It’s just a perception, but I sense an important threshold’s been crossed over the course of the last few weeks.

‘We’re working it through’, was how Danny Alexander described what was happening in the days immediately after the General Election in the UK a month ago, after the electorate handed back the most exquisitely hung Parliament to politicians for more than a generation.

‘We’re working it through’, is how Mark Zuckerberg might put having to deal with consumer mutiny over privacy control plus an increasingly deep questioning by some Facebook users about what the DNA of Facebook and the core values of ‘being Zucked’ are all about.

‘We’re working it through’, also describes the grim reality as B.P. struggles to find an authentic response to a global sense of condemnation, cynicism and disbelief that’s attaching itself to the B.P. brand as surely as the oil slicks are landing on the beaches of Louisiana.

These three situations all have something in common. They all ask for organizational adaptability at a deep level. They challenge what all the parties involved stand for and represent.

What’s interesting about the phrase, we’re ‘working it through’ is that it’s an iterative, hands-on approach to problem solving. It involves contradictory pairs of muscles and often the engagement of opposites to achieve progress.

In the case of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats who have formed the Coalition Government, ‘working it through’ led to harnessing a collective imagination and a bigger ambition than either was capable of alone. It led to ‘new politics’, a clear and confidently articulated manifesto, a shared cabinet creating credibility for the platform of an inclusive ‘big society’.

It didn’t take much to turn the dial on the mood music about the election. In a few days it shifted from mainly doom mongering conversations of conflict, woe, indecision and a re-election within the year, to ‘lawn love’ and a decidedly pacified and somewhat surprisingly positive reaction from the electorate.

It was the body language that did it, a change in behaviour, the emotional maturity to go from combatants to colleagues in pursuit of a collective national interest.

There’s a creative truth that comes to my mind in this context which is, ‘if an idea’s not working then it’s time to get a bigger one’. I think both David Cameron and Nick Clegg became receptive to that as a result of that impasse; our politicians have become more consensual and to some degree at least, have adapted. For the time being, it’s paid off and the voters have been largely assuaged by their creativity.

The difference for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is the opposition to what’s being pitched on user privacy’s led to the biggest backlash a social media platform’s ever experienced. This is new territory. It raises questions about what happens when you represent the digital footprints of more than 500 million people and how much licence any provider has to act unilaterally in a connected age.

The response has been that there are privacy protection groups within Facebook promoting user control over privacy settings to fill this vacuum of management. In doing so, they’re acting like the cleaner fish of the network, helping Facebook stem the attrition of disgruntled users, in many cases persuading them to stay within the network better than Facebook’s capable of doing by itself.

It makes good business sense for Facebook to embrace these efforts and to knead them into their overall operating recipe. It’s an example of how the seeds of corporate strength and survival are often to be found within the opposable forces of a networked organization, in the same way as recombinant genes are said to be part at the core of our own DNA and our sustainability as a species.

The question in this is how many organizations recognise this and are equipped with the capability to be this adaptive?

As B.P. embarks on one of the largest shoring up exercises in corporate reputation we’ve seen in years, spending $50million on a slick damage limitation communications campaign, are they capable of being hands-on and credible enough to connect with the gritty realities and the issues, from a position of blatant integrity, to restore the trust that once existed in its brand?

Blatant integrity is present when people and organizations are comfortable with being held up to scrutiny and we’re big on ‘blatant integrity’ at Visceral Business. Organizations that can manage this welcome attention as a compliment knowing it’s a commercial currency, and welcome the opportunity to cushion and objections because they’re more interested in creating a moment of truth than making an expedient sale. Knowing that one leads to another in a skittish, no-mercy, click happy culture, they see the value in relationships over transactions.

Increasingly, corporate success is a co-owned and co-created experience. Increasingly, this is an experiential economy in which control has to be surrendered in the interests of benefitting from a multiplicity of voices, the voices that are at the heart of what’s known as swarm smarts, and of working that through.

B.P. illustrates how interested parties that give a brand attention have a range of perspectives that need to be incorporated into the strategy of the adaptive organization at speed. B.P. has often appeared in denial about this, which Tony Hayward’s ‘I want my life back’ comment only served to amplify. The quicker a business environment develops, the bigger the risk any kind of blind spot is, and the agility with which an organization can react is a severe test of how well a brand is truly aligned with its stakeholders.

For an engaged brand, challenges will come thick and fast because that’s a facet of iterative learning, and working through the unknown is ever-present characteristic of doing business that often requires a degree of faith and goodwill to succeed.

The big imperative for all organizations now is to know how to operate iteratively like this. In Rework, 37 Signals, an organization I greatly admire, suggest that these days a business plan stays relevant for about 15 minutes. This is an inherent characteristic of a lean organization and an important shift that all brands and businesses should now consider.

The UK Election, Facebook’s privacy saga and the social and environmental accountability of B.P. are all examples that illustrate formative organizational experiences. They represent a shift that goes beyond social media. What we are entering now is a new chapter in how we organize, a shift that goes beyond a social revolution to a semantic one.

The semantic web has arrived and the semantic revolution’s about collective smarts. It’s about how, when it comes to solving management problems, we’re going to need to feel comfortable ‘working it through’ and to be able to lead and inspire confidence from that position.

