Trust Agents E-Book

Chris Brogan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 430

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller-now in a new, updated paperback edition Today's online influencers are Web natives who trade in trust, reputation, and relationships, using social media to accrue the influence that builds up or brings down businesses online. In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of social networks to build your brand's influence, reputation, and, of course, profits. In this revised paperback version, learn how businesses are using the latest online social tools to build networks of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact your business. Combining high-level theory and practical actions, this guide delivers actionable steps and case studies that show how social media can positively impact your business. * New edition features specific first moves for entering social media for small businesses, educators, travel and hospitality enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and corporations * Authors both have a major presence on the social Web as well as years of online marketing and new media experience If you want your business to succeed, don't sit on the sidelines while new markets and channels grow. Instead, use the Web to build trust with your consumers using Trust Agents.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Trust, Social Capital, and Media

The Connected Guy

Stanley Kubrick

Why Is This Important?

What Is the Truth, Anyway?

Humanizing the Web

Transparency

How Trust Is Modified by Media

Why Trust Agents, and Why Now?

The Matrix Thing

Media and What They Do

Why Trust Agents?

The Basics: Social Capital

Putting It on Paper

The Six Characteristics of Trust Agents

What Comes Next

Chapter 2 - Make Your Own Game

Poster Child?

Set Your Own Rules

Gatejumping: An Example

What Gatejumping Has to Do with Trust

Seeing Your Own Way

A Note about Games

The Three Methods of Games

The Importance of Moving First

The Tic-Tac-Toe Corollary, or Now What?

Chapter 3 - One of Us

Who Is This Geek, and Why Is He Famous?

The Importance of Being Human

The Trust Test

Trusting Strangers

Status Paralysis

(Most) Buzz Is Suspect

Walling Your Community

Social Benefit Occurs as a By-Product of Being a Good Citizen

How Public Discourse Magnifies Social Capital

Half-Strangers and the Rise of “Friends”

The Business Value of Friends (and How Not to Be Scummy)

Mass Microevangelism

The New Community

A Sense of Belonging

Friends as Gatekeepers

The Power of Taking the First Action

How to Screw Up (and How to Fix It)

How Not to Be One of Us (about Elitism)

Raising Up versus Sucking Up

The Currency of Comments

You Must Earn Your Place in Communities

Businesses That Understand How “One of Us” Works

Trust Agents Are Not Infiltrators

A Final Lesson: Don’t Be “That Guy”

Chapter 4 - The Archimedes Effect

What Is the Archimedes Effect?

A Basic View of Leverage

An Introduction to Arbitrage

A Young Man’s Primer

The Path of Least Resistance

Owning the Largest Game in the World

Existing Infrastructure

How a Trust Agent Uses Time

How a Trust Agent Leverages Social Media

Fish Where the Fish Are

About Recommendation

Things to Stop and Things to Start

Summing Up the Stops and Starts

Using Leverage to Build Dad-O-Matic

Leverage and the Third Tribe

Wait, It Sounds Like You’re Saying . . .

Finally, Why We Used Traditional Publishing

Chapter 5 - Agent Zero

It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You

Agent Zero Connects the Web

Agent Zero at Work

Awareness

Attention

Influence

Reputation

Authority

What’s Next?

Chapter 6 - Human Artist

What if Etiquette Isn’t a “Nice to Have” Skill?

A Micromanifesto from Us Digital Natives

The Basic Stuff

The Golden Rule Ports Nicely to the Web

Transparency and Anonymity as Feedback

Empathy as Feedback

Lurking versus Jumping In

The New Customer Service

Keeping Connected Across Distances

Talking about the Weather

One-Way Intimacy

How Human Artists Sell on the Web

Getting Strangers to Trust Us

One Simple Answer to Several Thousand Questions

First Impressions

Everyone Seems Like an Expert

Sharing versus Hoarding

From the Individual to the Group

Chapter 7 - Build an Army

You Can’t Do It Alone

Your Generals: The Mastermind Group

Why an Army of Ronin Might Not Work

The Power of Asynchronous Aggregation

Mechanization: How the Web Works When You’re Not There

How the Web Helps Create Democracy

The Ease of Spreading Information

Scale: The Importance of Café-Shaped Experiences

Bring Your Own Dial Tone: Small Powerful Networks

The Social Contract

Give Your Ideas Handles

Chapter 8 - The Trust Agent

Art, Business, the Web, and Humans

How This Relates to Your Career

Master Tomorrow’s Radios

How Frames and Perspective Matter

How “Yes, and . . . ” Applies to a Trust Agent

How to Make Friends (and Why It Matters)

Start Small

The One Difference

Be Wary of Praise and Awards

Six Games You Could Have Made and Still Can

If You Were to Write the Next Chapter

How You Can Help

Three More Things You Can Do to Add Value

Ways People May Trash the Lessons in This Book

Where We’re Going in the Next Few Years

Chapter 9 - What’s Next

There’s Still So Much to Do

Different Jobs Trust Agents Might Have

Trust Agents for Real Estate

Scaling Trust

Trust, Multitasking, and Sacrifice

Is Being a Trust Agent Just About Being a Good Person?

