Productivity, Bandwidth and Social Media

I had a fun conversation on Sunday night with a business owner who was lamenting over people spending their day on Facebook and other social media venues.  He felt he had a big enough issue that he spent some money on a firewall to stop people from accessing it.

As we chatted, I realized based on some work Michael had done at a client (I asked some good probing questions), that this was just as much about bandwidth utilization as productivity.  As we talked I highlighted:

  1. In today's world, people will move to smartphones if they want to really get on facebook
  2. In some cases, if you see someone having facebook open all day, does not mean they are on it all day.  Often, the next generation uses this like I use email/outlook.  So not necessarily a good measurement.
  3. Productivity is often abused, and social media is just the next tool to give people the opportunity.
  4. Bandwidth utilization can mean that instead of stopping it, move it to a low cost, low bandwidth pipe and off the corporate communication network.

It was funny though, with all the conversation, he never thought about leveraging this interest in the social media to take it as an opportunity for his business.  He is a prime, customer facing organization that probably spends a good amount of money on print and nothing online.  He has some people in his office that understand part of the paradigm, now harness it.

Man it was a fun conversation.

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