A great book that actually relates to far more than just how to interact using Web 2.0 tools. In fact it, many of the ideas can just as easily be applied to life in general. Not too bogged down with the specific tools and technology (as the authors say that is always changing anyway), the book draws out general points on how to successfully relate to others in a highly interconnected world.
Definitely a book for those who are trying to carve out a presence in such communities, plenty of encouragement and vision of where all this is heading.
Locn. 354-56 They (Trust Agents) operate under the assumption that everything they do will eventually be known online. Realizing they are unable to hide anything, they choose not to try. Instead, they leverage the way the Web connects us and ties our information together to help turn transparency into an asset for doing business.
Locn. 377-78 customers are one Google search away from the truth. Further, they join activist groups to stay informed about new practices, so they are often one step ahead of the people trying to profit from them.
Locn. 425-26 71 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds studied spend more than two hours online per day, compared to only 48 percent of the same group who spend two hours watching television.
Locn. 605-6 ACTION: Answer Whatever Questions You’re Willing to on Your Blog. Get Credit More Than Once.
Locn. 733-36 Don’t be better at following the guidelines and constraints that accompany a common label—be different and call yourself such. If the concept or category you create catches a foothold, you’re the first to mindshare. Let the rest of the world that follows be compared to you. Particularly in a world where power is often measured in links, this puts you in pole position.”
Locn. 791-93 When you conclude that talent, though not quite a myth, is certainly overrated, you start to realize that you never need to see yourself as below anyone. Instead, you should only believe that you don’t yet have the experience that person does, then find a way to get it.
Locn. 850-52 Playing Games Is Fun. Okay, business is business and work is work. But truly, if you don’t accept this detail, that games are meant to be fun, you’re probably reading the wrong book. Try Jim Collins’s Good to Great instead. Excellent book. The rest of us, let’s agree that if we can figure out a way that work can be fun, it just goes better for everyone involved.
Locn. 924-26 Comments and blog posts and articles found “in the wild” are likely to be a more accurate reflection of a customer’s opinion. You can do the same for yourself, for your business, for a product, and so on—that is, if people are talking about you.
Locn. 945-46 As Wayne Gretzky once said: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” We try to do the same.
Locn. 1049-52 Hacking Life. An entire movement has sprung up around the notion of improving productivity and effectiveness by engaging in life hacking. How can you do things differently to make life go better? Examples range from ways to capture and process information, like David Allen’s Getting Things Done, to learning how to keep your e-mail in-box empty with Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero Parenthacks.com. There are great web sites, such as Lifehacker .com and Parenthacks.com,
Locn. 1112-13 Do something. Try something small and finite, and then larger and finite, and then complex and finite. See what comes of it. It will soon become clear that failures are just as important as victories.
Locn. 1126-28 Understand that failure is an inevitable part of the game, but that the chance of success is much greater the more often you roll the dice. You shouldn’t fear it; you should embrace it.
Locn. 1283-85 The Importance of Being Human Gaining the trust of another requires you be competent and reliable. It also requires you to leave someone with a positive emotional impression, which is something the Web has the potential to do quickly and well.
Locn. 1292-93 YouTube has over 5 billion videos, one for almost every human on the planet.
Locn. 1318-28 T, of course, is trust, and all the other elements are what makes it happen): (C × R × I)/S = T C = credibility, or the signals people send out to show that they are who they claim to be and as good as they say they are. The higher this is, the more you can trust someone. R = reliability. The more they show up on time, the more you’ll trust them to do so in the future, for example. I = intimacy, one of the most powerful emotional factors in trust. The feeling you get from individuals is important, and it shouldn’t be discounted just because it’s emotional. Do you feel comfortable around them? Could you tell them a secret? That’s intimacy. S = self-orientation, and this is the only negative; the higher this is, the less we tend to trust a person. An example of a low self-orientation would be someone specifically recommending a better competitor instead of themselves. An example of high self-orientation would be the smarmy, self-interested company sycophant who’s always looking for a sale instead of making people feel comfortable.