It’s All Sales

Selling the Ideas of Trust Agents into Your Organization

Platform Matters

Cars and Trust

Measuring Trust

But Measuring the Tools We Use to Build Trust? Sure!

How Do You Grow?

Index

Copyright © 2010 by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-0-470-63549-0 (pbk)

To Kat and the kids, who suffer the most for my passions.

—CB

To my parents, who showed me the way.

—JS

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Shannon “Queen of All Things Book” Vargo, Matt “Dive Bar Finder” Holt, Ellen “Why don’t you have a book deal?” Gerstein, and Chris “This won’t hurt a bit” Webb from John Wiley & Sons. Thanks also to Jeff “Believe in Yourself” Pulver and countless others who believed.

Introduction

When we asked people to help make Trust Agents a success, we simply requested they buy the book if they thought it would be useful. We asked them to let us know—via our blogs and other efforts—whether they appreciated what we’d done. We underestimated their power.

Thanks to all the buzz our readers generated, Trust Agents became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller. Inc. magazine, 800-CEO-Read, and Small Business Trends took notice. Over 90 percent of nonfiction business books don’t survive beyond their first printing. Trust Agents has gone through six. We had little to do with this.

For that, we are grateful. But gratitude only goes so far. We owe you. So we decided to come back with more ideas for you in this revised and updated paperback.

If you’ve purchased this book once (or many times, as some of you have), why should you buy it again? Has the world changed that drastically in the year that has passed between the hardcover edition and the paperback? Has technology changed? Of course. But have people changed?

Only a little.

If we’re being honest, the six main tenets that make you a trust agent haven’t changed a bit. They are still:

• Standing out

• Belonging

• Leverage

• Networking

• Soft skills

• Strength in numbers

Nonetheless, how you choose to use these tenets has changed. The world has shown us quite definitively that nothing lasts forever. On the back of the hardcover edition of Trust Agents, there was a blurb from GM chairman, Fritz Henderson. But Fritz is gone now. Since we wrote the book, Toyota has had troubles, too. More and more people are losing their jobs. The whole world has shifted, knocked off its pillars by the ripples from companies that aren’t treating people as though they’re important, inside or out.

The need for trust has grown.

We need to believe that someone cares about us. We need to find others who share that mind-set, who operate from a center of trust. We are building new businesses and augmenting existing practices by evaluating how Web tools can foster better relationships and, hopefully, more sales.

We have much more to say about that. You are holding more stories about trust, more ideas on what to do with trust, and conversations with trust agents from specific industries whose advice you’ll find useful.

As with the hardcover edition of this book, we ask you to reach out should you want to connect. We’re here. We’re part of the story. This isn’t cold ink on dead trees, but rather the first step in a relationship that reaches beyond the page. Find us.

Chris Brogan: @chrisbrogan on Twitter http://chrisbrogan.com

Julien Smith: @julien on Twitter http://juliensmith.com

Let’s talk about trust, about what this book means to you, and about what you can do with your newfound abilities.

Ready to dig in? Let’s go.

1

Trust, Social Capital, and Media

The Connected Guy

Joe Pistone had thought he was going to go undercover for six months. Instead, he vanished for six years.

You see, he was already practically a wiseguy. He had grown up among the Mafia in Paterson, New Jersey, and had worked the same kind of jobs. Like many involved in the Mob, Pistone was of Sicilian descent and spoke Italian, and they accepted him. When he started showing up at Carmello’s—a restaurant at 1638 York Avenue on the corner of 86th Street and one block from the East River—he fit in perfectly. He knew it was a spot in Manhattan where wiseguys hung out, and he knew he’d get acquainted eventually. He just didn’t know how deep he would get.

Turns out that, to go undercover, Pistone knew how to make all the right moves. He knew that in order to be a good undercover agent, he needed to be a good street agent: someone who understood not just how things worked in an office, but out in the city, too. He knew all about the Mob from growing up around its members; but he had been brought up by a good family whose values led him to join the FBI. But the FBI didn’t know who he was anymore. No one named Joe Pistone was working there, nor was there one in the company records; his personnel file had been removed and his desk had been entirely cleaned out. As Pistone himself says of his old life: “I obliterated it.”

While Pistone was immersing himself in Mob life, the FBI was trying to figure out who this new guy with the Bonanno family was—Pistone had remade himself into a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco.

