Chris Bro­gan and Julien Smith, co-authors of “Trust Agents,” at SOB­con in May. (Photo by JD Lasica)

It’s always cool to see one of your friends hit the best-seller list, and that’s what just hap­pened to Chris Bro­gan, the Tiger Woods of inbound mar­ket­ing. Chris (@chrisbrogan on Twit­ter) and Julien Smith (@julien on Twit­ter) have their first book out: Trust Agents, and it’s receiv­ing quite a bit of praise from the social media cognoscenti.

Here are five ques­tions I put to Chris this week about Trust Agents and social influ­ence marketing:

1Wel­come to the pan­theon of pub­lished authors. Is it what you expected? How did you mar­shal your social media assets and con­tacts to help push “Trust Agents” up the best-seller lists?

Chris Bro­gan: It is and it’s not. I was sur­prised that pub­lic­ity mech­a­nisms don’t seem as attuned to the social media world’s new meth­ods. Things seem to be the way they were years ago. I mean, our peo­ple at Wiley are won­der­ful, and I don’t know any­one doing it bet­ter, but I still think there’s more oppor­tu­nity to do some new and cre­ative things with book mar­ket­ing. How did WE do the best­seller thing (twice, I might add: NYT and Wall Street Jour­nal)? We asked our friends. I’m just lucky that I have ten thou­sand friends.

2With so many other books about social media out there, what spe­cific gap in the mar­ket­place did you want to fill with your book? What do you hope it adds to the conversation?

Chris Bro­gan: We didn’t write about social media. That was our magic trick. We wrote about how to be a human at a dis­tance. Social media isn’t cool. It’s a set of tools. Con­nect­ing to humans is cool. That’s what we wrote about. We wrote about how to be human, and that’s time­less, baby.

3What’s the biggest sur­prise you came across in research­ing Trust Agents?

Chris Bro­gan:The biggest sur­prises are every­where. We changed the entire struc­ture of the book mid­way through, and turned it into a book about six big ideas with lots of how-to infor­ma­tion and sto­ries to back it up. That was markedly dif­fer­ent from what we showed Wiley when they said yes. What else did we learn? That we’d uncov­ered ways to talk about build­ing busi­ness rela­tion­ships that had noth­ing to do with Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, but instead, had every­thing to do with under­stand­ing how peo­ple use those tools in the new world.

4The word “brand” has a com­mer­cial slant to it, but we all build our brands or online iden­ti­ties in the dig­i­tal age. In the book you and Julien write: “choose an offi­cial online name and stick with it.” What advice do you have for indi­vid­u­als who have a pres­ence across mul­ti­ple social networks?

Chris Bro­gan: We’ve all cre­ated our own dial­tones. We’ve cre­ated our own TV shows, our own radios, every­thing. There is no “Jerry’s List” any more. With that in mind, make it easy for peo­ple to do busi­ness with you. That’s why we tell peo­ple to keep a uni­fied pres­ence. Why make it harder for peo­ple to connect?

5Can you riff a bit on the notion of Trust Agents, or Agent Zero, and the value that such peo­ple can bring to an organization?

Chris Bro­gan: A trust agent is the per­son that we know, that hangs out in the places we hang out. She’s a smart user of media tools to say what she wants to say. She con­nects every­one around her, and grows rela­tion­ships across many indus­tries, geo­gra­phies, and strata. She uses her abil­i­ties to be help­ful, and she builds armies of peo­ple who can all par­tic­i­pate in the growth of her pur­suits. Orga­ni­za­tions can ben­e­fit from these nat­ural con­nec­tors, from the power of bring­ing in resources from every­where to bear on chal­lenges, and from the aware­ness that comes from shar­ing our atten­tion around groups of inter­ested parties.

Sounds a bit hip­pie when I write it, and yet there are exam­ples all around us. Red Hat built a bil­lion dol­lar busi­ness sell­ing free soft­ware. Zap­pos sold their busi­ness for just shy of a bil­lion dol­lars because they believed cus­tomer ser­vice was the most impor­tant aspect of a com­pany. What am I to believe? That they did it wrong?

Related

• 5 ques­tions for the author of ‘Twit­ter­ville’
• 7 ques­tions for the author of ‘Say Every­thing’

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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