sure, facebook is a fun and easy-to-use social utility, but business aren’t too happy with their employees utilizing it at work. in fact, according to estimates from the sydney morning herald, there are about 800,000 workplaces in australia, and for each employee that uses facebook for one hour a day the employer loses $6200 per year.
Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said.
taking this into account, its a wonder only 43% of all businesses block facebook at work.
Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, surfcontrol, australia, time waster
In fairness, SurfControl spend much of their time scraping for justification of their web filtering products, so they’re going after a very newsworthy social network to make their point and validate the need for their product.
Companies will balk at the $billions being lost and perhaps overlook networking opportunities that could be gained by good use of social networks.
I’d love to hear of the first million dollar deal that started with a zombie hug…