Review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536

This past week, I read the book Malcolm Gladwell dubbed the “bible” of social media, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. The overarching theme Shirky pushes is the power of social media to connect and mobilize its users for a common cause or reason. As Shirky explains, this is both a dream and a nightmare for marketers, as, “Consumers now talk back to businesses and speak out to the general public, and they can do so en masse and in coordinate ways,” (179). So while this gives satisfied customers a broad platform to promote the product, it also provides this same incredible platform and wide reach for negative press. Shirky provides examples of how this can go so wrong for companies, detailing disgruntled consumers who banned together on social media after negative experiences with a company to broadcast unflattering reviews to each other and everyone else in their personal networks.

Shirky also analyzes one of the earliest examples of social media marketing, the direct mail model, meaning those computer-generated emails that fill in your name to seem “personal.” These are actually still quite common today despite their many flaws (Shirky humorously notes how annoying the emails he receives to “Caly Shinky” are) (88). I believe Nancy Baym would agree with Shirky that this form of marketing is problematic, as it masquerades as synchronous communication by appearing to be personal email, but in truth, it is asynchronous since the sender is not a person that can be communicated with but a machine. Baym notes in her work that asynchronous one-on-one communications tend to have a “strange rhythm,” not to even mention how problematic the social implications are of misspelling someone’s name so blatantly in what is supposed to be a personal message.

Here Comes Everybody actually reminded me a lot of Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age, as both attempted to give a very comprehensive overview of the social media realm. However, while Baym’s book was a great way to start this semester by introducing many of the concepts and theories we would be going over in the course, Shirky’s book was a bit more basic than I would have liked at this point and for this specific assignment. While Shirky did offer some interesting insights to the psychologist aspects of the mass marketing social media allows, I overall felt like I did not walk away with too much new knowledge from the book. I do want to clarify that I do not mean to say that the book was bad—I think it was just aimed more at an older generation who would not be as familiar with social media. With my personal experience and knowledge from this course, it seemed a bit like I was taking a step back rather than enriching my knowledge.

It is also a testament to the extremely quick development of social media technologies that Shirky’s book—published in 2008—read as a bit out of date.  For example, when he discussed the concept of user feedback online, the fact that he did not go into review sites such as Yelp seemed like a blatant omission, until I realized that they just probably did not exist or were not as popular at the time.

While I recognize that this review has been primarily negative, I do think Shirky’s book would be beneficial for someone unfamiliar with social networking and marketing, as it is a solid introductory guide. However, I would suggest that anyone who chooses this book would supplement their reading with more recent articles on social media marketing and trends since this book is simply older than many of today’s popular social media sites and techniques. 


- Colleen H