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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.
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