At Rabbit we have a very simple argument for organisations wanting to stop worker Facebook or Twitter access.   With more people set to go online via their mobiles than desktops within four years (this stat via Ben Kunz), your efforts are likely to be futile.  Much better to have an internal social media policy in place instead.

Here’s another reason:  Allowing workers to use social media won’t result in them talking you down, just the opposite actually.    Forrester came out with pretty damning research among 5500+ information workers in North America and Europe, to find out whether they’d be more likely to be ‘detractors’ or ‘ambassadors.’

Half of (49%) of information workers are detractors, and only 27% are promoters, or a net score of minus 23%.   Not surprisingly, directors are promoters but workers – and also supervisors – are detractors.   So forget the notion of middle management always being on your side.

However at the same time, this statistic is worth nothing.   According to Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff in AdAge:

“In case you’re wondering if you should allow employees onto social networks (and trust me, you can’t stop them), try this fact on: workers who use social media are among the most positive. 48% would strongly recommend a company’s products and services and only 22% were detractors, for a net score of 26% — among the highest of the groups we surveyed.”

My theory for why this is, is two-fold.   First of all, in a lot of companies still adopting an attitude that’s at least five years out of date, only marcoms professionals whose job it is to actually monitor and respond on social media, are given access.

Secondly, I wonder if an instinctive reflex to defend your ‘tribe’ kicks in.  So you might proactively mouth off about your boss or the stuff your company makes to friends and family, but seeing a stranger criticise them online is different.

I’d also agree with Ann All of IT Business Edge, letting workers use social media shows that you trust them to act responsibly.    Another reason for bosses to stop treating workers like children when it comes to social media access.    If you treat them like adults, they’ll more often than not respond in kind and become your advocates.

(Image from m4r003nd)

Related articles

• Employees Using Facebook, Smartphones More Likely to Promote Company (pcworld.com)
• Would Your Employees Promote Your Company? (adage.com)
• 10 Must-Know Advantages & Disadvantages of Social Media (thoughtpick.com)

US media strategist and business week columnist Ben Kunz points us to a fascinating case study from US digital agency Organic.

Faced with the constant question every agency in this space is familiar with of “yes, but how does it drive sales?”, Organic hired economist Jason Harper to work in the Detroit office for US car clients.

Instead of scrabbling around with post campaign reports, Harper took a different approach – to predict whether a marketing campaign was hitting targets mid-flow by assessing the level of chatter.

In other words, social media wasn’t evaluated, it was an evaluation tool.

According to MIT’s technology review, a ‘velocity and acceleration’ model constantly measured social media activity and (importantly) the momentum it was gathering as a way to see if a campaign was on track.

As it was, Harper was able to prove that consumers who engaged with one of (auto brand) Jeep’s “online touch points” were twice as likely to schedule a test drive at a dealership.

Image – Darren Hester

Related articles

• Predicting where the social dice will land (thoughtgadgets.com)
• A New Model for Predicting Social Media Impact (technologyreview.in)

Following Rupert Murdoch‘s comment that he might in future hide his news sites from Google, there’s obviously been a fair amount of discussion about it.  Ben Kunz’s take on the issue, including a look at how Sony manages to give away free content AND shift inventory is worth a read.

However, the obvious question is, could this become something of an own goal? Answers from Hitwise and Alexa say quite possibly yes.

Hitwise looked at Murdoch’s flagship US title, The Wall Street Journal, and found that both Google and Google News are the top traffic drivers.  More importantly, Google is responsible for driving new readers Murdoch’s way – with over 44% of Google traffic coming from people who haven’t visited the WSJ in the past 30 days.

That last point is important – with 88% of newspaper reading time happening in print (note – reading time, not actual readers), the way we consume online media is, outside a community of news nerds, such as myself, very different.

The other month, UK media blogger Malcolm Coles looked at the online editions of the UK national newspapers and found that over 6/10 readers only read a single page, or article, and leave again. The conclusion is that there is less brand loyalty online for news.  We search for what we look for, we consume it, and we quickly move onto doing something else.  And if we encounter a paywall, we can easily find that content for free somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal at least does have a core of – paying – readers.  Looking at the UK tabloid, The Sun, Google is responsible for close to 20% of ‘upstream’ visits to the site according to Alexa. For The Times (see image below), that figure increases to over a quarter.

Given this much more single-minded way we now consume news, it will be interesting to see how Murdoch’s sites fare if he does pull them away from search. From the evidence, if he really goes ahead with it, he might have to do an about turn very quickly.

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• Google: Rupert Murdoch can block us if he wants to (telegraph.co.uk)
• News Corp Sites May Be Removed From Google (news.sky.com)
• If The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will Also Say Goodbye To 25 Percent Of Its Traffic (techcrunch.com)