Despite the fact that I’m painfully shy when meeting new people face to face, one thing I’ve never had trouble with is making friends online. It’s so easy for me and I’ve met enough of them in real life that I think my friends that I met in real life first might actually think I’m kind of weird.
And it’s not something I’ve started recently. I flew down to Southern California on my own (with my parents blessing) to meet up with an online friend for the first time when I was 16 back in 2000. It was an awesome trip, she came to visit me the next year, I went to college in Southern California for a while and we met up frequently then, and we’ve kept in touch for the 9 years since that first real life meeting.
Trust Agents promotes meeting in person with people you’ve only met online as a good and powerful thing to be doing. For the past 9 years, I’ve considered it a weird and socially awkward thing to be doing despite the fact that I’ve done it often.
At work, one of my titles is marketing manager. Usually that means just filling out registration forms for trade shows, maintaining the corporate website, and designing pretty brochures. But sometimes it means going to trade shows and exhibiting and having to network with potential customers. I think my boss would like me to be a sales person but that’s not something I could ever do because I can’t make a hard sale.
Trust Agents is written mainly to teach businesses and their sales people how to leverage social networking and the online world. For me, it’s about taking what I’ve learned from making friends online and inverting those skills back to the traditional business atmosphere.
The book is about the internet, it’s about social networking, it’s about real live people and it’s about every possible way those concepts could overlap and interconnect with each other. The book also includes handy tips for meeting people in real life for the painfully shy like: when a person hands you their business card, that’s the perfect opportunity to make eye contact if you haven’t done so yet.
If you’re interested in the evolution of online friendships and social networking, the future of marketing, or just the internet in general then Trust Agents is an excellent read.
I’d also like to note that I bought the Kindle edition of this book and read it via the Kindle for iPhone application and am very pleased with that experience. The library doesn’t have the book yet since it just came out a couple weeks ago, the cheapest price currently available on Amazon.com for the physical book is $11.99 (was $18 something earlier this week when I bought it), and the Kindle edition is $9.99.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I love that you picked up on the fact that it’s not just for the online part of the equation. I’m also happy that you do little things to stretch out your comfort levels. That’s so exciting! Thanks for a great review.
Hi Carrie,
I have read a lot of reviews of the Trust Agents recently, but yours is one of the most convincing. It’s so refreshing to have someone apply knowledge to real life situations, which is why the book was so fantastic.
Cheers,
Camille