The Clean and Green Club

Another Recommended Book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Of the dozen or so books I’ve read on Internet-based communities (and their application for marketing), Trust Agents stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Normally when I review a book, I take a page of notes, maybe two. In the smallest handwriting I can still read, I had more than half a page by the time I got to the end of Chapter 1! By the time I was done, I had four full pages.

A generation younger than me and a generation older than those who grew up with computers from the womb on, Brogan and Smith bring insights from the computer game culture (something completely foreign to me, other than throwing an occasional quarter into Pac-Man in the Laundromat in my 20s, before we had our own washing machine). Yet, as an active participant in Internet communities for nearly 15 years, I think their perspective totally applies to that world. And even though I’ve been in that space for so long, and in fact have written about it in several books (all the way back to a book I wrote in 1991), I learned a lot.

Several of the key points are certainly familiar:  that you gain much more online from helping others than you do by shoving traditional marketing down their throats, that a corporation’s presence on the Net needs to be interactive, etc. But somehow, they’re presented in fresh ways. One thing they emphasize, for instance, is that it’s not enough just to have a social media strategy; you have to “be one of us.” In other words, you have to <i>actively participate</i>, not just be present.

Brogan and Smith come out of the same mentality of abundance that I write about in Principled Profit and some of my other books; they point out that some capital is traded, like swapping hours for income—but other kinds are essentially cloned. If I tell you a joke, you can grab hold of it and pass it around—but I still have it, too.

When Trust Agents—their name for people who become nexuses of influence—encounter obstacles, like gatekeepers, they often have a creative workaround. Sometimes, they even become “gatejumpers,” who so thoroughly rework the paradigm that they simply leave the gatekeepers scratching their heads as they hurtle past. If the paradigm changes completely, they may get to name the new game. They might even become a verb, as Google did.

If that happens, though, don’t forget your roots. Don’t get full of yourself and drown in your own self-perceived stardom. Continue to help the small guys; that chorus of quiet voices will reverberate into something bigger and louder than a single star singing your praises.

The book is full of useful checklists, such as eight ways to build credibility, or five steps to locate new social media friends (and three more to make sure you keep them).There’s a whole lot of practical advice from these social media veterans, including a good sermon on the opportunity costs of not doing social media (along with lessons from industry after industry that got caught napping and lost their market). There’s even some limited advice on how to cope with the pressure of getting so good at this stuff that you’re deluged with messages to deal with, including how to say no to requests.

One fascinating question the authors raise: does the very anonymity of the Web actually <i>create</i> the culture of transparency?

Some of the most perceptive comments come at the very end: the idea of exploring the outer limits of possibility by saying “yes, and…” rather than “no”; the idea that each of us is an integral part of the Web, and that it can’t exist without our participation, and the wonderful idea that the Web returns society to the culture of small groups—the culture it was based on from the dawn of history until the mass-media society of the 20th century took over. They see the mass era as 1950-2000; I’d probably start it at least at 1900, as early phonographs, radios, and cars started to take hold, and maybe even 1850, as the telegraph and railroad and industrialization were changing the shape of society—but this is a small quibble. The important distinction is that the decades of mass culture were a historical aberration, and that the Web allows those small groups to thrive without needing to be based on geography, but on common interests and values.
There’s much more I could say about this wonderful book. If you’re already building communities and markets on the Web, read this book to do it better. If you haven’t begun, read this book to get a huge jumpstart. Highly recommended.