Trust agents by Chris Brogan – Essential how to use social media – reading for people in travel and tourism
You may have noticed in my last post on the future of travel agents I used the word trust. Over the holiday period I got to reading “Trust Agents – Using the web to build influence, improve reputation and earn trust” by Chris Brogan. After reading the title the non web savvy person may be instantly turned off, this would be a mistake as there are plenty of lessons to be learned for day to day business.
The book is essentially about networking. How to network both on and off line and how to conduct yourself in order to be a trusted member of your network a.k.a community. Throughout the book there are to do lists, so for the business owner who is not up to speed with all things social media this book will be quite useful.
The book is not really technology focused but more on strategy, though there are loads of pointers that can be applied to technologies like Twitter, facebook, Linked-in and more.
What seems to stand out most throughout the book is a consistent message of doing “the right thing” or “good things happen to those who do good”. It seems that by being the nice guy that social media will work for you. The cynic may read this and think this all too touchy feely and the author is just writing all this to make a lot of money. This would be a mistake.
Whilst reading the book Chris Brogan joined my linked-in network so I tweeted something along the lines of…..
@shansmith01: a very busy man @chrisbrogan just accepted my connection on linkedin. nice thanks
@chrisbrogan (2 min later): thanks sorry it took so long
We then had a brief conversation on twitter about his book. I must say that this all but brief exchange has increased my level of trust in Chris and the messages in his book as they are more real. Reading Chris’s book is now a much more personal experience and over the coming weeks I will be making tweaks to several of our social media strategies.
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