Facebook and other social networking sites are lots of fun but they are also amazing productivity killers. Most enterprises will end up blocking social sites at work so they don't have to fire their employees for wasting all their time and money.
At home, people can still while away the hours, days and years of their lives on social networks, but at work, they still need to do what they were hired for.
The social networking bandwagon is operating at near capacity: Only 18 percent of the online population is holding out from social media, according to Forrester Research.
To put that 18 percent in context 25 percent of the online population was socially inactive in 2008 and 44 percent were no-shows in 2007. Forrester’s third annual Social Technographics Profile, as highlighted by Josh Bernoff, reveals the following:
- Nearly a quarter of the U.S. online population create blogs, upload audio and video and write stories.
- Online forum traffic is down as folks move to Facebook and social networks.
- One in five adults categorize content with tags, RSS feeds and voting systems like Digg.
- Half of online adults are members of social networks.
- We’re all spectators that consume social content. Social participation increased across all age groups, but adults 35 to 54 really got on the bandwagon.
The enterprise takeaway: Given all your employees are now online social creatures it stands to reason that these technologies will make their way into corporate applications as features.
The report categorizes people into six categories: Creators, who write and upload multimedia; critics, who regularly comment; collectors, who aggregate information; joiners, who are relative newbies; spectators, who just watch; and inactives.
Here’s a look at the social trends by activity:
