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Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith: a review

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Benjamin Franklin famously said that you will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  In Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith update Franklin for the digital age.

Ben Franklin

You can’t force anyone to pay attention to your message. These days, there are just too many other things they could be doing.  Even on broadcast TV, people changed channels to get away from ads.  Now, there are more “channels” than ever, and many of them are online. People won’t listen to you unless you give them a reason to: namely, that they trust you.

Here are some of the ways to behave to win people’s trust, especially online.

Hang out with them. In social media, for instance, find out where the people you’re interested in meeting congregate and spend time there.  Even better, if you can: create a meeting place where they’ll want to spend time.

Listen. Don’t rush in and blurt out a sales pitch. Take time to find out who’s “in the room” with you.  Learn what they like, and how they talk and don’t talk.  Give them time to feel you’re one of them.

Be helpful. Share information, provide tips, make referrals, help solve problems.  Don’t count favors provided versus favors owed. Cast your bread upon the waters, as the Bible says, and it shall return to you in many days.

Rely on relationships.  Use what you have that’s valuable to others to make them more interested in sharing what they have that would be valuable to you.

Build social capital.  Put yourself at the center of relationships and whole networks that make everybody stronger.

This book was published in 2009, and many of us have gotten the message since then.  If you are still wondering how to make “this social media thing” work for you, then this is the book to read.  If you know the how-to, this book will remind you of the reason why.

I have to say, the book nearly lost me in chapter 2, where the framework is all drawn from games and hacking.  It seems there’s a fine line between using social media and using people, and this part of the book made me feel I was on the wrong side of the line.  If you have the same reaction, skip that chapter and read the rest. It will be worth your while, whether you’re trying to build a career, a business, or a nonprofit organization.  In fact, I will blog soon about how nonprofits are better positioned to win trust than businesses.  Stay tuned!

Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith: a review

by 2 Comments

Benjamin Franklin famously said that you will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  In Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith update Franklin for the digital age.

Ben FranklinYou can’t force anyone to pay attention to your message. These days, there are just too many other things they could be doing.  Even on broadcast TV, people changed channels to get away from ads.  Now, there are more “channels” than ever, and many of them are online.

People won’t listen to you unless you give them a reason to: namely, that they trust you. Here are some of the ways to behave to win people’s trust, especially online.

Hang out with them. In social media, for instance, find out where the people you’re interested in meeting congregate and spend time there.  Even better, if you can: create a meeting place where they’ll want to spend time.

Listen. Don’t rush in and blurt out a sales pitch. Take time to find out who’s “in the room” with you.  Learn what they like, and how they talk and don’t talk.  Give them time to feel you’re one of them.

Be helpful. Share information, provide tips, make referrals, help solve problems.  Don’t count favors provided versus favors owed. Cast your bread upon the waters, as the Bible says, and it shall return to you in many days.

Rely on relationships.  Use what you have that’s valuable to others to make them more interested in sharing what they have that would be valuable to you.

Build social capital.  Put yourself at the center of relationships and whole networks that make everybody stronger.

This book was published in 2009, and many of us have gotten the message since then.  If you are still wondering how to make “this social media thing” work for you, then this is the book to read.  If you know the how-to, this book will remind you of the reason why.

I have to say, the book nearly lost me in chapter 2, where the framework is all drawn from games and hacking.  It seems there’s a fine line between using social media and using people, and this part of the book made me feel I was on the wrong side of the line.

If you have the same reaction, skip that chapter and read the rest. It will be worth your while, whether you’re trying to build a career, a business, or a nonprofit organization.

Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen: a review

by 3 Comments

You care passionately about something.  You want other people to get involved.  You want their time, money, ideas, commitment.  How do you reach them?  Do you send out mail?  Work on your website?  Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram?  Sometimes it seems as if there’s a new way to reach out to people every day.  How do you figure out what will really work for you?

Robin Hood Marketing  Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen’s Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.Andresen, until recently the chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive.  She doesn’t let the latest fad distract her.  She gets right to the point.  And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves–we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.Read the book for the “Robin Hood rules” she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits.  Chief among those rules are “focus on getting people to do something specific” and “appeal to your audience’s values, not your own.”

Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take?  And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step.  Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance).  They’ll be more likely to listen to your reasons later.  But even if they don’t, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications.  Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews.  Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:

  • What can we ask people to do that will be “fun, easy, popular, and rewarding”? (for supporters)
  • “Who wins when we win?” (for partners)
  • How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists–they are a target audience too!)

I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review.  It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself.  And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter.  I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date.  That’s what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.

My one reservation about this book is the same one that’s been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately–even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers’ Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit.  These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual’s behavior, or even a lot of individuals’ behavior.  But that is not the same thing as social change.

Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power.  Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody’s lives.  You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.

Perhaps it’s just that social change is outside the scope of these books.  But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone.  That’s selling their books too hard.  They are worthwhile to read on their own merits.  People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.

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