Locn. 1452-53 Find friends along lines of mutual interests more than via geography or any other factor.
Locn. 1498-1503 Maybe what you want to know instead is, aren’t the people who spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks being antisocial? In a word, the answer is no. In the past few years, the people who have started using the Web have become closer and closer to the average person you know. The question may have been valid in 1996, but in 2009 and onward, the social aspects of the Web mean that the people interacting within these networks are interested in social activities. In fact, in a lot of cases, they talk online between in-person events and share pictures of stuff they did together.
Locn. 1555-58 People have very sophisticated bullshit sensors, and if not immediately, your intentions will be exposed later. But as long as you’re not considering only the bottom line, taking the first step to initiate an interaction says to people that you want to establish a relationship, that you’re interested in being involved. So step forward and take that step, over and over again. Trust us, as long as you have something to really offer, the benefit will come.
Locn. 1612-13 The better strategy for a trust agent is to develop relationships with up-and-coming individuals in a space. The time spent developing relationships with many up-and-comers beats time spent courting the few big names.
Locn. 1628-29 “givers get.” In the online world, being present and commenting on other people’s work and engaging in general connectedness are just as important as any direct marketing initiatives or other traditional business strategies.
Locn. 1656 Leave 10 comments today and then 10 tomorrow, even if some are just thank-you notes.
Locn. 1791-93 If you take one lesson away from this chapter, take this: Don’t be That Guy. We don’t mind companies in our space, and we need good people working with us, but we can’t stand another one of those people trying to sell us stuff. We’re sick of it, and so is everyone else.
Locn. 1828-29 There’s a programmer’s saying that “the lazy ones are usually the best.” It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. Programmers want a little bit of code to do a lot of work, so the lazy programmers usually do the most thinking and the least writing.
Locn. 1915-18 Whatever your industry, it is important to meet a lot of people online, if only superficially. You can do this by connecting with them through tools like Facebook and Twitter or by commenting on their sites. Then find ways to meet face-to-face—whether at industry conferences or in one-on-one meetings—to cement those relationships. By doing so, you make yourself more “real” than the competition
Locn. 2006-7 If you’re thinking somewhere in your head that you need permission to learn how to start building the ability to leverage the resources for your corporation, hand this book to someone else. You’ve already lost the game.
Locn. 2048-58 Here are just a few tools of the trade for a time-starved trust agent: • Spinvox.com: Why listen to voice mail when you can have it transposed and sent to you as text? You can read faster than you can listen. • Jott.com: Speak into your phone and you can receive an email of your transcribed words. Easy leverage. • Kayak.com: Check several airlines and hotels at the same time for prices from a single screen. • SMS: Use this for e-mail. It makes the message and response more concise. It cuts down e-mail clutter. • Podcasts: As learning tools, we can consume these during travel/transit. • RSS reader: Instead of going to blogs directly, we read them quickly via an RSS reader. • Keyboard shortcuts: For most every application we use, we learn the keyboard shortcuts. This time does add up.
Locn. 2097-99 The trick is to come up with something you could tell people at a party, to be able to differentiate between what you think is interesting about what you do and what the average person thinks is interesting.
Locn. 2141-43 The key lesson here is to spend as much time doing what you and your company do best and to delegate everything else that you can. This is true both because it’s not profitable to do everything yourself and because, let’s be honest, you’re not that great at all those other tasks, are you?
Locn. 2173-77 The real secret of the most successful people on the Web is that they are always trying new things. A lot of the time it’s just for fun, because they are passionate about it and like to see how things work. But the benefit is that it’s there for business, too. Early adopters always know more about what’s coming up, and that leads to advantage, over and over again. The company that doesn’t see how it should innovate will always lose over the one that knows how, because it leverages that information to dominate its marketplace. And so should you.
Locn. 2369 As you now know, if you have no Google results, you don’t exist.
Locn. 2444-45 The process of finding new, exciting, and profitable information is difficult, precisely because popularity of any one piece of information reduces its value.