Smart organizations will evolve by creating adaptive fits with their stakeholders at a deeply engaged level.

Semantic value is going to be our daily bread of the future. Semantic value, as we’re beginning to see, depends on the ability for diverse forces to work together. Semantic organizations will have the kind of adaptable, recombinant genes, the big ideas, heightened ambitions and the new horizons that our survival as a species has always depended on.

‘Working it through’ is a means of communication and engagement that’s becoming a critical success factor. Which is one reason why organizations and brands need to know how to engage at that visceral level if they want to succeed in the semantic age, not be defeated by it.

Thanks to Erica Marshall for the photo.

This is an update of a post first written 18th April 2010, stimulated by Google’s #zeitgeist event 17th-18th May.

When Theodore Levitt wrote The Globalization of Markets in 1983, he couldn’t have imagined what globalization would have become 27 years later.

His take on a joined-up world spawned some eager initiatives in commercial ambition and how brands communicated. The Saatchi brothers, whom I worked for in my tender years, were keen exponents of Ted Levitt’s ideas and they were all onto something, up to a point.

Theodore Levitt’s definition of corporate purpose was ‘to create and keep a customer’ and as Wikipedia says, this went ‘far beyond the hackneyed belief that business exist only to make money.’

I’ve been reminded of this in the context of reviewing Chris Houchens’ book ‘Brand Zeitgeist, Embedding Brand Relationships into the Collective Consciousness’.

Brand Zeitgeist’s a well-written, concise and convenient ready reckoner about the basics of branding. However, for me, one that questions the very idea of zeitgeist and whether it’s now an outmoded concept.

The idea that brands can embed themselves into the collective psyche by becoming masters of a zeitgeist’s is in many ways an arrogant one. It shows a certain amount of contempt for an audience and makes assumptions that fails to recognize the tectonic underpinning of plates between business and the people who are now formerly known as the audience, has shifted.

The world has turned since 1983. What a book like ‘Brand Zeitgeist’  suggests to me is whether the very notion of there being a zeitgeist isn’t, actually, a bit of a marketers’ conceit. (A conceit, as Helen Gardner observed, is ‘a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness’.)

The introduction of promoted tweets seems to suggest this is the  case. It implies there’s a cost for attempting to control share of mind and assumes there’s still a joined-up, mass market that a brand can connect to in that kind of a controlled way.

One of the most profound characteristics of the internet age and the semantic web is that there’s no single truth. The more joined up we are, the more that’s the case because there’s so much out there. No-one and nothing can possibly see it all, much less make sense of it.

Society’s undergone a step change in its complexity and sophistication and this step change means that even though a dominant narrative may prevail, it cannot fully represent the full gamut of opinion, that paradox and nuance are subtle but can be highly significant, that the ‘black swan’ is an ever-present phenomenon, and the unpredictable’s becoming increasingly embedded as a part of the fabric of the life we’re now living.

The first Leader’s Debate in the General Election in the UK created a bit of a stir on Twitter, and while all the parties’ masters of spin were arguing for prominence, what actually caught public imagination was a hashtag born out of an unscripted moment that resonated, #iagreewithnick. That hashtag was the UK’s response to Shepherd Fairey’s Obama poster and it coloured the campaign from a completely unpredicted angle.

So, we might ask the question, what’s that worth? And it’s a question that’s even more interesting in the light of the findings by Fresh Networks, who’ve been doing a comparison of Social Media Monitoring tools and come to the conclusion that different monitoring tools are delivering very different results. It seems on that front at least there’s really not much of a zeitgeist after all.

When discussing how to assess with the promotional tweet factor accurately in perceptual mapping and social sentiment monitoring, some people have suggested simply stripping promoted tweets out of the equation. And yet genuine connection, shared truth and the opportunity for zeitgeist comes from brands and consumers alike all knowing how much of a conversation is thrust and how much is traction. This is a pre-requisite for sharing a meme in anything like a meaningful way.

And what about the insights of those who’s insight and point of view is silent and sitting below the waterline? A conversation’s worth should be measured by what’s not said, and the spaces in between the content, just as much as the content itself.

The reality is one person’s zeitgeist is another person’s snoozebutton, and without recognition of that brands are not much more than commercial prozac. By obliterating potency and eliminating nuance they stand to offer and engage with very little.

We think that sticky, memorable experiences and loyalties form through visceral relationships, that include a sense of challenge and adversity overcome as much as the sharing of good news. This is mixture which is realistic, authentic, trustworthy and how shared memes are moulded and formed in conjunction with others.

To fill the void of a disappearing zeitgeist social brands stay healthy by being able to balance being recognised at a surface level with resonance at a deeper one. They must reconciling the desire for saturation of the mass market immediacy with the selectivity and a long term niche following, and be that spread because they encourage ease and inspiration more than imposition. That’s a tough one for many businesses to pull off.

Implicit in the idea of zeitgeist is that we have ‘nature’ on the one hand, and ‘law’, ‘custom’, or ‘convention’ on the other.

Coke has spread its message socially with some success by adapting to other environments.

