Earlier this week a survey story about how social networks cost companies £1.4 billion/year in lost hours hit the headlines. The Mirror wrote "Twitter is a time waster", the FT chimed in with "Twittering workers waste £1.4bn" and Forbes perked up with "the cost of tweets and pokes." Fortunately, I suspect most people who heard about the story through social networks are also likely to have read the excellent debunking articles by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch and Charles Arthur at the Guardian.
Since the invention of social networks, and their subsequent shock! horror! highlighting of human nature (people like to chat, no matter the medium) there's been a rash of stories about the waste they allegedly cause. The BBC reported in 2007 that social networking sites were costing up to £133 million a day, a preposterous figure of £47 billion a year. That story prompted a minor backlash in the States, with posts from Warner Bros. VP of Technology Ethan Kaplan and Robert Scoble criticising any company that can't get constructive with social networks.
Commercial companies aren't the only bodies concerned with the activities of their staff. Kent County Council banned social networking sites in 2007 in an effort to reduce time wasting among its 32,000 employees. Portsmouth City Council also banned its 4,500 staff from accessing Facebook, even though it was shown that each employee was only spending 5 or 6 minutes a month on the site. It turned out to be a group of around 50 employees racking up hours on Facebook every day.
Strangely, the same news sites that covered these unquestionably negative angles also post a decent number of "good news" stories about use of social networks. A BBC report from New York showed that small businesses have been able to bring in customers and combat the recession through the effective use of sites like Twitter and Facebook. Another article, also from the BBC, reports that colleges are reducing student drop out rates through communication with students online.
This weird, contradictory coverage does in some way represent a truth about social media sites: they can be extremely useful in making contacts (and money), but they can also be distracting when you're trying to complete a single task that requires your full attention. Still, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that taking away the social network won't solve the underlying problem. Procrastination wasn't invented with the computer.
A few stories facilitated by social networks:
@Victoriaraimes' story of a pensioner who laid dead in her flat for five years came through a tip-off on Twitter.
Telegraph correspondents used Facebook to contact Rudy Guede, the murderer of Meredith Kercher, after he fled to Germany.
Pick up a newspaper and you'll likely encounter stories quoting Twitter streams from notable individuals. See: Ben Bradshaw says BBC biased, Hugh Jackman Twitter gaffe, Mark Cuban fined by NBA, Miley Cyrus quits Twitter, etc.
Got any more? Add them in the comments.
Great post Conrad.
I think the survey was also highly questionable - and Morse, the company responsible for it fairly luddite in its assessment of the findings. The wording of their press release will only have helped steer journos down this narrow-minded path.
What constitutes time wasting?
For example, say I spend four hours a week on social media - writing blog posts, conversing and sharing information via Twitter. Say half of that is in work time and there's no short-term value - that's "time-wasting" right?
But long term there is considerable commercial value in people being able to find me online and seeing that I can use tools and platforms they are trying to understand the value of.
Companies, such as Morse clearly still exist in a very analogue world where they equate people 'playing on computers' with time wasting because it doesn't fit neatly into traditional ways of assessing meaningful activity.
I'd have thought a technology company would be more open-minded.
Posted by: Will Sturgeon | Oct 29, 2009 at 16:48
Agree. It's a good article that I can apply this for my routine. I loved it, so usefully. Thanks :)
Posted by: ed hardy | Nov 20, 2009 at 05:04