Case Study: Chris Brogan
Book | Trust Agents
Primary Tribes | ChrisBrogan.com | @chrisbrogan | Facebook/trustagents
Chris is a well-known blogger and social media leader with a large blog and twitter following. He’s also a popular speaker and has a reputation as one of the most approachable “big names” in social media (he’s also a friend, so I’m a little biased).
In late August 2009, Chris and his co-writer, Julien Smith, released their book, Trust Agents. As part of the pre-release, Chris began to seed his blog, twitter and Facebook fan page with a variety of innovative offers, including the opportunity to purchase copies of the book in bulk. Two or 300 copies got you Chris, in person, anywhere in the U.S. for a 1/2 day. And, after years of offering up a ton of high value content to his readers, friends and followers and engaging in conversation, he asked people to give back, just one time, by buying the book.
Had Chris not built up a substantial cross-platform online tribe, he’d have had to resort largely to old-school broadcast media or far less conversational and less sustained list marketing, making the campaign both far more costly and far less likely to have succeeded. And, had this been his opening salvo after a brief time building his online tribes, it never would have worked. Social media communities don’t respond well when you ask for favors, before having offered substantial value to the community, preferably over an extended period of time.
But, Chris has given so much for so long, people not only stepped up to support the book, they stepped up to support him as a way to say thank you for giving so much and bringing us into the conversation. More recently, Chris has begun to tap his tribes as a resource to brainstorm new book marketing ideas, travel the country in hybrid social media/signing tour mode and even figure out how to marry book sales to his ability to further certain causes.
Net result: Trust Agents hit the NYT Bestseller list 2 days after release and the WSJ list 2 weeks after.