This is a book review of Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

How I got the book:

It was a Christmas present, on my list.  Seriously.

Background:

This book is a collaboration between Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, two prominent and respected bloggers/social media practitioners/professionals.  This book is about being a decent, supportive, and productive person online and using the resulting reputation to do good, if not great, things.  “Things” is a general term, but the book sets up a framework whereby you can position yourself to do many different kinds of things, whether they are for profit or not-for-profit, and enlist other people via social media to help you get things done while you do the same for them.

A Trust Agent, the subject of this book, is a talented person with a good reputation – and a useful network of friends, colleagues and contacts – who knows how to use the Web to get things done.  This is my definition, not the book’s, but I think I have it right.  The rise of the Trust Agent, as made possible through social media and other technology, seems like a reaction to the depersonalization of businesses, the muting of individual voices, and increasing stories of corporate malfeasance and political corruption.  As such, the book starts with a chapter discussing trust to establish the foundation for the material that follows.  It also talks about the power of the Web and social capital.

The book lists six main characteristics of Trust Agents and explains them in detail in an individual chapter.  They are:

• Make Your Own Game
• One of Us
• Archimedes Principle
• Agent Zero
• Human Artist
• Build an Army

The final chapter, The Trust Agent, wraps things up with further suggestions, advice, and thoughts about what you can do with the information in the book.

The strengths:

This book is a good read:  it’s written in an upbeat, humble and encouraging tone (didn’t want to use the phrase “non-threatening”, although that was the first thing that came to mind) and provides a lot of examples, ideas, anecdotes, and take-away activities that you can use in your work environment or in the causes you champion outside of your day job.  It has some of the same characteristics of Chris Brogan’s blogging but it’s not him:  it reads like a gestalt of both his and Julien’s writing styles.

The authors are also pretty clear about the intended audience for the book and they capture it well in the following sentence:  “….you’ve come to this book looking to improve yourself and, specifically, to improve how you do business over the Web.”  In a sense, it’s a starter social media handbook without calling itself that, but it’s not tool centric.  It’s like half of a book about how to use social media and Dan Zarrella’s book The Social Media Marketing Guide, which focuses much more on tools and technology, is the other half.  However, you could rightly argue that this is the more important half because it’s the human half.  To borrow a Star Trek analogy:  Brogan and Smith are like a combination of Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy (or perhaps Mr. Sulu) and Zarrella, perhaps unfairly, comes across as Mr. Spock and/or “Scotty”.  The celluloid heroes accomplish greater things when they work together, which is my somewhat awkward way of trying to explain why Trust Agents and The Social Media Marketing Guide seem like two halves of the same book.  But I digress.

I particularly enjoyed the Make Your Own Game section of the book.  I thought that the book also had some very wise advice about how customer service can, and should, evolve.  You also have to support anything that respects and empowers the individual, which Trust Agents does a good job of doing.  Finally, it’s full of lots of useful tips and ideas.

The areas for improvement:

This is a good book but, to me, not an earth-shattering or GREAT book.  My reaction is understandable because I’m not really the intended audience of the book and most of the material isn’t new to me.

However, I will say that the naming and the presentation of the six characteristics are a bit confusing to me.  For example, as I understand the concepts, there’s an awful lot of overlap between concepts like One of Us, Agent Zero, and Build an Army because they deal with networking in three phases:  belonging; becoming a connector or close to one; and leading the troops into battle (so to speak).  For that matter, the Archimedes Principle (leveraging other people’s strengths and connections to do much bigger work) and Human Artist (being a good listener, communicator, and generally a good citizen of the Web) also tie into the whole networking concept.  The lingo is somewhat familiar if you regularly read Chris’s blog, but I’m guessing that the book might have been intended to appeal to people who weren’t already readers.

The naming of the six characteristics seem like they were picked to make good sound bites or PowerPoint presentation slides so that people could remember them if they haven’t read the book yet, but they feel a bit clunky and jagged within the context of the same book.  I think I would have preferred it if they were all verbs or all nouns or if they were a little more straightforward and a bit less… lingoish.  The naming of Agent Zero (Be a Connector?), the Archimedes Principle (for some reason, I think the phrase Leverage, Leverage, Leverage would have been simpler and just as effective), and Human Artist (Etiquette or Rules of Engagement?) particularly seem to suffer.  It would have been better to use simpler, more direct terms for the six characteristics, particularly if this is a book for novices.  Maybe the authors are trying to invent and install a new vocabulary – time will tell if the terms they use in their book become widely adopted.

The last thing that I want to mention is really, really picky but… there were some spelling mistakes/editing problems that were disappointing to me.  It detracted from the book a bit.

Other points of interest:

I liked the SF/gamer/fantasy/comic book geekiness that was used in several places in the book.  I certainly didn’t expect to read any anecdotes about Ms. Pac Man, so there was some surprise factor there.

Verdict (out of 10): 8  (recommended; plenty of useful tips and it articulates many of the underlying themes/benefits of social media in one package)

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