Anthony J. BradleyLast week I blogged on a recent article out of Computerworld citing a study finding that “54% of U.S. companies say that they have banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job. This seems very high so I conducted my own survey via this blog (the first time I tried it) and promised to publish the results today. One finding is that my readers are lazy or maybe apathetic 
Over 500 people read the blog but only 22 people took the survey. Not exactly statistically relevant numbers but here are the results:
Q1. Does your employer leave the decision on social media access up to you (i.e., there is no policy)? Yes. 60% No: 40%
Q2. Does your employer encourage the productive use of social media Web sites? Yes: 50% No: 50%
Q3. Does your employer restrict access to specific social media Web sites such as facebook and YouTube? Yes: 36.4% No: 63.6%
4. Does your employer restrict all access to the Web from work devices? Yes: 4.5% No: 95.5%
As I already mentioned, these numbers are not large enough to be statistically valid but let’s do some analysis anyway just for fun. These numbers are actually more in line with what I’ve seen in my dealings with clients. Q1 has 60% where there is no explicit policy on social media. This seems like it might even be a little low. I am really just starting to see enterprises taking a hard look at good social media policy. My survey paints a better picture for social media than the Half survey cited in Computerworld but even my rosier survey results leave a great deal of room for improvement. Some people left comments. Here are some interesting ones:
- Our employer even discourages use of social media tools (wiki’s, discussion forums, even Sharepoint Sites) internally, by placing barriers to entry (massive approval chains, undersized infrastructure)
- [Access is restricted ] Frequently under the guise of “network performance” or “virus protection.” I actually think the business side would like to be more open, but we do have a strong engineering background that gives us nerds in I/T (and particularly info security) too much control. I give this company some credit for trying, but the initial reaction of most I/T gatekeepers is NO – which I attribute to being 1)troglodytes, and 2)too lazy to make it work in a secure manner and 3)to lawyers who are too scared to let people speak up.
- [About access restrictions] No, not yet. Some employees “sense” that it’s coming, though.
I’m going to leave the survey up for a little while longer and I’ll publish again if responses pick up.
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7 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention Results of my Survey on Restricting Access to the Social Web -- Topsy.com October 13, 2009 at 8:55 am
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2 SmithWill October 13, 2009 at 9:07 am
Most organizations haven’t even figured out WHY they have Internet let alone knash their teeth over social media concerns. A better qiestion to ask is “how much does Internet connectivity add to the bottom line?” it’s not like you can’t calculate the amount. If you know your business and your customers all the content and activity will reflect same. Social Media is SOCIAL thus doesn’t necessarily translate to BUSINESS media.
3 Jay Scism October 13, 2009 at 9:37 am
Anthony,
This is what I love about corporate America. I go to Brizzly.com to add Gartner to my following list on Twitter, and Whoa!, it is now blocked by our corporate proxy under the Wiki/Social Networking category.
Twitter’s not blocked (probably too big to block), but, of course, Facebook and Myspace are (LinkedIn isn’t). To use a tool like TweetDeck requires an act of God (trust me, I have requested it on other’s behalf, don’t want to shed any light on my own use).
This from a company who wants to pretend to be one of those 2.0 companies. It’s disheartening inside to know that the external marketing speak is not met by any real desire to change attitudes inside.
4 Anthony Bradley October 13, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Will, you are absolutely correct. You can’t effectively build governance on social media (or the internet in general) without a clear understanding of the benefits to the organization. It does not naturally translate to business value. Business value is achieved only by design.
Jay, some organizations are fearful of social media. Sometimes this fear is used positively as the impetus for further exploration of benefits v. risks (good practice) and other times it results in blanket restrictions (bad practice). I have seen organizations put blanket restrictions in place while they figure out how to gain benefits while mitigating risks with the intention of opening up more as the make key decisions.
5 AJ October 16, 2009 at 3:22 pm
The 90-9-1 rule prevails. Actually, 22 out of 500 is pretty darned good.
6 Anthony Bradley October 21, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I like the 1-9-90 rule because it highlights the need to understand the numbers. IMO, the 1-9-90 rule isn’t really accurate and it only applied to the general public. I talk about understanding the numbers when going after a target audience because 1-9-90 may not be enough to garner ta thriving community. If you are targeting all sales people in your organization and their are say 300 salespeople. Having 3 originators, 27, augmenters, and 270 readers may not be enough for a thriving community.
And to be precise
I am the originator of this blog and those that completed the survey are the augmenters so according to the 1-9-90 rule I should have had 9 augmenters completing the survey and 90 readers. So you are right that with 22 augmenters and 500 readers, I kicked the 1-9-90 rule’s butt!
7 Results of my Survey on Restricting Access to the Social Web-Part 2 October 26, 2009 at 10:34 am
[...] like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job, I did a little survey of my own with these results. I left the survey up to possibly collect more responses (only 22 people took the survey the first [...]