Amazing concepts to consider here.

Want to know about our book, Trust Agents? My co-author, Julien Smith, and I want to know if you are a trust agent. What defines a trust agent? Here are the six main secrets of being a trust agent. Do any of these sound like you?

Make Your Own Game

You can do what’s come before or you can take a unique swing at the world. If you’re Hugh McGuire, you’re working on Book Oven, a whole new way to look at books and reading. You’re someone like Perez Hilton, who took on People magazine and won, as far as we’re concerned.

Are you making your own game?

One of Us

Maybe you’re the person in your industry who’s come to the larger online conversation, like Leslie Carothers is to the home industry. Perhaps you’re the next Matt Cutts, who represents Google to lots of us. He’s more Google than Sergey or Larry, because he’s here. He’s one of us.

Are you one of us?

The Archimedes Effect

Understanding leverage is what separates the hobbyists from the professionals. Do you understand how to take what you’re doing in one instance and extend it out into something bigger or better elsewhere? This is what brought Madonna from just another singer into being a worldwide brand. Leverage is behind all the most powerful people in the world, but it all starts somewhere. Gary Vaynerchuk leveraged his wine store into his video project and took that into his media project and his book deal. Gary bleeds leverage.

Do you understand the Archimedes Effect?

Agent Zero

Connecting and networking and building relationships is what moves you from an individual contributor to an interdependent kingmaker. Learning how to be a core element of several networks is where we think a trust agent works best. Take Robert Scoble. He went from being a guy talking about Microsoft to a guy on a mission to be moved by what he saw around him. Robert connects with people all over, and finds himself at the core of many important networks.

Are you Agent Zero to several networks?

Human Artist

There’s a world of difference between knowing how to build relationships with people and coming off as “that guy.” You know who we mean: that person who shows up with a bullhorn to promote her projects, to blurt about her interests, and then to leave before you get a chance to say anything about you. A human artist is what we call the people who interact well in this new world, and who know how to build nurturing relationships. People like Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker are human artists.

How do you relate to others?

Build Armies

Working solo is easy. Do you share what you know to promote larger interactions? Can you create resources to help you and then thread your efforts into theirs? Building an army, especially a loosely-joined and flexible group of people from many disciplines, is the key to being an advanced trust agent. People like Danny Brown, who started a social good movement know the value of armies. Ze Frank turned entertainment into a massively multiplayer online experience, one that has yet to be replicated successfully. The implications to business are obvious.

Are you ready to build armies?

If You Answered Yes to Any of the Above

You are definitely in the mindset of trust agents. Your examples might be different. You might not do as much of one of the six secrets as others (I’m still not very good with leverage, for instance). But at your core, you’ve caught on that these new online tools require a different type of person, and that not just anyone can get the most from the experience. You, however, are in the perfect position to be a trust agent.

If you are a trust agent, Julien and I want to meet you over the coming months. We’re traveling the US (and sometimes abroad), and we look forward to connecting with as many of you as we can. Why? Because that’s what we do.

I’m excited you’re part of the experience. We’ll appreciate your help, your input, your support, and your own experiences as part of the project. It’s how we do things. Thanks in advance. You’ve already made this all very much worth it.

If you haven’t joined the Trust Agents Community, swing by. And if you want to buy a copy of Trust Agents, you can get it here.

Thanks!

Julien and I have a book coming out in May 2009 (earlier, if we can type faster) from Wiley tentatively titled Trust Agents. The premise, and we’re still working to define this word more succinctly is, “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. That’s my definition at the moment. Julien and I send each other countless little emails a day that say, “What about THIS definition?”

It’s a business book, not a tech book. We talk about the web, but we discuss it as a tool, not in terms of how great Twitter and Friendfeed are, but rather, what someone can do with the tools of the moment with regards to the web at large.

Here’s the thing: though a company like Microsoft spent millions and millions of advertising and marketing dollars trying to improve our perception of the brand, none of us gave a sh!t until Robert Scoble came along and put a human shape around their online and event presence for us. Robert acted as a real human, with thoughts, opinions, and – gasp – he sometimes agreed with us that MSFT didn’t have something right. It was brilliant.

Lionel Menchaca at Dell is a trust agent. Pam Finnie at HP is a trust agent. Matt Cutts at Google is a great example of a trust agent. Caterina Fake when at Flickr was a great trust agent. Kathy Sierra is one of the ultimate trust agents.

Are these things related to tech only? Hell no. I’m just listing a few that we have batted back and forth a lot. There will be more.

Know who’s the non-web equivalent of a trust agent? Oprah Winfrey. To a lesser degree, so is Paris Hilton. We’ll talk about that, too.

Book writing isn’t exactly the same as blog posting. Julien and I are doing a lot of talking, a lot of reading (well, Julien is), a lot of research (again, more Julien than me- he digs that stuff), and a lot of storytelling.

I spoke with Seth Godin over lunch today. A little later, I spoke with business partners David Meerman Scott and also Paul Gillin. We talked about books and publishing and the business overall. It’s some tricky stuff, but it can be rewarding, if you do it with passion and get a decent book turned out.

While I’ll be putting lots of this information into the manuscript, I wanted to open up some conversations about trust agents, about who you think fits that description, and about what you think it means before knowing more than what I’ve written about what goes in the book.

(Side note: I’ve written in some form or another since age six. I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life, and never realized on the way up the scale that I *was* a writer. It all changed when I stopped worrying about BEING a writer and just started writing. If this is an aspiration of yours, you can do it. The key? Practice. The other key? Practice. Third key? Read a LOT of books. )

What do you think? Your ideas mean the world to me, and to Julien as well. We’ll ask you bits here and there from time to time. You know me. I ask questions. Right?