Devin Byrka

I just finished reading a book a few days ago called Socialnomics, by Eric Qualman. (I find it funny that his logical email or Twitter name shortens to equalman.) The book is about social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and to a lesser extent, Youtube, and how they are impacting the way we live and do business.

It’s a pretty interesting book, and Qualman brings up some pretty solid points about the social and economic effects of social media sites. He uses a lot of hypothetical stories, which to me come off as lazy. I feel like if he’d dug a little bit, he could have come up with real accounts of interesting people who have benefited from sites like Youtube and Facebook. Instead, we get News Site A vs Blog Site B, home to Jane the Blogger. Surely Qualman could have found a similar example that actually happened, done a bit of research, a couple of interviews, and then recounted the story. Maybe he felt he could better illustrate his points with picture-perfect hypothetical examples, but to me it just seems lazy. Speaking of lazy, I’m not going to spend my time doing research to find a case that would have worked, and will move on.

Despite the nitpicking, there are a lot of insights to be had here. Qualman equates Social media to braggadocian behaviour, which he argues is a positive thing for society as it allows us to take collective stock of our lives and to monitor the social lives of our friends and colleagues more efficiently than we have in the past. He has another chapter on the Obama campaign, and how he used social media sites such as Facebook in order to build a grassroots campaign. Did you know that one of the four founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, worked on the Obama campaign? I bet he knew how to reach a lot of people on Facebook for a small amount of money…

Overall, it’s a pretty interesting book, but I have to wonder if it had an editor. I’m not claiming to be a grammar whiz or anything, but there are numerous places in the book where you just have to scratch your head and wonder how an editor could have missed not only the first and second confusions of your and you’re or it and its, but the third and fourth as well. I’m exaggerating, but that’s not to say it’s a prize winning piece of prose.