Social Media - Guilty Pleasure or Guilty Time Waster?

By Carrie Pairman, G2G3

This week I read a report that social media distractions are costing companies thousands in lost revenue. It has been thought that each year, companies can be blowing in excess of $10,000 per worker as employees tumble into the twitter trap or fall into the realms of Facebook updates and messages.

We find ourselves immersed in a media-obsessed age where almost 60% of all distractions in the workplace involve social media of some sort, text messaging, instant messaging or email. This particular study showed that almost half of the employees involved only worked for a maximum of 15 minutes without being subject to interruption or distraction, whilst more than 50% of participants were quoted to waste at least one hour every day due to distraction.

IT is no longer saving time, it is doing exactly the opposite with many of the tools we use to help us in our work interfering in just that, our jobs. Psychologists believe that we are increasingly suffering from “online compulsive disorder” where employees are seeing an overspill from personal lives into the workplace. With online activities such as Facebook and twitter accounting for 9% of the greatest digital distractions, are they a guilty pleasure or merely............... guilty of time wasting?

As a marketeer, the use of social media is undoubtedly a large part of my role in terms of advertising, but despite that, could I be correct in saying that taking the odd short break throughout the day for non-work related issues actually increases productivity and quality of work? Social networking sites and the use of IM, I believe can help a team connect better, however succumbing to this “guilty pleasure” and clicking from link to link on twitter or Facebook is perhaps what contributes to this reported loss in revenue for some companies.

Working in the marketing department for a small firm like G2G3, we rely heavily on word of mouth and a lot of time can be spent even just thinking about social media, ideas for our blog, or tweeting. Social media is a good investment but should have a customized strategy - can these platforms be adopted for knowledge building and open communication as opposed to being seen as frivolous activities?

Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin indubitably provide additional marketing exposure and additional revenue but as more and more social media platforms are appearing on the market, companies need to understand how best to manage their brand, and indeed their time, across all of these channels.