Facebook costing Aussie businesses $5 Billion a year. Or not.

A bit of a storm erupted yesterday (I'm loathe to use the word "kerfuffle" for some reason), centering around this Facebook story on the Sydney Morning Herald.

According to web filtering firm SurfControl, the cost of employees spending an hour a day on Facebook adds up to an annual, time-related cost of AU$5 billion.

Crikey.

There've been numerous reactions to this in the blogosphere and, clearly loving the publicity and hits it generated, SMH.com has run a further story (in fact quite similar in most respects), discussing how "Facebook can damage productivity", and saying the site is shaping up to be an "employers worst nightmare".

The figures and results are questionable, but then again so are the motives behind the story itself.

Way to increase your traffic, SMH.

However, spurious reporting aside there's some serious issues here.

Firstly, are draconian measures with Facebook the right way forward? Should organizations ban it? No, I don’t think so and I’ve said this already.

I subscribe to the argument that if an employee is wasting hours on Facebook, so much so that it’s seriously affecting their productivity, then that’s symptomatic of other problems with that individual.

And even if an employee does or does not waste time but still wants to access Facebook at work and you’ve banned it, mobile technology now is such that you can’t actually do much about it if they’re even remotely determined. Banning it seems a little pointless with that in mind.

Secondly, it’s the psychology of why people keep in touch or network like this that really warrants investigation. As stated in the comments on Ross Dawson’s post, "networking is important to businesses," so why not networking facilitated by a social network website?

And further to this, forget the trendy names of the “Facebooks” and the “Twitters” and even the idea of “blogs” and “wikis”. I think the names are irrelevant, and in many cases limiting (like "RSS"...). Instead, focus on the underlying concepts of what people are doing with these tools and clearly identify how the mechanics of them can help people do their jobs better. In the positive examples we've researched, that’s been a recurring theme.