Just read the Nucleus Research study on FACEBOOK: MEASURING THE COST TO BUSINESS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING released last month.

The report points out the employees can’t articulate a business reason why access to Facebook helps:

Although industry pundits may tout Web 2.0 and social networking as the next big thing, when asked to actually identify business uses for Facebook, Nucleus found that few employees could point to a true business reason. In some cases a specific business benefit may outweigh the general productivity loss, but the business case hasn’t yet been made for broad business user adoption.

But isn’t that opinion a self fulfilling prophesy – if a business doesn’t use Social Media, why expect people who work there to articulate the benefits of Social Networking?

I’m not totally disagreeing that there is a productivity issue, in some cases, where time on Facebook was time taken away from other activities that your at work to do.  However, if the nature of the work place needs to move towards Social Media, wouldn’t make more sense, instead of forbidding Facebook, and Twitter, to integrate it into the normal workflow?

And, by the way, I’ve found the time I spend on Facebook extremely productive, but that’s just me, can’t speak for anyone else’s experience.