As it turns out, Pistone was so deep that even FBI surveillance teams who were following him had no idea who they were taking pictures of. The name Donnie Brasco was suddenly everywhere, but the FBI didn’t know where he had come from. Most wiseguys had grown up in or near the city, but Brasco’s story was that he was from California and had spent time in Florida doing some jobs (i.e., burglaries) before coming here.

When Pistone was officially brought in to the Mob, it was by Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero. That day, he became a “connected guy”—someone connected to the Mob—but not officially a “made guy” (or wiseguy), which is an official member of Cosa Nostra. But you don’t just get connected to the Mob that easily. Pistone had spent more than six months working undercover in New York, becoming a regular at Carmello’s, before he could gain Ruggiero’s trust. It was this patience, this diligence, that helped him move quickly up the ranks.

His first moves, though, were subtle ones. At Carmello’s, he would occasionally see mobsters the FBI wanted more information about, but, as he said, “I never got an opportunity to get into conversation with them. It isn’t wise to say to the bartender, ‘Who is that over there? Isn’t that so-and-so?’” Pistone “wanted to be known as a guy who didn’t ask too many questions, didn’t appear to be too curious. With the guys we were after, it was tough to break in. A wrong move—even if you’re just on the fringes of things—will turn them off.” Instead, Donnie Brasco learned to play backgammon (a game wiseguys played a lot around then) and just hung out. Around Christmas, he was able to get into a couple of games with the right people. He introduced himself as “Don,” and let people see him hanging around so they would recognize him as a regular at the bar. Now he could sit around and chat with the others.

“What do you do?” asked Marty, the bartender, eventually. Marty wasn’t a Mob guy, but he knew that many of his clientele were mobsters. That kind of question wasn’t “the kind you answer directly,” claims Pistone. So he said, “Oh, you know, not doing anything right now, you know, hanging out, looking around. . . . Basically, I do anything where I can make a fast buck.” He made clear what kind of guy Donnie Brasco was, and word got around. In Pistone’s own words,

The important thing here in the beginning was not so much to get hooked up with anybody in particular and get action going right away. The important thing was to have a hangout, a good backup, for credibility. When I went other places, I could say, “I been hanging out at that place for four or five months.” And they could check it out. The guys that had been hanging around in this place would say, “Yeah, Don Brasco has been coming in here for quite a while, and he seems all right, never tried to pull anything on us.” That’s the way you build up who you are, little by little, never moving too fast, never taking too big a bite at one time. There are occasions where you suddenly have to take a big step or a big chance. Those come later.

Finally, the time was right for Pistone to make a move. He brought some jewelry from the FBI that had been confiscated during investigations to the bar with the intention of selling it to the mobsters. Since cops are always trying to buy illegal items, to make a bust, Pistone decided he would make Brasco do something different. Because he had already made clear to anyone who asked that Brasco wasn’t on the up-and-up, he could try to sell “a couple of diamond rings, a couple of loose stones, and a couple of men’s and ladies’ wristwatches” to the bartender. Pistone recounts the story:

“If you’d like to hold on to these for a couple days,” I said,

“you can try to get rid of them.”

“What’s the deal?” he asked.

“I need $2,500 total. Anything over that is yours.”

And so it began. At Carmello’s, he met Albert, who was connected to the Colombo family; from there, he hooked up with Jilly’s crew, which stole all sorts of goods around New York and sold it in a place called Acerg (backward for Jilly’s last name, Greca). From there, he connected with Tony Mirra, a soldier for the Bonanno family. Mirra was a knife man, and Brasco was told, “If you ever get into an argument with him, make sure you stay an arm’s length away, because he will stick you.”

Pistone stayed in the Mafia for six years. He was so deeply immersed in that life that, at one point, he was one kill away from being made—turned into a real mobster. He claims that the whole time he never lost his moral compass, never doubted himself or strayed from his mission. Today, Pistone lives under an assumed name somewhere in the United States with his family. He brought the Mafia to its knees; every individual the FBI would go after during this time, it would get—all because of Pistone, the best infiltrator ever to have entered the Mob. La Cosa Nostra never truly recovered.

There’s a lot we could learn from Pistone’s efforts, but first, we’d like to introduce you to another imposter of a wholly different variety: Alan Conway.

Stanley Kubrick

Who was Alan Conway? Videos display him as an older British gentleman, effete and smug, with a sparkle in his eye and gray hair. But Conway is in fact much more than that. He is a small-time British con artist who became famous for impersonating Stanley Kubrick in the early 1990s. It was an act he kept up despite many challenges—namely, that he looked nothing like Kubrick. The famous director had dark, deep-set eyes, was famous for his thick beard, was of a different nationality, and had a different accent than Conway. In addition, Conway barely knew anything about the famous film director’s movies.