In comparison, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been busy building buttresses of its own, and both represent a form of world order. But as Lao-Tzu put it, ‘The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware. Next comes one whom they love and praise. Next comes one whom they fear. Next comes one whom they despise and defy’.

A major narrative of the last ten years has been the one from the reality shows, the message that life’s about trying hard,the stakes are high and only there’s only room for a few lucky winners, classic scarcity marketing.

Now a new model is emerging, one that’s championing the collective mind. Businesses are getting more comfortable with co-creativity and crowdsourcing. Exciting initiatives like junto are developing new means of co-operation. Social connectivity via the web’s enabling emotional intelligence and literacy and encouraging a collective ‘aha’. Organic self-determination is developing via community networks in ways that are moving things on from a ‘top down’ kind of zeitgeist. Dynamic combined efforts are happening because there’s a ‘why’, a ‘why’ from which everyone develops and which people freely contribute to because they want to. Such is the nature of free will on the internet.

Zeitgeist is a kind of precognition, the collection of hope and intent that comes about through a suspension of disbelief. As technology speeds up every iterative cycle, that changes all the time. As Apple constricts who’s in on its zeitgeist for example, others open up, and the same is happening with Facebook; Diaspora and Openbook are there, waiting and ready to take its place.

The Director of Zeitgeist the movie said that, in his opinion, ‘the failure of our world to resolve the issues of war, poverty, and corruption, rests within a gross ignorance about what guides human behavior to begin with… oppressive laws, social stratification, irrelevant superstitions, environmental destruction, and a despotic, socially indifferent, profit oriented, ruling class’ and that this is a collective ignorance of ‘the emergent and symbiotic aspects of natural law.’

The call of the film was to ‘eliminate the divisionary, materialistic noise, we have been conditioned to think is true … while discovering, amplifying and aligning with the signal coming from our true, empirical oneness.’

If a brand isn’t able to inspire at that level, it may be time to start thinking about the price of trying to manufacture zeitgeist and how to reduce it. In the globalized world of 2010 there are many zeitgeists, and the challenge is to matter to at least some of them. As we go through a semantic revolution and exit the industrial Age, the marketing challenge is to recognise the autonomy, mastery and purpose of individuals connected are today’s new motivators. Brands are going to be ever-reliant on their integrity to build sustainable business and there are big risks – and a price attached – to trying to second-guess a zeitgeist.

Here’s the brilliant Dan Pink detailing what our motivations are made of.

I’m indebted to Dr Anne-Marie McEwan for pointing me towards this video as a reminder that the capacity of human beings to create distinctive and compelling cultures and identities is limitless and as a powerful and beautiful illustration of what authentic expressions of identity at their source are about.

There’s a point in here for marketers I think, in that transactional marketing has dulled the senses and sliced many of the ties that bind people enduringly to cultures they can connect with.

Attention fatigue, the curse for marketeers today comes, to at least some degree, from the fact that much of the marketing output being generated by brands does very little to change the nature of the recipient or move them to want to belong to something as part of a story or a relationship. So the ennui has set in.

This is the dimension that art and the creativity of human expression provides, and that social media can communicate and curate.

Visceral connections like this, around the identity, culture and meaning of a connected community, show that points of difference have, and always will be, something it’s possible to create to infinity, in constantly compelling ways. At a very primal level it’s in all of our DNA to do it.

I think social media enables co-creation to produce imaginative ways of doing things that reinforce meaning, belonging and buy-in.

Isn’t it time to take a new leaf out of an old book? How about we go back to the source of what humans do best in groups by developing community identities and connections we can be moved by.

As a means of engendering human and social capital value in today’s world it still has mileage and now, maybe, more so than ever. Over and above product, it’s the cultures we create that get us remembered.

As a sidenote, the interruption ads at the bottom of the video are fairly hilarious. They make the same point, in their own way.

At the Dachis/Headshift Social Business Summit #sbs2010 in London this week some interesting insights around social business emerged while we discussed the practical challenges of transitioning from hierarchies to networks.

I was privileged to be asked to act as a synthesizer for the Summit, (Lee Bryant and I opted for a stylish 1970’s moog as it’s my era). This post’s an extension, having had the chance to reflect on what happened.

A key take-out for me is that understanding the impact social business can have on organizational design has a lot to do with managing the middle, by being able to make clear the connections between corporate strategy, positioning, culture and relationships.

Many organizations resist becoming lean and agile through the use of tools and networks because it involves new and unfamiliar behaviours, just like people; so the connections between corporate strategy, positioning, culture and relationships have to make sense and be motivating.

One of the great things about #sbs2010 itself is it’s been a dynamic happening, the hashtag representing a multidimensional experience moving fluidly from Austin to London to Sydney.

In this sense, the Social Business Summit’s been a way of thinking about identities and what networked brands may be in the future, the collection points of real time experience that allow iterative, and formative exchanges to happen collaboratively. Hashtags represent a group mind, events that can capture attention, a collection of cumulative insights to create shared value, with very little organizational fat.

