Chris Brogan is one of the ‘it’ guys in social media right now. So when he and Julien Smith published Trust Agents, I figured I should give it a read.

Julien is on a podcast called Media Hacks. He curses a lot, which makes me like him.

I am, as you can likely tell, very skeptical of any book that claims to explain social media and internet marketing in less than 400 pages. So, at 260 pages, Trust Agents came in a bit high on the Ian Skepticism Scale.
However, the book rocks. You gotta read it.

What you’ll learn

If you’re a total social media newcomer, you’ll learn how it works, and how you can turn time spent on sites like Facebook into a bigger, better audience for your business.
You’ll also get some specific, actionable stuff to make getting involved online a bit more manageable. Things like building a monitoring station (I’d swear someone wrote a free ebook about this).
If you’re a cantankerous old internet marketing fart like me, you’ll gain a whole new vocabulary for talking about this stuff to clients. And you’ll likely learn a thing or two.
The most important point everyone will learn: This kind of marketing, via Twitter, one customer at a time, blogging, etc. is not going to go away. In fact, it’s becoming the marketing engine. With that change, trust will become the currency we exchange to get customers, clients, reputation and growth.

Buy Trust Agents. Read it. More than once.

I’m actually re-reading the book now, a few weeks after first finishing it. So go buy Trust Agents (preferably via the link below, so I can save up for my Kindle), read it, and learn.