Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust - Hardcover

Brogan, C.; Smith, Julien

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470743085 ISBN 13: 9780470743089

Verlag: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

This book shows how to tap the power of social software and networks to build your business. 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. 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. The book shows how people use online social tools to build networks of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact your business. Because trust is key to building online reputations, those who traffic in it are 'trust agents,' the key people your business needs on its side. This book delivers actionable steps and case studies that show how social media can positively impact your business. It is written by authors with over ten years of online media experience. It shows you how to build and wield influence online to benefit your brand. It combines high-level theory with practical step-by-step guidance. If you want your business to succeed, don't sit on the sidelines. Instead, use the Web to build trust with your consumers using "Trust Agents".

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Brogan is cofounder of PodCamp, a popular new media conference series focused on the use of social media to build business and personal relationships. He is a widely read blogger on the subject of social media. Find him at chrisbrogan.com and on Twitter at twitter.com/chrisbrogan. Julien Smith is a veteran trend analyst who has run Web communities for over ten years. He helps companies prepare for and profit from disruptive changes in their industries, and has appeared on news programs to represent companies and nonprofits in Canada and the U.S. Find him at juliensmith.com and on Twitter at twitter.com/julien

Von der hinteren Coverseite

There's no question that the Internet has changed the way we do business?especially when it comes to marketing. Consumer environments are short on trust and populated by consumers who are cynical, savvy, and informed. Though it's easier than ever to reach your customers, it's less likely that they'll listen. Today, the most valuable online currency isn't the dollar, but trust itself.

At the same time, social networks and personal connections have far more influence on consumers than your marketing messages ever will?unless your business knows how to harness them. In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of these networks to build your brand's influence, reputation, and profits.

Trust agents aren't necessarily marketers or salespeople; they're the digitally savvy people who use the Web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty, and genuine relationships. As a result, they wield enough online influence to build up or bring down a business's reputation. This book will show you how to build profitable relationships with trust agents, or become one yourself.

In an online world defined by its transparency, becoming a trust agent is no easy task, but once you've established your reputation, you can build influence, share it, and reap the benefits of it for your business. When you've learned a trust agent's secrets, your words can carry more power and more weight than any PR firm or big corporate marketing department.

Learn to use the power of the Web and social networks for your business now. Trust Agents gives you all the tools and strategies you need to do it the right way?honestly, effectively, and profitably.

Aus dem Klappentext

There's no question that the Internet has changed the way we do business?especially when it comes to marketing. Consumer environments are short on trust and populated by consumers who are cynical, savvy, and informed. Though it's easier than ever to reach your customers, it's less likely that they'll listen. Today, the most valuable online currency isn't the dollar, but trust itself.

At the same time, social networks and personal connections have far more influence on consumers than your marketing messages ever will?unless your business knows how to harness them. In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of these networks to build your brand's influence, reputation, and profits.

Trust agents aren't necessarily marketers or salespeople; they're the digitally savvy people who use the Web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty, and genuine relationships. As a result, they wield enough online influence to build up or bring down a business's reputation. This book will show you how to build profitable relationships with trust agents, or become one yourself.

In an online world defined by its transparency, becoming a trust agent is no easy task, but once you've established your reputation, you can build influence, share it, and reap the benefits of it for your business. When you've learned a trust agent's secrets, your words can carry more power and more weight than any PR firm or big corporate marketing department.

Learn to use the power of the Web and social networks for your business now. Trust Agents gives you all the tools and strategies you need to do it the right way?honestly, effectively, and profitably.

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Trust Agents

Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn TrustBy Chris Brogan Julien Smith

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-74308-9

Chapter One

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. 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, Brasco decided he would 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."

Today, Pistone lives under an assumed name somewhere in the United States with his family. He stayed in the Mafia for six years and 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. 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 smalltime 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 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 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 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.

How Humans Shape 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, and 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.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Trust Agentsby Chris Brogan Julien Smith Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Wiley & Sons Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470743085
• ISBN 13: 9780470743089
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar