Facebook is a social networking site that is well and truly taking Australia by storm. According to an article on news.com.au there are more than 230,000 Facebook users across the country, with reportedly more than 100 Australians joining the phenomenon each hour. I have been reading a lot of articles lately, some of which praise the site as being a vital tool and others damning it as a waste of billions.
News.com.au has run an article this morning painting Facebook as a time-waster costing Australian business big bucks through lost productivity, with expenses set to rise.
The data found if one employee spent an hour a day of company time on Facebook, it could cost their employer more than $6200 a year.
Projected across the 800,000 businesses with one or more employees in Australia, this one wasted hour a day equaled productivity losses of more than $5 billion a year.
NineMSN, however is running an article discussing Facebook as a “vital tool for productivity“. Interestingly enough I returned to this article for information on Facebook as a time waster and found that it had been altered to this new standpoint.
Facebook is a “vital tool for productivity” for Australian businesses, a leading Internet authority says.
Ross Dawson says claims that websites such as Facebook are timewasters is irresponsible and contradicts actual business practice.
Ninemsn’s Money website is also on board with an article titled “The dangers of being too social” that discusses social networking sites again from the time wasting point of view.
These sites can also be a huge waste of time. According to comScore, people spend an average of 186 minutes on Facebook per session. (To be fair, a lot of those visitors are letting the program run in the background while they perform other tasks — but three hours is still a long time.)
Aside from the time-waster vs time-saver debate, there is also a rising issue of threat from hacker activities. A concern shared throughout these articles as the popularity and growth rate of the site makes it an attractive target for hackers and spam monkeys. I have already come across groups and members on Facebook who are spamtastic. It’s not uncommon now to see members with a profile that invites friends to come along and view their webcam site or sign up at another site to see more pictures of them. This is something that will only get worse and I do hope it is an issue that can be tackled before it is too late.
I am not totally sold on the “vital tool” argument but I do see how it can be beneficial as a tool for some companies and also as a tool for networking with others in your industry for sharing ideas and perhaps even finding employees.
Almost all of the team at my office are signed up and we have multiple groups ranging from professional work groups to party organising groups. I have found it to be time saving for organising social activities but from a business point of view my mind switches more so to thinking about the productivity lost for my team checking out their buddies photos and writing on their “super walls” - and also the large amount of bandwidth these sorts of sites seem to guzzle up. We’re not ready to ban the site yet (as many companies have started doing) but we have given a softly softly warning to staff and asked them to keep their “facebooking” to lunch hours.
I am sure we will see more articles of this nature popping up in the mainstream press in the coming months.
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Facebook can be an excellent place for your employees to share good news stories about the business they work for. Within reason business should be encouraging their staff to have conversations.
Use employees as your social marketers
The tax system in Australia, through the Fringe Benefits Tax or FBT regulations currently allows you to make irregular and unexpected rewards to staff up to the value of $300 per person per year without incurring any liability.
Employee engagement has been high on everyone’s agenda for a number of years, more recently the debate has shifted and the idea of engaged employees being the new marketers is now becoming more commonplace.
Imagine you run a business employing one hundred people. That’s $30,000 that you can spend encouraging your employees to talk positively about your brand, products and service; acknowledging and engaging them in the process.
Let’s take a look at that this in a bit more detail. Assume you decide that $100 is a pretty good amount for each reward. Your $30,000 tax free allowance buys you 300 rewards, an average of three for each member of staff every year.
Each reward gets talked about. Every time you reward an employee you create a conversation; at the pub, at a BBQ, in the queue at the supermarket, over coffee, at the school gates.
Let’s assume that each reward gets talked about three times, that’s 900 conversations.
$33 for a good conversation, a potential new customer and someone likely to tell someone else a positive story about your business. Try asking your marketing experts whether they think that’s good value for money. Word of mouth, social networking, whatever you want to call it, can’t be bought they’ll tell you, well they are wrong!
Depending on how you structure your rewards program you can buy yourself even more conversations. An accumulative, points based program, allows you to make smaller more regular rewards. Let’s say you run with an average reward value of $25. That’s 1200 rewards a year and 3600 conversations.
We talk about our experiences even more than we do our possessions and cash.
RedBalloon Days uses experiences and unique gifts as extraordinary rewards through Gift Certificates and it’s points platform; we work with hundreds of businesses to engage employees and create powerful conversations for their brands.
From shark diving, to Sri Lankan cookery classes, flying lessons to spa treatments, sleepovers at the zoo to luxury weekends away there is something for everyone in the range of over 2500 experiences across Australia and New Zealand.
At RedBalloon for Corporate we help business get the most of out the marketing and rewards budgets. I start most of my presentations with a simple question, who has experienced RedBalloon Days before. I can pretty much guarantee that at least one person in the room will have been given, purchased one of our gifts or experienced our brand in the last seven years. People are always keen to share their story with the group; ‘my husband got one through his work’, ‘I bought one for my son’, ‘my friend took me with her on hers’…gossip gossip gossip….sometimes I don’t even have to speak to get the business on board - it’s the power of conversation. How many conversations is your business having?