I read a report from Reuters about British Think Tank, Demos, saying that bosses shouldn't stop their staff from visiting social networking sites because it could actually benefit their business. Music to my ears I thought. I'm obviously pretty pleased with the conclusions that they came to, not least because it absolutely marries up with the results of FaceTime's fourth annual survey of Internet Trends (more on this in a moment), but it marries up with how I work.
The Demos report concluded that
"The value of networking within an economic downturn is perhaps more important than ever and I believe it could mean the difference between a business collapsing or capitalizing on the tricky conditions."
Paraphrasing the report, it means that employees should be allowed to use MySpace, or Facebook, because there is very little difference between social networking and professional networking.
The FaceTime survey also looked at the changing way in which IT professionals and employees use the Internet. This year, 81% of survey respondents said they use social networks at work for personal reasons. But what's interesting is a nearly equal number - 79% - said they use these sites for business reasons. And 51% are accessing them several times a day.
I'm definitely one of those 51% of the 79%. You'll find me regularly on LinkedIn and Facebook, both for social and legitimate business reasons. I actually think that my local supermarket owes me some coupons or at least a pat on the back.... I recently posted a tip on Facebook about beating the credit crunch with a special deal they had on some wine, and I know for certain that my buddies bought at least 5 cases. So Tesco, if you're listening....you know where I live.
However, there's one point in the report that I don't agree with.
"Bans on Facebook or YouTube are in any case almost impossible to enforce; firms may as well try to put a time limit on the numbers of minutes allowed each day for gossiping."
You see this is one of the great things that FaceTime - and our flagship product, the Unified Security Gateway (or USG) does.
Ban the access if you want, USG lets you do that. Or, enabling you to truly realize the value of networking, it gives you granular control over who can do what. Whether its downloading one of the more than 20,000 thousand applications on Facebook, or setting who can use AIM or Yahoo! Messenger or GoogleTalk or myriad other real time chat and communications tools.
So while we can't stop the gossip around the real water cooler, we can stop them getting to the virtual one!
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