As this series of Social Business Summit’s been happening, each event has been varied in content and style. The London Social Business Summit, refreshingly, veered away from show and tell, and Jeff Dachis opened his keynote with the timely reminder or two – that social business is more than the new means of delivering a one-way marketing message, and digital shortens the distance between everything.

With only two keynotes and perhaps referencing Scott Gould’s recent well-made point that social media events are often social in name only, the Summit was the alternative that walked the walk, an example of how action learning can reap dividends as an exercise.

We discussed initiatives across innovation, marketing and customer service, practical perspectives, and the internal, external dimensions and the ecosystems of social business. J.P. Rangaswami illuminated the room during his keynote by talking about the value of social business as being what you might call search with brains. In true social business style, then, that’s what the focus was.

The questions were how to move beyond the adoption of social tools, to consider business impact, the implications for organizational design and affect change. And the key question it seems to me, is one of balance, because social business design has to harness the exponential value of node multiplication, and yet also be able to steer a course true to a central strategic intent to be successful.

Hierarchical structures are characterized by middle management, a group that has neither the benefit of the vision and vantage point that leadership has at the head of an organization, nor the experience of connecting with customers or the competition as an interface at its fingertips.

And grasping that nature of middle management, addressing through doing so the dynamics between strategy, culture and relationships is, it seems to me, the key to answering some of the questions.

Developing operationally coherent connections at scale is a challenge that social business design must seek to solve. This is just as applicable for supporter networks and it’s a universal issue.

Beyond a certain point, data management becomes a morass of numerics without emotional meaning and social business becomes statistics. This is the challenge of managing the middle.

The failure of current management design, the reason why there’s been reduced levels of real return on corporate value over the last ten years, is a growing credibility gap between what’s being promoted as benefits by organizations and what’s the reality in terms of the needs of users. That’s a gap worth minding in the middle.

The value of social business is that it can address this credibility gap generatively through user-centric business models and the ability to understand existing corporate ecosystems in detail, bridging the gap between how things are now and how they can be is, as I see it, a vital part of helping organizations to transition, encouraging them to adopt the network ethos characterized by social business.

There is a real dilemma around the middle. Middle management is the gateway between the leadership and operational interface and, in certain instances, it can be not dissimilar from the layer of visceral fat that exists around the middle of the human body; a layer designed to protect and look after central organs, but that can cause and accelerate disease because of the way it impairs ease of movement, vital information and the flow of resources.

By definition there must be a middle, and an average. The sheer volume and numbers in society that sent us into the industrial age created the middle classes and a globally networked world does more of the same. Yet, when J.P. Rangaswami reminded the Summit of the real value of social business are the nodes in a network that can increase value exponentially, he spoke of something that speaks to this directly.

The ethos of middle management is in complete contrast to the kind of thinking we’re now talking about, of additional nodes that increase the value of a network as rapid and scalable value.

We’re beginning to appreciate it’s the value of the linchpin, the personal profile, the key nodes that create value, yet there are some serious people and scale reversals to negotiate, as J.P. Rangaswami suggested, as part of a shift to social business. How do we solve those?

The Summit’s ecosystem group talked about how co-creation can be in effect snuffed by marketing one-way messages and by making it fake. We also talked about how ecosystems can often work to protect the way things are as their means of survival. How do we deal with that?

Social business design can address this shortfall by truly understanding the nature of the clients business that its serving, by helping clients to be better connected across strategy, culture and relationships, by dealing with the credibility gap between what’s promoted as benefits and the reality of user needs, and by helping to manage the gap between them that existing management models often create in the middle.

The web makes value granular, and webscience is helping us to understand digital culture isn’t about cookie-cutting, but about cultures as clusters of unique DNA.

Successful social business design involves deftly managing the middle in several ways, by better connecting needs with resources, by identifying how value can be created for the collective whole, and by how organizational, social and personal value can be generated across nodal networks.

That’s the note of my moog, thanks to Jeff, Lee, Livio at Dachis/Headshift, Arjen and Judith at Somesso, and everyone who made it the event it was.

Here are a few thoughts about what F1 says about social business as an homage to the start of the 2010 season. This piece was originally written by me eighteen months ago as part Seth Godin’s Triiibes Casebook.  And yes, I’m a fan.

Not every organization needs to adopt an F1 type of fast track culture, but F1 represents many of ways social businesses and organizations can get into gear.

The world of Formula One has a dynamic power to it that burns serious rubber, creating a fabulous and visceral show where business as usual is never the name of the game. The F1 community’s enormous, capturing global imagination and attention on a regular basis and making hundreds of millions of dollars as it travels, nomadically, across the planet during the course of the season. That’s a pretty impressive communal and organizational formula.

Formula One’s a semantic form of organization and as a sports tribe it’s always looking to go faster, quicker, and sleeker. It’s in its DNA to be morphing and adapting at speed constantly. A fluid entity, F1 is adaptive, intelligent, and continuously learning and flexing in changing circumstances.

On the tarmac it’s the same. Every track, from Bahrain to Melbourne to Canada, Monaco, Singapore, Valencia and back to Abu Dhabi is different. In 2008 the street circuit of Valencia was completely untried. Singapore’s Grand Prix was the first to take place at night. In 2009 new tracks like Abu Dhabi were added. F1 pushes the envelope, it’s part of its DNA, it’s in its blood, it’s the engine oil of F1 to be always learning, continuously dynamic.

