From “Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust” by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
Having learned about the rainbow while we were growing up, almost any of us could easily recite its spectrum of colors without a problem: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But were you aware that at least one these – orange, a color we take for granted – did not always exist? In fact, its first official use was recorded in the court of Henry VIII. No one used the term before the actual fruit (the orange) arrived from China in the tenth century. We call people redheads and use the term goldfish because orange didn’t exist back then.
New terms, in fact, are invented all the time and thus shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Podcast, a word that describes audio that you subscribe to over the Internet, became the Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2004 and is now so common that many of us on the Web don’t think twice before using it. Likewise, trolling, the act of anonymously annoying the hell out of people over the Internet, is another recently coined term. There is a vernacular here that is at once common to people online and foreign to those from other cultures, similar to the esoteric language used by Harley riders, Manchester football fans, or wine enthusiasts.
Trust agent isn’t the kind of thing you would call yourself. That’s like people calling themselves gurus, divas, goddesses, or experts. Let other people call you that. We prefer to say “trust agent moves” and point out people who act as trust agents. For example, we’ll say, “It’s cool how Gia Lyons made that reference to Mzinga and Awareness. What a trust agent move.” (In this case, by praising her competitors, we recognize that Gia is building our trust in her own perspective, and her own company.)
In another sense, “trust agent” can be a kind of unofficial job title. Some of these people have roles like “community manager,” or they might be in the online-facing part of “public relations.” The name isn’t synonymous with either title. First, communities don’t want to be managed: They want to be cared for. Second, public relations departments fill people’s email inbox with dozens of cold pitches every day (we’ve even received offers for free sneakers by e-mail in exchange for blog posts). That said, we promise we’re not here to trash PR professionals – at least not the good ones.
You’ll get a hang for who trust agents are, and you’ll learn what being a trust agent entails. People who humanize the Web are trust agents. People who understand the systems and how to make their own game are trust agents. People who connect and build fluid relationships are trust agents. By the end of this book, you’ll probably be a trust agent, too. Just don’t call yourself one.
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