Locn. 2553-54 The value of bringing people in is the value of expanding the potential of the network overall. It’s a simple effect. It’s not far afield from Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, where having more than one voice adds to the experience.
Locn. 2551-52 People working in this space collaborate, they connect, they build business relationships without asking for outright favors or payment. Trust agents build networks, then build circles, and then include others in those circles.
Locn. 2569 try the one-sentence response: “How, exactly, did you want me to help with this?”
Locn. 2576-78 The rule of “multitouch” is important here. Send out small messages. Comment on blogs. Leave notes on Facebook or Flickr or wherever your community spends time. By reaching out and keeping relationships warm, opportunities flow more freely. If you’re not working to maintain your network, it dwindles and shrivels up from lack of use.
Locn. 2653 Six Tools for Reputation and Competition Management
1. Google Alerts:
2. Rank Checker:
3. Technorati:
4. Compete.com:
5. Twitter Grader:
6. Search.Twitter.com:
Locn. 2718-20 ACTION: Get LinkedIn Dust off your LinkedIn.com profile. Refresh it and start connecting to potential business partners, prospects, and friends.
Locn. 2794-96 There’s a tidal wave coming, and it’s made of people. Some will run and some will ignore it, but others will be ready and find a way to roll with it. Those who win are the ones who are always prepared; while some people are hiding their heads in the sand, the winners are anticipating change and finding a ton of opportunities.
Locn. 2825-27 Our first impressions of you strongly resonate with us on an emotional level, so they stick around for a while (and they stay on the Web forever). Take some time to think about how you want to do this before doing it, because that impression will last.
Locn. 2969-71 It’s better to ignore some things than to argue back, because you cannot change people’s minds about everything, and you can’t be everyone’s friend. You’ll try your hardest to help, put in a lot of hours trying to make things right, but at some point, it just ain’t worth it. Some people will never be happy.
Locn. 2984-85 When a customer complains about something, follow the three A’s: Acknowledge, Apologize, Act.
Locn. 3041-42 Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor, calls this “throwing sheep,” because it’s fun and seemingly unproductive, but translates into a deeper sense of belonging.
Locn. 3213-15 reliability is one of the easiest ways to differentiate yourself. Be on time perpetually for your work, your meetings, and your emails. If you can’t be on time, tell people early, not at the last minute. And whatever the case, offer constant updates as to your progress instead of long periods of (virtual) absence. You’ll have already beaten out 75 percent of the competition.
Locn. 3648 No matter what the situation, in improv the intention is always “yes, and.” Understanding improvisational comedy has made an actual business difference in our lives. One great book on the subject is Improv Wisdom, by Patricia Ryan Madson. The lessons put forth in that book might very well help you understand how improv applies to being a trust agent, and how that might help with your business.
Locn. 3680-84 So if you were to retain one piece of information, one tip, about the social side of trust, it should be this: You need to be liked, and you start becoming likable by being worthy of being liked. Be kind. Be patient. Be humble, on time, and generous. Be that person you would like to be friends with. Likability and the related trait, intimacy, is one of the biggest factors in trust, and it’s also one of the easiest to develop with people online. So work on that first with people, before you try to create transactions or take things further. It makes a world of difference.
Locn. 3803-5 Be helpful. Just for the sake of doing it, be helpful. It’s the act that keeps on giving. Since so many people are in it for them, this one idea is worth more than you’d imagine. Doing very simple things without the emphasis on any kind of quid pro quo makes it much more meaningful, and the ways you can do this are endless.
Locn. 3843-45 At this point, the web sites people pay the most attention to (besides search engines) are YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and primarily the social networks. They’ve surpassed porn as the types of sites people spend the most time using on the Internet (we know, we were shocked, too).
Locn. 3872-76 Often with experimentation, the downside is very small, while the possible reward is very large. So trying something new could do you worlds of good. You could hit upon small, new ways to connect or whole worlds of benefit and profit. So give it a shot. Try something new today. It may just revolutionize what you do. Trust us.
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