Despite this, Conway had conned many, many people. One victim was well-known New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who was in London in 1993 and, with three other journalists, met Conway at a club. Although Rich had met Stanley Kubrick before, it didn’t prevent him from being duped. (“I shaved my beard off,” Conway told him.) Rich wrote about his meeting with the Kubrick imposter in the Times shortly thereafter. He said of the incident:

On our euphoric way out, we quizzed the manager [of the club], who knew only one member of the group Conway was with: a white-haired man, whom he said was a Conservative Member of [British] Parliament.

“That . . . should have been the tip-off,” a friend at The Associated Press told me when commiserating two days later. “They’re always surrounded by con men and rent-boys.”

By then, an executive at Warner Brothers who had been reached by phone had expressed his delight at the news that a tableful of journalists had been duped. He also told us that Kubrick’s new film was no secret, but was in fact a well-publicized adaptation of a novel by someone I know. Kubrick’s assistant called to add that the director was neither beardless nor gay but was concerned about the impostor, who had been sighted 15 to 20 times over the past two to three years.

Despite his concern, Kubrick was also fascinated by the idea of an imposter. But the director of Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey was a recluse, and this is what gave Conway his strength. Kubrick had become a kind of spirit whose name he could evoke to cause others to lose control over their senses. Thinking that they were faced with the opportunity of a lifetime, Conway’s victims wanted so badly to believe the ruse that all the contradictory evidence meant nothing to them. Conway was able to get away with anything—under Kubrick’s name, he cosigned a loan for a gay club in Soho, for example—and was long gone by the time his victims knew what was going on. Worse, no one wanted to testify against him, because they would expose themselves as having been duped by a con man. They would be ridiculed, they reasoned, so all declined.

Conway continued his Stanly Kubrick impersonation for many years. Eventually, he dropped it and later joined Alcoholics Anonymous; yet even there he told everyone another whole set of tall tales, involving businesses in the Cayman Islands and an otherwise exciting life, recounted in a diary found after his death in 1998.

But by then the world was being transformed. The Internet was expanding in full force, and Google had just been founded, changing the way we would all interact, and who we would trust, forever.

Why Is This Important?

While most people don’t know of Joe Pistone, they do recognize the name “Donnie Brasco,” because he was portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 1997 film of the same name. Likewise, most people haven’t heard of Alan Conway, though his story is so unusual it is unlikely you’ll ever forget it.

This book is about trust; but it’s also about how technology can influence it. This book is about the crossroads between the two and how that impacts your business. Pistone and Conway were able to deceive everyone they met because, back then, you couldn’t just type “Stanley Kubrick” into Google Images and find a picture of him. Conway delighted in the fact that finding information about Kubrick involved hours of vigorous research—something that few were willing to do. Today, Pistone may have had a Facebook or a MySpace page before going undercover or, at the very least, would have shown up in a few pictures on Flickr or on a birthday video on YouTube. And once your traces are on the Web, they’re there forever.

What Is the Truth, Anyway?

The way people use the Web is constantly changing. People have become more wary of where the information they receive comes from, and with good reason. We read articles about how the person beside us at the bar ordering the Miller Genuine Draft is actually a paid “buzz generator.” We read product reviews on the Web, believing that they are a reflection of what the reviewers think of the product—only to find out that products returning a higher cut of the profits are always rated higher than products that are perhaps superior in quality. We know how less-than-honest advertisers and marketers work to influence us. We realize that those few lazy reporters in our media who just report on whatever a PR firm tells them without follow-up offer poor reporting. We are living in an age where the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 shook our trust in our entire financial system, compromised the viability of our retirement funds, and sent massive waves of distrust through London, New York, and beyond.

It is unclear in an age in which technologies such as Google prevail over almost all information whether either of the two gentlemen discussed earlier would have been able to pass as the people they did for so long. Conway’s elaborate Stanley Kubrick impersonation was eventually discovered as a fraud and exposed on television in a series called The Lying Game; by that time, he had already borrowed tens of thousands of dollars from people who believed him to be the real thing. As for Joe Pistone, his true identity was never exposed (that is to say, until the FBI revealed it). This enabled him to eventually send more than 100 members of the New York Mob to prison, striking a serious blow to the Mafia. How would he have done this in the twenty-first century, with much of our communication going through digital channels? Obliterating an identity online as well as in the real world is extremely difficult.

It’s difficult to reach out and do business with people using the Web. This is especially true in an environment where trust isn’t previously established and where the prospective customer has access to far more information about your organization, products, and services than ever before.

Humanizing the Web

Although the general public’s level of mistrust is at an all-time high, there are individuals and companies who do successfully use the Internet to establish levels of trust in the communities where they operate. In the technology sector, a person such as Robert Scoble (circa Microsoft days) stands out as someone who, by the nature of how he communicated about his formerly faceless company, developed a strong level of trust among his online community. In the United Kingdom, JP Rangaswami is managing director of BT Design for BT Group. His blog, Confused of Calcutta, is often about cricket, music, food, and many things not related to a major telecommunications company; yet, because of his stories and conversational writing tone, we trust Rangaswami and have a positive opinion about BT.

