Browsing: Trust Agents

Leverage is where Chris Brogan and Julien Smith take us throughout the second half of chapter four. But it was one sentence toward the middle of chapter four that’s been swirling around in my brain for the last few days… “Don’t ever sell to your audience. Instead, be their gatekeeper.”

Online communities are valuable. They can be reached more quickly and leveraged more effectively, and the right kind of trust agent can work with those communities to effect actionable change.

The dynamics of community and culture seem to be the same, wherever you may find yourself.

For example, I work in campus ministry. The university community is unique and as a campus missionary of sorts, I must know the culture. I must learn its language, find its gathering places, and know its nuances. I must submerge myself into the community if I want to effectively develop relationships with college students, earn their trust, and ultimately earn the right to share the gospel with them.

Essentially, I must become “one of them.”

(And, may I say, it’s a rough job. Somebody has to go to all those football games!)

Tic-Tac-Toe is a boring game. I can’t think of the last time I lost a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. I bet you can’t either. And you know why? It’s because the game is too simple. You can be a master at Tic-Tac-Toe, but no one will care.

You’ve got to play a new game.

In the second (and third) part(s) of chapter 2, Brogan and Smith discuss steps 2 and 3 of gaming (see Mary Beth Stockdale’s post for step 1). Here they offer two ways to improve your game: hacking and programming.

Accomplishing a goal requires following some type of procedures, but to Make it Your Own Game, you need to find the “Gatejumper” key. Gatejumping is…”what happens when you find a better way to do things while everyone else is too busy to notice.”