In the last 5 years of the F1 Grand Prix, the testing and qualifying rules have been rewritten before every season. Fuel loads, engine changes, basic set-up, all of them have been re-visited. Technological innovation drives change all the time. During every race strategies are re-calibrated second by second. This is moment-by-moment intelligence on its feet.

Everyone in the F1 tribe plays a big part, in their own right and as individual pieces of the whole. Each team member is a critical component and their commitment is relentless. Car designers, engineers, pit crew, test drivers, race drivers, technicians – they turn up every day to practice their craft, testing in real time, looking for excellence, perfecting the combination of man, method and machine working as one. This is iterative working through formative experiences, where everyone makes big contributions as part of a constant forging forward of the community and something they believe in.

And F1 can be the fluid network it is because of a powerfully strong sense of identity and purpose. Different identities sit under the umbrella of F1 as a logomania of sorts, all connected by a powerful unifying thread, entities within entities, and tribes within tribes.

If F1 is distinguished and distinguishable for many reasons, one notable reason is that it has rituals baked into the culture that unite. The must-have champagne spray after the race is one of them and it bonds people together, it’s a visceral experience. While racing teams, drivers, pit crews, constructors, manufacturers, sponsors, all co-exist and do their thing, it’s the spark that’s created off one another that ignites excitement and that works for them, individually and together. And the rituals enshrine that into things that make it special.

Formula One is different from many organizations because it takes itself to its audience, moving to where the experience is, circuit by circuit, being the catalyst for powerful experiences to happen. Imagine if your brand could lay claim to that. There’s a price of entry but no one ticket of entry, and this is no static tribe. New waves join and leave the tribe in each location. Race-makers and race-goers form around an activity, get fired up and then move on. Fans make a race relay across Twitter or Facebook, via the live streams off the Beeb, to coffee bars, pubs, cheering and recharging the energy as it goes.

As one of the earliest examples of a highly successful networked organization, the F1 tribe has a complex composition, and a range of leaders who look after different aspects of the sport both globally and locally; but it was Bernie Ecclestone who brought the groups together to ‘hunt as a pack’ and who has for decades encapsulated and driven the vision. When Ecclestone bought the Brabham team in 1971 he gained a seat on the Formula One Constructors’ Association and in 1978 became its President. Wikipedia describes it like this, ‘Previously the circuit owners controlled the income of the teams and negotiated with each individually’. Under Bernie’s leadership as a united tribe they raced ahead to prosperity.

Organizations with a sense of mission can learn much from F1. Formula One’s the epitome of a fluid social business that’s grown up around a sport powered by an evocation of purpose, and a visceral energy that comes from fans and participants alike, it’s genetically programmed to be an organization that goes places.

How many organizations do you know that could work in this way, that have the potential in them to develop a this kind of dynamic, organizational energy and memorable experience with their users but don’t? Networks and every kind of organization can learn something from the strength of F1 and apply it.

HR operations for organizations make a fine art out of developing job descriptions, roles and responsibilities, duties, and key performance indicators.

They’ve led to management layers and mechanical thinking, and sometimes to zombie businesses that work to the script but can miss essential opportunities.

In effect, they’ve developed cogs for factory structures. This ‘division of labour’ model, whilst not necessary entirely obsolete, can have the effect of doing business today a lot of harm.

The problem with cogs is that a cog out of alignment can halt a whole machine. Cogs are geared to work in a pre-prescribed fashion, they’re passive processors, part of ‘the system’.

Many a corporate structure today is based on a structure comprised of cogs.

One of the principles of Visceral Business is that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’; we help organizations adapt to become socially calibrated so they’re more strategically connected and dynamic.

As we become more networked in general, as the lines between inside and outside the co-created business become blurred, I have a hunch that we may look at mechanical business models one day and see this way of organising as having as much sophistication as a set of meccano.

By comparison, corpuscles are rapidly adaptive receptors that respond to mechanical pressure or distortion. They balance introvert and extrovert stimuli within the corporate body as a whole, based on a combination of shared imperative and free will.

And because they’re adaptive, they can coagulate.

In business management today, there are strong arguments emerging to think of people as corpuscles not cogs, as vital, dynamic and highly differentiated elements of ability, and to work with them in this way.

Evidence is emerging to suggest incorporating (quite literally), the biological nature of human networks into business strategy, that strong organizations are ‘super-organisms’ as Nicholas Christakis, talking about the power of social networks at the RSA, described them last week.

Matthew Taylor, writing in the RSA blog yesterday, expanded on this by referencing the RSA’s Connected Communities project, and saying ‘it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.’

Coagulation, at a very primal level, breeds creativity. It happens when corpuscles cluster together through shared purpose and affinity and, today coagulation doesn’t just breed creativity, it breeds profit.

Have a look at this video of a talk Robert Scoble gave recently at Stanford. Making some leeway for the slightly amusing subtitles, it hints at the way social business is going and makes the point compellingly that how we need to be thinking and organising today, how people work and how ideas spread now, is a biological business.

