Does Twitter Really Cost Business?

A recent survey highlighted by the Telegraph shows that Twitter may be costing UK business £1.38bn!  The survey shows that

• More than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day, and admit wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.

• One in three of the 1,460 office workers surveyed also said they had seen sensitive company information posted on social networking sites, leading to fears about how workers use the internet.

• Philip Wicks, consultant at Morse, the IT services and technology company who commissioned the survey, said the true cost to the economy could be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate.

What makes me smile about surveys like that, is that they only look at social networking as a time waster not as a value producer. There is an assumption that time spent is time wasted….yet I know for instance that I use Twitter to help answer questions, almost like a free consultant. I also know that I find talent through Twitter. I also know that social networking has a motivational factor which cannot be measured…..

My feeling remains that social networking only moves from value adding to time wasting when people are badly managed and disengaged with their workforce in the first place!