Those who are most familiar with the digital space—we refer to them as “digital natives”—have become accustomed to a new level of transparency. They operate under the assumption that everything they do will eventually be known online. Realizing they are unable to hide anything, they choose not to try. Instead, they leverage the way the Web connects us and ties our information together to help turn transparency into an asset for doing business.

Transparency

You probably know what we are about to tell you, but it’s possible you’ve never much thought about it. For every photo that a magazine uses as part of an article, there are perhaps another 60 that won’t be used. For every quote a journalist pulls from a source for a story, there are several minutes of conversation that weren’t used. This is simply editing, a part of storytelling. Except for when it isn’t.

What if there are times when we want every possible angle, every possible description, every version of the story that we can get our hands on? What if what was left on the cutting room floor is of real value to the public? Think about moments of world-impacting news, or even moments within your company where a rumor leaks into the mainstream. It is those hidden moments, the forgotten photos, the deleted details that tell the true story.

We are in a new era of increasing transparency, and it is becoming obvious from a number of angles that the world will never be the same because of it. Information flows faster and is everywhere. Human memory is slowly becoming obsolete. We barely need to remember everyone’s name continuously when all of their information is all over the Web; it’s all in public view. Clay Shirky examines this phenomenon in his book, Here Comes Everybody, in which he explains how the barriers that have prevented like-minded individuals from coming together are disappearing, allowing us all to transmit our thoughts and get information faster than we ever could before.

Because of this, secrets are impossible to keep for long. First, digital photography made everyone look like a supermodel online. (It’s easy to look great when you choose the best of 100 photos.) But then, something else happened. People gained the ability to upload their own pictures, the ability to tag themselves (affix information about themselves) to other people’s pictures; and they put all of this online. The next thing you know, all those terrible pictures of you—including the unflattering ones a photographer would have selectively edited and removed—are all over the Web. If you extrapolate forward from bad pictures of you to potential corporate scandal, or even to something as simple yet life-altering as how your online profile impacts a company’s interest in hiring you, the picture (pimples and all) becomes even clearer.

Those who are active on the Web now realize that they need to embrace this new transparency, that all things will now eventually be known. Companies can no longer hide behind a veneer of a shiny branding campaign, because customers are one Google search away from the truth. Further, they join activist groups to stay informed about new practices, so they are often one step ahead of the people trying to profit from them.

Companies must acknowledge that they are as naked on the Web as individuals are. This shouldn’t be a surprise; any new medium you jump into changes the way you are seen. But since the Web is active 24/7 and has cameras on all angles, it’s difficult for anyone to hide. We propose a different solution. But first, we need to equip you with some tools.

Action: Build a Listening Station

Here are a few free and inexpensive tools to help you start to see how people on the Web view you, your company, your products, your services, and your competitors. Use these tools, and use them as a way to understand why someone might choose to trust you—or not.

Start by opening a Web browser, and do the following:

1. If you do not already have one, set up a Gmail account at www.gmail.com. This allows you access to all the various free Google applications. (We like to call accounts like these “passports,” because they let you open many tools.)

2. Go to www.google.com/reader. This will become your listening station.

3. Go to www.technorati.com. Type your name, in quotes, into the search bar.

4. When the results page comes up, right-click on the little orange RSS button, which looks like this: Select Copy-Link Location.

5. Go back to Google Reader, click the blue plus button (+), and paste what you copied into there (either right-click paste or use CTRL-V for Windows, CMD-V for Macs).

Repeat these steps for as many different terms as you might want to search for (your company, your product, your competitors).

For the bonus round, go to http://blogsearch.google.com and do the same searches. Then go to http://search.twitter.com and search there, too. Add all these things back into your listening post, and search for other ways to do the same thing. Are you likely to show up on YouTube? Do a search there. Anything new come out that we haven’t mentioned? Check there, too.

If you end up with too much in one big pile, Google Reader allows you to build folders. You can start out by labeling one “me” and one “them.” It might help you sort.

How Trust Is Modified by Media

Imagine that the radio had been invented yesterday. Suddenly, you and everyone you know hears about this machine, and one day, you actually see one at a local breakfast place. Picture it: For the first time, you are hearing music coming out of a machine instead of being played live right before you. Or perhaps, if you couldn’t afford to see a band play live, you were able to hear music for the first time. What now?

At this moment, something incredible is happening. If you are open to new ideas, you may simply think about how amazing this is. Now imagine that, following this song (we imagine a really jazzy Benny Goodman number), you hear a news broadcast.

