you think is the special sauce of social brands? Could it be the visceral connective tissue of people coming together around brands they understand and believe in? I’d love to hear your point of view.

Enable others, and appreciate them.

Be in the experience for the moment. Be in the relationship for the long term.

Be open, ask as well as tell. Make pleasure the priority.

So, what do you think? What’s made a difference to your writing, or moved you in the writing of others?

Thanks to @popplestone for inspiring me to write this.  It’s amazing what can happen while waiting for a bus (and that’s a metaphor).