Businesses can gain ground today by re-imagining their business frameworks to be less about structures and more about genetics, by thinking about making a move from managing cogs to cultivating corpuscles.

Organizational structures are highly interconnected, and as we move away from the mechanical concepts of organization they’re becoming more permeable; as such, I think they’re going to be more capable of spreading ideas through affinity, by receptive people as a process of osmosis and by working with the talent connected to their brand, both inside and outside the walls of the organization.

What are your thoughts?

There’s a significant difference between metadata, messages, stories and conversations that impacts on how we take ourselves to market and organize when being social.

Attention spans are being strung out these days by the mass of information available on the web, leading to the rising value of metadata as a currency of information.

RSS feeds, web trends, information visualization, analysis tools, the output of most social monitoring platforms, they’re all sense-making mechanisms that reflect a growing dependency that we have on metadata.

As connection, co-creation and learning iteratively through social networks are happening increasingly at scale, metadata is an aggregator and, as many a frustrated advertiser might testify, as the mash-up that everyone makes it’s drowning out many a marketer’s individual message. Which is partly why advertising spends are going down and social media spends are going up.

And a migration to metadata has another knock-on effect, namely the need to distil large volumes of insight into a good story. Storytelling and the telling of an ongoing narrative’s becoming crucial to powerful communication when the plain truth is simple messages are hard to hear and stories are by comparison more captivating.

At The Story event in London last week, about 400 people each took a day out of their lives (that’s more than a year of life in one room) and gathered together in London to hear and think about stories. Stories being told had their day as an antidote to information overload and overcomplication. It was a day that went refreshingly back to basics, a day of reminiscing, stirring deep seated memories of communities and cosy camp fires.

The Story was a great success and the level of interest in it was perhaps an indication of how we have deep and unmet needs, as Matt Locke who organized it put it, to connect with the ‘visceral emotions that good storytelling can create’.

How well any one or any organization tells a story reflects the kind of valuable experiences they can engender. It reflects the degree to which anyone might want to get involved with it, and stay involved.

Yet the key to a good story goes well beyond having a good storyline. Subtexts support storylines and give them breadth, depth, relevance and intrigue, the subtexts make the story one that’s fascinating, one that lingers in the mind.

The onward march of metadata means reading between the lines can get easily obscured. We seek dominant narratives that can crowd out important insight and subtexts. This rich granularity, this silt within the storyline is where you’ll find the staying power that insiders and true advocates know of, the value that well goes beyond the initial hit-and-run headline.

The interesting correlation is that business models are increasingly becoming dependent on working the fringes of their stage to generate value too.

Communicators have a duty of care to seek out equivalent truths in order to fully support them, the type of communication that goes well beyond easily broadcastable tweets and obviously packaged facebook pages.

Alongside the clarity of a storyline is the part that includes involvement from others, the part that makes messages and stories into fascinating dialogue and compelling conversations.

This part involves an understanding of who’s telling a story and how it unfolds, and understanding the nature of one’s social storytelling voice. That social voice is a significant identifiable aspect of a brand’s identity, something that many organizations are only just beginning to appreciate they might need to determine and develop.

Because somewhere, in amongst all the information, the goal for how sustainable businesses take themselves to market and organize involves initiating conversations that are multi-dimensional now.

Conversations that can draw out the nuances beyond the dominant narrative and become valuable learning experiences, each different, all connected by a common thread are part of what Robert Scoble, in a brilliant piece that’s music to our ears here, has called ‘the coming age of molecular information’.

Atomistic messages are ineffective when planned to stand alone in a worldwide web; advertising is being replaced by networks of active and passive recommendations, by the semiotics of the web (which doesn’t have a commercial break) and by affinity, relevance and trust. These are the attributes that story-telling can bind together that go well beyond the ‘drive the message’ mindset of old style marketing, or trying to sense out a singular message out of metadata.

Scoble’s identified that technically we’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to curating and parsing large volumes of related information well, whether it’s metadata, messages, stories or conversations.

In the meantime however, everyone on the web has an opportunity to look at their inbound and outbound communications, and ask themselves how the metadata, messages, stories and conversations they’re involved in are weaving together. That common purpose is the kernel of a terrific story, and a whole raft of meaningful relationships, that are waiting to happen.
What’s clear is simplistic ways of information digestion, whatever the label, can only take us so far.

All our communications skills of the past millennia suggest that it’s the visceral experiences that matter and that mean we internalise the message, and those experiences come from how the information impacts against us, in what context, how, and who with.

Questions about the nature of human connectivity are now at the epicentre of what constitutes and creates personal, commercial and social value.

How will leaders connect with stakeholders in order to be able to do their jobs, and what are the appropriate business models with which to develop connectivity to build business?

Many organizations are yet to integrate the benefits of network effects fully into their business models. As I watched the social media discussions at Davos last week from the comfort of my own desktop, what I observed was a group of decision-makers, however, becoming increasingly aware of the impact that social media is going to have, that when they make their decisions there may be, at least metaphorically, other people in the room. Social business is bringing with it a big shift, and the key is that it involves going from messages to experiences.

