Social Media Is Not (Always) a Waste of Work Time
One of the biggest stigmas that social media has been, and continues to, contend with is the fact that it’s a time sink and harmful to productivity. Ben Martin shared an article with me a few days ago (Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions) that related the findings of a study of Facebook users within Australia. The authors findings: Facebook users who keep a close watch on their profile page were responsible for costing their employers approximately $4 billion USD a year. From the report:
“Facebook is shaping up as every boss’ nightmare as the social networking Web site urges its members to hook up with workmates online. That means millions of corporate dollars could be lost as workers manage their online social life via Facebook, rather than being productive in front of the screen.”
Based on the dollar amount alone, this is a startling and staggering revelation, but I believe it’s misleading and not entirely accurate. Additionally, studies and finding like these only make it harder for the productivity, community and communication enhancing effects of social media tools and technologies to be demonstrated and validated. This in turn makes it rather difficult to suggest or adopt technologies within organizations because public opinion is obviously clearly divided.
In a recent posting titled: “Facebook Is Not a Waste of Worktime” on the Digital Edge blog Beth Lawton seemed to echo very similar sentiments in defending the merit and value of social media technology in the digital media field. In constructing her argument she cited reasons such as (I created the categories, her thoughts are quoted):
- Know Thy Users: “As a newspaper online editor (or any digital media exec), you should be looking at these sites to figure out why everyone is playing with these sites.”
- Diversify Your Approach: “you may want to find out how you can either Work with the sites’ capabilities or partnership programs to get your content in front of your target audience or incorporate some of the cool elements from these sites and networks into your own digital media outlet.”
- Know Thy Competitors: “especially with Facebook platform, a ton of publications, digital media outlets and companies are working to gain access to consumers in creative ways.”
- Network, Network, Network: “Digital media groups, alumni groups, localized industry groups, etc.
Beth finishes her thoughts with the following statement:
“if you work in digital media and you are not “wasting” time on Facebook, MySpace and other Web 2.0 outlets – where your content consumers, potential content consumers and other digital media people are spending their time – you should be there.”
In looking at this from an Association perspective, I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’d be willing to go so far as to suggest removing digital media from the statements above and filling in your own association or industry/field/etc. that your association is trying to serve.
Bottom line: you need to be where your members are, and understand where your members go in order to serve them effectively and provide them as much value as possible. If you are not, they will either go and do it themselves or go and find it somewhere else. In either case its the association who loses out, not the individual. Social media is a great connector, and while not without its faults, does have many more positives than negatives. Lets start to try to highlight it’s strengths so others can learn from our successes while we also take a close look on it’s weaknesses so we can figure out how to fix/correct them. Saying that social media is a waste of time is the easy way out…it’s just lazy.
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My name is Dave Sabol and I work at the intersection of technology, online learning and knowledge management for 
One thing I keep in mind when I read about studies like “Facebook surfers cost bosses billions” is that they are PR bait as much as anything else. It’s like the articles you see every year based on studies about how much fantasy football is costing employers. An organization looking for media coverage just takes the number of fantasy football players, assumes they spend X amount of time on their teams during the workday, multiplies it out to get a big number, and issues a press release.
I would argue that as long as employees are meeting their objectives (and supervisors are making sure those objectives are strategic and sufficiently challenging for each employee) that it doesn’t really matter if someone is spending time on Facebook (even if that time is totally un-work-related).
And further, as you say in your post, having employees who are social-media savvy will benefit the employer in the end, if the employer is smart enough to tap that knowledge for the benefit of the organization. So what if the employee hones their social media knowledge on fantasy football blogs or knitting discussion groups?
Lisa,
Some really salient points and I agree completely. I think its just a matter of taking what makes sense to us and figuring out how to communicate that value to others. I think the larger problem is that current management thinking is that the only thing that can be done at work is work. You are right that the primary metric should be performance. As long as employees are meeting or exceeding their objectives what they do or how they do it should be immaterial. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
That’s part of why I wouldn’t choose to work somewhere that doesn’t allow flexible scheduling (for positions that don’t require you to be physically in the same space as others at particular times). If you’re meeting or exceeding your objectives, why does it matter if you’re there at 8 or 9 or 10 am? The 9-5 workday is more traditional than functional–in my opinion, at least.
Hear hear! The point is, a large demographic of workers will be on these sites (or IM’ing, or texting, or whatever) so it makes sense to see how companies and associations can harness their workers’ desire to interact inside their social networks, and use these tools to their advantage.