Think about it. What happens? You’re hearing a human voice right next to you, as if it’s speaking directly to you. Some questions would pop up: Who is this person? Are they trustworthy? How true is this information? The answers would have a lot to do with the information being broadcast, as well as the sincerity and timbre of the person’s voice. A variety of factors come into play, all of which will cause you to wonder what’s going on. If you need something concrete, consider two extreme examples of this: Imagine the Hindenburg disaster (“Oh, the humanity!”), and then think about the famous War of the Worlds broadcast, directed by Orson Welles. How would you react?

Whether you imagine yourself to be trustworthy or not, one thing remains true: The medium has transformed the message. An official-sounding voice might make you confident that what you’re hearing is true. Another voice might give you the impression that it’s a radio drama, fiction being performed for you through the technology in this new box.

This book is about all the new radios being invented in our day, from the common ones like Web pages, e-mail, or instant messaging, to the newest: YouTube, Twitter, and beyond. In our radio example, someone had to take control to get that broadcast to you. Likewise, there are people out there right now working to understand these new technologies and learning everything about how to use them—from etiquette to audience building and beyond. They are learning the ropes. They are the pioneers, mastering the latest one-to-many communications methods. Like your kids, they know more about technology, and maybe even more about people, than you do; and that makes them very powerful.

We call them trust agents.

Why Trust Agents, and Why Now?

Who we trust has changed. We know from personal experience that this generation and the next aren’t blindly trusting information from just any random source. In fact, upon conducting research in this field, IBM discovered that 71 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds studied spend more than two hours online per day, compared to only 48 percent of the same group who spend two hours watching television. One-third of them (32 percent) received advice about where to go on the Web mostly from friends. Consider your own behavior; you’ll likely realize that your own skepticism is also on the rise.

We are currently living in a communications environment where there is a trust deficit. As a society, we no longer have confidence in advertising. We are hostile to those who appear to have ulterior motives, even if they’re just selling themselves. The result is our tendency to join together into loose networks, or tribes, that gather based on common interest. We tend to be suspicious of anything that comes to us from outside our circle of friends. So we form groups of like-minded individuals around those topics, products, or news items that interest us. For example, the news-sharing site Digg.com reports news quite differently than Reddit.com, the London Times, or the Wall Street Journal. And that news might be suspect in certain circles, because the stories on Digg that reach the top are sometimes moved to the top by dubious means: voting campaigns, robotic algorithms, and so forth. Again, we ask you: Whom should you trust?

Trust agents have established themselves as being non-sales-oriented, non-high-pressure marketers. Instead, they are digital natives using the Web to be genuine and to humanize their business. They’re interested in people (prospective customers, employees, colleagues, and more), and they have realized that these tools that enable more unique, robust communication also allow more business opportunities for everyone.

Who, exactly, are trust agents? They are the power users of the new tools of the Web, educated more by way of their own experiences and experiments than from the core of their professional experiences. They speak online technology fluently. They learn by trying, so they are bold in their efforts to try on new applications and devices. They recommend more, and more often, on social bookmarking applications (Delicious.com, etc.) than anyone else. They connect with more people than anyone else, and they know how to leave a good impression. As they do so, they build healthy, honest relationships. Trust agents use today’s Web tools to spread their influence faster, wider, and deeper than a typical company’s PR or marketing department might be capable of achieving, and with more genuine interest in people, too.

We need to become them—and to harness them.

As we delve more deeply into this topic, we intend for you to consider two things: (1) how to be genuine, real, and open with people while also (2) recognizing that if you can think strategically and understand certain principles, you can learn how to master tomorrow’s radios as well as trust agents do.

You can bring the news to people. You can build influence, share influence, and benefit from the other currencies that such exchanges of trust deliver to you.

Most people will do this within a business setting while working for a company, but always with an eye toward being legitimate and honest with the community within which they operate. The more you read, the more you’ll realize that we’re asking you to balance being genuinely part of an online community with being aware of business opportunities, and how executing the trust agent’s strategy can realize business goals. We know that this can be tricky business, but also that it’s absolutely possible. Further, we believe you can do it, too.

A Trust Agent’s Version of a Resume or CV

We know that you hate your resume; hey, we hate resumes, too. They don’t really represent us. They diminish our skills and demean the complexity of our experiences. For almost every job that we’ve held in the past three years, neither of us has had to present a resume, ever. We want you to get the job you want without a resume. This book will teach you how. As you build up social capital and reputation, don’t forget to create a spectacular “About” page on your blog. Weight it heavily toward what others might hire you to do or how they might partner. Remember that this counts internally as well.

The Web is such a powerful resource for leveraging contacts and presenting our strengths that a curriculum vitae (CV) becomes irrelevant. It’s not so much that you won’t need one, but that you’ll never be asked for a CV because your reputation will precede you. Instead, you’ll just get hired. Read on.

