Election 2008

Fight the Man: Facebook Edition

(UPDATE: post edited to include Mashable source citation and category links)

As social networking sites increase in popularity, more and more businesses are striving to maintain worker productivity by simply blocking access to sites such as Facebook and MySpace. This week, an Australian firm released a study claiming that Facebook usage costs Australian businesses $4 billion in lost productivity…Mashable posted a good analysis of the study:

“An Internet security company, SurfControl, looked into the issue, and it estimates that Australian employees spend approximately one hour a day on the social networking site. Using that number, they come up with the slack time costing employers approximately $5 billion Australian ($4 billion US) a year in lost productivity.

How they reached this mysterious number is, just that, a mystery. The study lists that there are 800,000 businesses in Australia, and they are estimating one slacking employee per company. A problem with this estimate is that Facebook only currently lists approximately 224,000 members from Down Under, and then you still have to assume each one of those people is a very active user of the site.

Of course, the fact that this firm sells a web and email blocking system may explain some of it.”

-originally posted by Mashable 

If this is indeed the methodology used in this study, I’m certain that any second-year college student with basic research skills (or even younger, if they have a decent level of commons sense) would be able to point out a plethora of fundamental flaws in this research design. Honestly, even if I ran a company whose business was controlling workplace net traffic, I would not release this study, if only to keep my company’s name off such an ineptly created statistic.

This is merely the latest push to stem the rising tide of social network users. Over the past year, companies all over the world have made efforts to block access to sites like Facebook, in fact, in Britain an estimated 70% of firms have blocked or limited access to Facebook. Despite the efforts to keep them off, however, users are simply getting more creative at accessing the site…the moral of the story is that you can’t fight social shifts: Rock’n'Roll won because of Elvis and the Beatles, user-generated media is winning because of Wikipedia and Digg, and social networking will win because of Facebook and (dare I say it…) MySpace.

It will be interesting to see how the balance is reached in the future between workers and firms each trying to balance their priorities. Maybe we will see a more widely-adopted Google model of running a company…

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