When someone needs to purchase goods or services, are they going to randomly choose a vendor from a list or will they contact someone with whom they have a relationship… someone whom they trust?
Trust Agents, a book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, is about building and maintaining trust. Developing relationships with clients and vendors (and potential clients and vendors) requires a set of skills that are essential in the social media world. Brogan and Smith do a great job of sharing tactics to build trust.
Drawing on their experiences in providing social media services and training to various organizations, they talk about trust in this rapidly-changing world, a world in which the winners are those who make their own game based on solid principles. In a chapter titled “One of Us”, they look at communities and the various formal and ad hoc networks that form around common interests. Companies such as Comcast and Dell have found success in building customer relationships through social media; their stories are analyzed for the decisions and actions that resulted in positive outcomes.
In addition to the general business, trust, and community lessons, the book also provides several lists of tips and tricks for making the most of social media in order to build trust effectively. Specific tools are recommended and timesaving ideas are shared so that a reader can immediately make positive changes in their daily flow to become a trust agent.
Around 250 pages, the book is a great length to get into the subject, provide real world suggestions and examples, and leave the reader thinking about how to apply trust agent techniques in his or her own life. I would definitely recommend Trust Agents as a must-read book for photographers – the strong photographer-client dynamic means that photographers must be trusted. Failure to build trust as a photographer will lead to a failure of one’s business.
Buy Trust Agents from Amazon.com
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