There’s no doubt that C level curiosity around this is subject has been aroused; it’s becoming palpable, but whether it’s a pandora’s box or a burning platform is unidentified and uncertain. As Jeff Jarvis tweets, what’s the endgame of ‘FT’s @johngapper sitting on floor; Facebook investor standing: Davos democracy’?

‘Who claims that open is good?’ Steve Jobs has said, and it’s a good question, but as Don Tapscott countered in the Davos session, ‘companies have to undress for success’. When it comes to positioning this, in fact the ethics matter as much as the technology. Blatant integrity might be better, more nuanced and more appropriate, than open.

From ‘Veni vidi vici’, Julius Ceasar and the first days of empire, to ‘ipod, iphone, ipad’, and the liberation of the individual through gadgetry, this is an iterative process. It has always been this way. Now is the time to open up to the experience with integrity.

Carver Mead, a leading computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, once said, “Listen to the technology; find out what it’s telling you.” Biz Stone has said the same thing about Twitter. At a NESTA session in December, Biz talked about how he’s spent the last two years listening to Twitter, telling him what it wants to be.

Technology is a finite game. It will ultimately solve all the problems it’s capable of addressing, now matter how shiny and new it seems now. What’s a more infinite game are the opportunities of human connectivity, all the shades of creation that are possible to conceive collectively.

A very modern form of disenfranchisement, being denied a networked identity, may become the ultimate social sanction of this century. That kind of ban from the cloud may have the same tarnish as the casting out of convicts to the far flung reaches of Australia two hundred years ago, as just as far an isolation away from the heart of a new civilization. Do we want that, especially at a time when one of the biggest risks we create as we emerge from seismic change, is a lack of education literacy that leads to us creating two societies, not one?

To help answer the question, Chris Brogan’s ‘The Third Tribe’ community launched this week. Chris Brogan, the man behind the move towards more human business, has a price for connectivity and membership to his tribe in the form of a monthly subscription. Subscription however doesn’t create a community, it creates a service, and with it comes a different ambience.

My friend Ed Brenegar’s put it like this ‘popularity in a free environment does not necessarily equate to value in a paid one’ and social connectivity means cost equations have changed. Purchase and purpose are more related, they come together via shared commitments, and purchase might take many forms and currencies – time given, attention focused, contributions made, as well as cold, hard cash.

The old school calls to consume don’t count for as much as they used to, whilst generative connections are growing in value.

I’ve paid upfront sight unseen for the value of being part of collaborative initiatives I believe in. There are causes that are redefining what participation in not-for-profit initiatives can mean and what it’s capable of achieving, and there are communities worth investing in heavily simply because of the quality of the leadership and freedom of connection.

Trust is the synaptic fluid of social business. In that context I think Chris Brogan, as a Trust Agent and because his stock in trade is his humanity, has erred. Trust is an intimate thing and monthly subscriptions are what we do when buying a network utility.

For anyone who wants to monetize social connectivity like in Davos, the key lies in differentiating value delivery appropriately, in understanding where brokerage can be paid for and value consumed, and where service and facilitation that’s free are crucial to delivering co-created value.

There are a number of industries where liberating co-created value is an increasingly important item on the agenda. The government burden of management in face of budget cutbacks, the healthcare requirement to develop insights that can make R&D cheaper, all business that benefits from streamlining business processes that can remove overhead, that knows that pump-priming marketing an increasingly expensive activity.

Old business models are yielding fewer returns. Generative listening is an antidote to the velocity of today’s overloaded information flows. The action potential contained within committed, visceral and trustworthy human relationships, that’s at the heart of the social connections, has never been more important. It’s the synaptic fluid of social business.

There’re a few moments in history when one great age gives way to another. As the industrial age gives way to the digital one, Seth Godin’s Linchpin may quite possibly be a book that marks the crossroads and becomes a crucial link in the chain of business development.

Quoting Doug Rushkoff, Seth Godin mentioned in his opening address about Linchpin that the Dark Ages were an under-appreciated chapter in history, the impetus for a renaissance , a blossoming of art and cultural expression. In a similar way in this depressed economy, Linchpin may be a turning point for the human being, the industrial cog in the factory machine.

In the globally connected world, Linchpin can be viewed as an important call for our evolution.

Since Seth Godin wrote Tribes last year, a book that turned accepted norms about brands and organisations upside down, the social media revolution that’s happened since has been in many ways a well-meaning banner in need of a business case. Linchpin is the book that seeks to address that.

The economics of Adam Smith and the industrial age decreed that wealth is created by the division of human labour. This has charted our commercial course for the last two hundred years and is described by Seth today as being a ‘race to the bottom’. The digital age, he argues, in my view absolutely correctly, will generate wealth through the creation of sustainable social benefit, by solving interesting problems and leading, all of which requires new skills and capabilities.

Welcome to the contribution economy as a route to wealth generation. Whilst established organizations can find it difficult and slow to change, this is the place where the seismic shift of being digital and the implications and possibilities for businesses that social connectivity creates are carrying on regardless.

Linchpin focuses on the granularity of where future excellence will come from, the individual people and catalysts who are making a difference, as a complex, connected, global society creates new value for unique and differentiated DNA. Seth set this point out in ‘Small is the New Big’ and ‘Linchpin’ is another step in the same direction.