The Matrix Thing

When discussing the core concepts of trust agents, we find ourselves thinking a lot about the concepts in the movie, The Matrix—the first one, not the others. If you’ve seen it, you know that Morpheus shows Neo that the life he’s lived up until that point was all a big program. Neo learned that if he could figure out the program and navigate the space outside of the world, then he could figure out and “own” the Matrix, which is to say, ignore what everybody else sees as rules or laws. Well, that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

There is a lot of similarity in realizing the inherent gamelike structure of online interactions; and there are some similar (and some different) methods in which we choose to interact with these experiences. We believe in the value of people and in being genuine with them. At the same time, we also realize that people frequently act within the context of these structures, and that if we want to find a way to success, it often involves breaking our connection to that structure.

There are two ways to proceed with doing business: One is to work completely within the system and to operate by the natural rules that exist. The other is to realize its structure, understand the rules that dictate the functions of the system, and to then choose whether to work strictly within it or not—or even to move between different systems that might get you to a goal better (sooner, faster, cheaper, etc.). In researching this book and organizing our thoughts on how we interact with people on the Web, we realized that there’s a big difference between those who play strictly within a system and those who work outside it. We tend toward the latter, and you can, too. But we’ll explain more about that later.

Beyond that, you don’t have to know much about the Matrix to enjoy the rest of the book. We promise.

Media and What They Do

We all know what the word media means, but in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (from which comes the famous slogan, “The medium is the message”), author Marshall McLuhan describes a medium as any extension of the human body. We like to think of media in the same way.

By expanding our ideas of what a medium is to McLuhan’s definition, we come to see that wheels are a medium, because they are extensions of our feet, and that money is a medium that extends human power. It follows that we view online social networks (the Facebooks and Twitters of our time) as media, not because they help us communicate, but because they extend human relationships. This is something that neither television nor radio ever could have done, because they were all one-way. E-mail never did it as effectively, either, because the communication didn’t occur in a public space. Now, with the advent of blogs, our communications can reach everyone, and thus we can connect with everyone, because they can respond to us directly.

There’s a big difference in the way traditional print, radio, and television media was used from the 1950s until present. These extensions let us blast something to everyone who had a receiving device. Newspapers, magazines, television, and radio were all different ways to interrupt people, grab their attention, and shove a message into their thought processes. In the case of television, and during the heyday of print advertising, something interesting was happening: the mix of it being a novelty (not everyone had a TV, so conversations were often about every detail and nuance of the experience) and being persuasive before we had tools to counter any of the claims (a few scant years earlier, the radio drama War of the Worlds was mistaken as being a true news report of an alien invasion). This has changed over the past number of years, and even more powerfully in the past few (from around 2001 until the present).

Somewhere along the line, institutions took ownership of certain media. Newspapers won’t print anything you send them. Televisions won’t play the video you made, and radio doesn’t always play the songs you want or read the news you feel is important.

Over the past year, all of these systems have met with competition from an entirely unexpected source: you. You can print anything you want on your blog. You can post any video you want on YouTube, Blip.tv, or several other services. You can make your own music and share it; you can podcast whatever appeals to you. Because of this, McLuhan’s true vision of media as an extension of ourselves is truer than ever. We’ve chosen to make the next media ours, and we’ve shaped our own media to be an extension of our own views, our own businesses, and our tribes.

We see now why this is an important time and why the communicators of today need a new title: that of trust agent.

Why Trust Agents?

Having learned about the rainbow while we were growing up, almost any of us could easily recite its spectrum of colors without a problem: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But were you aware that at least one of these—orange, a color we take for granted—did not always exist? In fact, its first official use was recorded in the court of Henry VIII. No one used the term before the actual fruit (the orange) arrived from China in the tenth century. We call people redheads and use the term goldfish because orange didn’t exist back then.

New terms, in fact, are invented all the time and thus shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Podcast, a word that describes audio that you subscribe to over the Internet, became the Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2004 and is now so common that many of us on the Web don’t think twice before using it. Likewise, trolling, the act of anonymously annoying the hell out of people over the Internet, is another recently coined term. There is a vernacular here that is at once common to people online and foreign to those from other cultures, similar to the esoteric language used by Harley riders, Manchester football fans, or wine enthusiasts.

Trust agent isn’t the kind of thing you would call yourself. That’s like people calling themselves gurus, divas, goddesses, or experts. Let other people call you that. We prefer to say “trust agent moves” and point out people who act as trust agents. For example, we’ll say, “It’s cool how Gia Lyons made that reference to Mzinga and Awareness. What a trust agent move.” (In this case, by praising her competitors, we recognize that Gia is building our trust in her own perspective and her own company.)

In another sense, “trust agent” can be a kind of unofficial job title. Some of these people have roles like “community manager,” or they might be in the online-facing part of “public relations.” The name isn’t synonymous with either title. First, communities don’t want to be managed: They want to be cared for. Second, public relations departments fill people’s e-mail inbox with dozens of cold pitches every day (we’ve even received offers for free sneakers by e-mail in exchange for blog posts). That said, we promise we’re not here to trash PR professionals—at least not the good ones.

