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By Michael Neubarth
Does engaging in social media make workers more or less productive? Is social media use by employees harmful or beneficial to an organization? A plethora of studies on the use of social media in the workplace have been released, with some seeing social media use as detrimental to productivity, and others showing social media to be a positive force for employees and businesses.
While each new survey makes a splash, the issue of whether employee use of social media at work is productive or unproductive is part of an "Internet surfing" debate that has been raging for more than a decade.
Among the recent crop of studies, Robert Half on October 6, 2009, released a survey that found that "more than half of those polled (54%) said their firms do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while at work."
Robert Half's study is one of a long string of studies that have appeared over the years that have cast Internet surfing and social media use in a negative light, based on a percentage of companies that are found to be blocking access to employees.
As Michael Masnick noted in February 2006 on his techdirt.com blog, "It's like clockwork. Every few months we see headlines proclaiming how personal surfing at work is bad."
As Masnick explained on techdirt.com on April 2, 2009:
"Way back in the late 90s, there was a spate of news stories worried about this awful web thing and how companies were making it available at work-and how that was obviously going to be a massive drain on productivity. Of course, this was falsely based on the idea that productivity means always working, rather than getting work done...Since all those studies came out in the earlier part of the decade, we had hoped that these issues had been put to rest. But...no, of course not. With new online services like Facebook and YouTube, suddenly companies started freaking out again."
Cast a Wary Eye
As Masnick, Jason Lee, and others have pointed out (including myself in a recent blog), many of the reports that highlight the dangers of social media in the workplace are from Web security firms that sell Internet blocking software.
However, besides reports from Web security firms, research studies in general should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. As analyst David Linthicum said on ebizq.net, speaking of particular vendors' surveys in the business intelligence arena: "First of all, take these types of surveys with a grain of salt. They are obviously paying for the research, thus typically come up with the findings they are looking for."
Likewise, as Wikibon founder Dave Vellante explained in an August interview for CIOZone, many research firms have become "hired guns." Said Vellante, a former senior vice president of IDC, "When research firms have become vendor advocates and write whitepapers for pay, they are being paid to say something positive."
With these caveats in mind, let's look at a recent social media study by Nucleus Research, deconstruct its negative findings, then look at a number of studies with positive findings-including surveys from The University of Melbourne, The Creative Group, The Association of National Advertisers, FaceTime Communications, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, and Nielsen Norman Group.
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