In case you were lounging on a beach, swimming in a lake or otherwise disconnected yesterday, you missed a big event: Chris Brogan and Julien Smith launched their new book, Trust Agents.
We're big fans of Chris here at HubSpot. He's on our advisory board, we named our game room after him and we work with him on great projects like the Inbound Marketing Summit.
Like many HubSpotters, I've already purchased my copy of his book, and I'll be reading it as soon as it arrives.
You should go get one, too.
Even before reading a page of Trust Agents, marketers and small business owners can learn something from Chris, particularly the way he launched this book. Three things stand out for me:
(1) Content. Chris is a content machine. He's been teasing the ideas of his book out for more than a year. I first heard about it in this post last September when he began explaining the concept of trust agents, "people who use the web in a very human way to build influence, reputation, awareness, and who can translate that into some kind of business value." Over the last year, as a reader of Chris' blog I watched these ideas grow up, fill out and become stronger -- and now I want to see how they matured in the book.
(2) Relationships. Chris builds relationships. Take a look at his Twitter account. See all those @ replies -- and the time stamps about 30 seconds apart? That's Chris blowing Dunbar's Number out of the water, building relationships. Some will reject these as trivial, but as Danah Boyd put it a few days ago, "We like the fact that humans are social. It's good for society." Chris gets to know people in little bits. He helps them, and when he asks for a favor, they're more than happy to help him.
(3) Trust. Chris builds trust. In his Tweets, on his blog and everywhere else he interacts, Chris is fastidious about transparency and disclosure. Like any human, he encounters gray areas, and gets push back from people who think he's gone too far or mishandled things. But he always gets through these gray areas with more trust than he started with because he lays it all out in the open.
That's what I've learned from Chris' book launch. The pearls of wisdom in Trust Agents will be far more valuable -- and stitched together to make one hell of a necklace -- so go order a copy now.
Webinar: How to Sell Social Media to Your Boss
| Social media guru Chris Brogan explains how to demonstrate the value of social media marketing. Download the free webinar to learn how to get your company started with social media.
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