The true cost of Twitter?
According to a recent survey of almost 1,500 office workers, Twitter is costing Britain’s economy nearly £1.4 billion in lost productivity.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8325865.stm
Research from IT consultancy Morse shows that 57% of employees use social networks for personal use when in the office, spending an average of 40 minutes a week posting personal tweets. It might not sound like much, but over the course of a year, this adds up to a whole week out of the year.
Sounds dramatic, yes? But let’s not get carried away. Long has the debate raged over whether the banning of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter at work is actually a good idea – after all, it’s not just within the media industry that employees are using their personal accounts to make and maintain work contacts. Here at Beam we’ve worked with several journalists who are far more responsive to Twitter than such quaint modes of communication such as the telephone...
And, after all, if your personal Twitter account identifies you as a representative of your brand, you have a great opportunity to have your message heard across the digital world. Get it right, and the results can be fantastic.
(Of course, 40 minutes a week equates to just 8 minutes a day on average. Probably about as much time as you might spend making those cups of tea, stretching your legs in your afternoon break, or even flicking through the papers at lunch. Sounds less dramatic now, don’t you think?)
The problem is not employees using social networks at work – the problem is employees using them in a way that reflects badly on their brands. Even if you’re using personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, the very mention of who you work for establishes you as a representative of your company, and those drunken or indiscreet tweets don’t just reflect badly on you. Perhaps the most interesting point from the Morse survey was that over three quarters of employers haven’t yet provided their staff with guidelines on how to use social networks. Maybe if they understood the value that an appreciation of the evolving digital world can bring, the benefits to businesses would far outweigh the supposed cost.