The essential point is that, as we start to make sense of a new commercial matrix of transactions and relationships, the crossroads that marks the real start of the digital age has two pathways.

One is for businesses built on interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. They’re likely to be consigned the fate of the wage slave, both separately and collectively.

The other is for those that generate value through making visceral connections and actions that move people. They will ‘create art that changes the nature of the recipient’. They will engage in activity in which ‘the best that can be done is not already known’ and they’ll encourage the talent of the best people around them, the Linchpins, to do it. They will be the safer bets for investment.

Digital transparency means personal reputation increasingly supplements corporate reputation and it’s the people behind the business that are its equity more now than ever. Linchpin is a manifesto for those that want to play that kind of part in business and how it develops from here on in.

There’s a catch of course, in that the greatest challenge we have to tame doesn’t come from the ecosystem around us but from within ourselves, from the lizard brain, the resistance, that’s an incarcerating force and a limiter of potential.

Linchpin is a dare to dream big, personally, professionally, collectively. If the factory approach now is a ‘system to take in the ordinary’, then the Linchpin philosophy is a call to awaken the genius within. It encapsulates the challenge of being social, which is to inspire others and it does it with great style. The marketing alone for Linchpin is a masterclass all by itself.

As is usually the case with Seth, the message is a deceptively simple one whilst being, at the same time, hugely significant. It’s his prescience and crystal clear insight that makes Linchpin such a gift in itself, brave, raw and challenging.

Seth Godin launched Linchpin in New York City last week on a cold January morning and it was a thrill to be there. He is a master of making people feel special, of inspiring others and, as Jacqueline Novogratz said at the time, of telling it how it is.

A hat-tip to Shawn McCormick for the picture.

Look around any airport departures area and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands, of logos. Destination stations are an iconographists nirvana.

Those excitedly stating the day of the brand is over need only wander through an environment like this to think again. Brands are signposts, identities encapsulated, and put in your face to say ‘buy me’.

With more information coming our way than ever, these signposts are a shorthand to navigate quickly, to help make the most of blink decisions, to tune in or tune out in a nanosecond.

If a brand is distinctive and recognizable it serves a helpful purpose by standing for something an audience can recognise. So much for brands as signposts.

Some brands go further than this. They’re recognisebly a signal, a conversation, and not just a company. They’re brands coming to terms with two-way dialogue and enabling their people to have those conversations in real time. These are the types of organizations I like to work with.

Enabled by social technology and communications, these brands recognise that data is the new oil, a new lubricant for business performance, and that data streams flowing back and forth are a vital force, a lifeblood.

By monitoring and understanding perceptions, they’re also honing their abilities to move according to dynamic information, they’re going off the page to be fleeter of foot than a business plan, tuning into their ecosystem to become biologically more agile than their peer group. They’re gearing up to be the mainstays of their communities.

But even these are not necessarily businesses with a pulse. There’s a difference between making a noise and generating a powerful experience. And the key to powerful experiences? They linger and they can be recalled.

Measuring click throughs, page rates and dwell times are of course useful in terms of signal measurement, they can determine some signal strength, but a visceral business can also possess the scope to harness the action potential within a relationship, and it is retrospective analysis and recall that registers the depth of an impression. That’s what tells us when something has moved us.

Digital media may be inching towards real time dialogue, but it’s still not built into the way many organizations interconnect with their users. We have a long way to go. While we’ve been busy looking forward at brave new social futures over the last year, there is, as yet, little recognition of the power of harnessing hindsight, and the importance and the opportunities to be gained from retrospective search.

Particularly at this time of the year, as we take stock and gather perspectives on the last one, it becomes easier to realize what things stood out as making a difference. If something can’t be remembered, it’s questionable to define it as having had much of an impact.

The way the web has virtually eliminated the cost of transaction means without this kind of visceral interrelationship it’s arguable whether any value creation has taken place.

Truly social businesses will have memories, something to incorporate into the communications equation. Along with dramatically reducing the cost of distribution and transaction, the web also dramatically lowers the cost of organization. Enterprises and ideas with a pulse are the ones around which people convene all over the world, and the ones that people want to flock to.

It is their strength of vision that’s the differentiator within these enterprises. Being able to connect with a well articulated vision lies at the heart of ability to move people and engender commitment within them. What lies beyond the bottom line is the anti-factory mantra and what’s likely to generate the most out of people.

If the social web powers new levels of relationship and lowers the cost of transactions, then inspiring movement figuratively within people is a big part of its potential. And, as mentioned in this blog before, if the hashtag defines new meeting points around which interests can accumulate, so new value can be found in enterprises that connect, that pulsate, inspire and organise people in this way.

Brands with pulses are essentially experiences, whether they are corporate or personal brands. The best ones are powerful experiences, they are fabric of life brands and linchpin ingredients in people’s lives.

it’s interesting to think how all this will affect marketing in the future, whilst this is being typed at 40,000 over the mid Atlantic, and I’m travelling to meet up with a #linchpin of some magnitude.

Interesting too, maybe, to think what your brand is about. Is it a signpost, a signal or a pulse?