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I just say the revolution hasn't come yet.

It's a huge distraction and a waste of time. It's a valuable resource to be embraced at all levels. Of course, it's both, but learning how to manage your time is perhaps one of the most important challenges in any work situation. But the management of our time as it relates to this relatively new set of distractions is something many of us (me included in some cases) have yet to master. Freedom to find your own ways of working effectively is important, but if you can't manage the the right balance between being productive and using social networking wisely, then you should be prepared to be replaced.

I worked for an NGO where the staff was very active and very connected via FB. It did wonders for corporate-community, expression and culture. In a mission-driven organization it does something amazing for the intelligence, real-time interactivity, and human-ness of the culture to be networked and interacting via the social web.

Overtime, as the general whole became more tech savvy - driven by an innate need to be more 'cool'ly connected - new concepts for productivity, relevance, and PR started floating up the chain-of-command into department and board meetings.

We are in the biz of relationship building, the corp world needs to utilize #socialmedia for such.

I absolutely agree, based on my personal experience of working on a company that allowed full access to the digital media in the office. I simply cannot believe that statistic about productivity drops.

@oscar - I guess it depends on how they measure productivity eh, old paradigm parameters.. . socialmedia not a straight line towards agenda item completion.

I agree with Trudy. Working at a company that does not block any website, I have to say that those sites are a powerful way of keeping people happy at work. And that goes a long way in terms of motivation.

I am definitely more worried about:
- Useless (and endless) meetings;
- People that should definitely not have been hired for a particular job because they have no clue what they're doing;
- Endless hierarchy levels where people cannot agree on the direction to go.

These are much worse than people using facebook for 2 minutes, which in fact is much less than a pause for a smoke ;)

It is not a good practise to use fb or orkut or myspace any of these kind of social ntwrking sites by employees other than let's say HR, marketing, sales or ext communication officer/ PR. I feel it's important how these departments use these platforms. Capability building and sense of integrity has to be built so tht the time spent on social ntwrking gives a higher ROI

trudy,
THAT was funny, well done!
It is a rare enterprise that really does care about the people. Profit per employee is always a very up front metric for a business owner and the real tools of engagement always look like a profit drain until you track the results.
@mnclayton

I think productivity is only perceived to drop.

When checking SM sites I may not be working at that precise moment so you could say that it is SM's fault that my productivity is down, but in general the reason I am spending the time checking SM in the first place is because I am not busy enough and need to fill time with something though-provoking. I glance at my FB news feeds briefly or glance over Twitter updates briefly (using Tweetdeck so it is all just a quick glimpse), and if I see an article that looks interesting then I spend the time to read it. SM for me is a time filler that has an added benefit of often informing me of interesting industry trends, learnings and related information.

Certainly more efficient use of time than long meetings in which nothing gets accomplished I would say - lord knows plenty of those go on around here.

Had to sign a No Internet form @ work. I can understand why. I thought that I would clean my house today...lol...much too busy tweeting!

If a company measures it's employee ROI in terms of "personal productivity" they'd fear the "distractions" of social media and see it as a time sink.

If a company measures it's employee ROI from "collaborative productivity", however, the equation changes and social media enhances relationship and team interaction.