You’ll get a hang for who trust agents are, and you’ll learn what being a trust agent entails. People who humanize the Web are trust agents. People who understand the systems and how to make their own game are trust agents. People who connect and build fluid relationships are trust agents. By the end of this book, you’ll probably be a trust agent, too. Just don’t call yourself one.

The Basics: Social Capital

In October of 2002, after the largest study on humor ever conducted, scientists discovered what they believed to be the funniest joke of all time. Conducted over the Web, the study collected more than 40,000 jokes and attracted almost 2 million ratings. This was the winning joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “Okay, now what?”

The beauty of a joke (and information of many varieties) is that it can be infinitely reused without losing any of its value. But there’s more at work here. You may not have realized what just happened, so we’d like to play it back to you, in slow motion, step by step.

First, we decided to include a joke at the beginning of this section. We didn’t invent it; in fact, it was submitted by psychiatrist Gurpal Gosall, from Manchester, United Kingdom, to the aforementioned study. What happens then? Well, you read the joke, and if we did our job right, you laughed. However, it’s what happens afterward that is interesting; but before we explain that, consider the next example.

Chris has an apple, and Julien has a dollar. Let’s say that Julien wants an apple and that Chris would rather have a dollar than a piece of fruit, so they decide to trade. Simple, right? At the beginning of this story, Chris had an apple and now he has a dollar. We can actually continue to follow this dollar on its journey if we like, being traded for apples the world over, but the point is made: That is, dollars don’t just grow on trees. They don’t simply duplicate by being passed around. They are exchanged for goods. That’s it.

What about our joke? Let’s say you take our joke and tell your friend. What happens? Hopefully, he or she laughs, and then you both have the joke. It isn’t gone; both you and your friend have it. When we follow the joke along its path, though, something remarkable happens. Everyone is left just a little bit richer. Not only did they laugh, but now they can tell it as well.

Our joke is an example of social capital. Capital is usually defined as “any form of wealth capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.” Our joke has value; it’s hard to nail down exactly what the value is, but it’s clearly there. Therefore, it is a form a wealth, just as in our definition. But our joke isn’t regular capital—you can’t put it in a savings account and you can’t (usually) trade it for an apple. So, what is it?

In this way, social capital is different from other kinds of capital. When people come together and share a meal, they not only end up fed, they also become tighter as a group. The mere act of gathering means that they will exchange things—stories, favors, and laughs—and will grow richer as a result. It may sound touchy-feely, but these things have real value. And we don’t just mean that they keep you warm on a cold winter night, either; we mean they have real value, as in “you can take it to the bank” value. But how?

It’s simple: Jokes aren’t the only form of social capital; favors are, too. Buying somebody a cup of coffee is a real exchange of value, and it can at some point be repaid. You can never truly be sure how, but the fact that it can be repaid is unquestionable: You can ask for that cup of coffee back one day. Just think of your favorite television cop drama and how often the phrase “you owe me a favor” is uttered. These things are real.

We’ve already made clear that social capital has real value; if you find someone a job, then that person may find a job for you when you really need one. The real magic—the core of our argument—is what happens on the Web. Because the Web is made out of text, everything on the Web is written down, and once it’s out there, thanks to Google, it will always be out there. This brings us to something we call putting it on paper. And it will change the way you think of our basic joke forever.

Putting It on Paper

What happens when we put our joke on our Web site or on our blog? At first glance, it shouldn’t be much different than telling friends. But in fact, it is extremely different; it is much more powerful and long lasting. And the reasons may surprise you.

Publishing our joke to a recent blog post may allow it to be seen by only a dozen visitors, or it may be seen by hundreds. In that way, this isn’t very different than telling a joke in a bar, or maybe getting onstage and doing stand-up at an open-mike night. The difference between putting it on the Web (or in a book, for that matter) is that when the joke is being told on the Internet, the joke teller is no longer there. The joke teller is gone. Yes, the joke is still being told, and yes, the teller is still getting credit for it. He or she is still participating, but that participation is no longer active.

The same is true of YouTube. When the famous Evolution of Dance video was first posted on YouTube (by our count, in April of 2006), the video’s originator, Judson Laipply, may have been present to upload it. Obviously, he was also there when he performed it. But after it went viral on the video-sharing site—eventually reaching a view count of more than 98 million views at the time of this writing—Judson Laipply was not there. He may have been having lunch, going on a date, doing another stand-up act, or even sleeping; but his presence was being felt, in different places all over the globe, by dozens of people at a time. In some small way, despite his absence, he was participating in each of those viewings.

You may think, so what? After all, you can write a book and sell a couple of copies. Your ideas are being spread passively there, too. But you can create a book only every little while. On the Web, you are participating all the time.