In my in-box last week: "Citibank Survey Reveals Small Businesses Not Joining Social Media Conversation."
In my in-box on Thursday morning: "Survey: Nearly Half of Small Businesses Surveyed Have Profiles on Facebook and Twitter."
Um, do these add up?
Let's take a look. The first survey, conducted by Citibank and research firm GFK Roper, surveyed 500 small-business executives in the U.S. and found that 76 percent say they don't think social networks are helpful for "generating business leads or for expanding their business," and 86 percent "say they have not used social-networking sites to get business advice or information."
Yet the second survey, commissioned by research group Internet2Go and small-business networking site MerchantCircle, polled 2,000 small businesses in the U.S. and found that 45 percent already operate Facebook pages and 46 percent have either a business or personal presence on Twitter.
"We've known anecdotally that small businesses are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter but these numbers are surprising," Internet2Go senior analyst Greg Sterling said in a release. "The conventional wisdom is that (small businesses) are unsophisticated but they're adopting social media tools en masse it appears, because there are fewer barriers to entry than other forms of online marketing."
Meanwhile, the Citibank survey: "Our survey suggests that small business owners are still feeling their way into social media, particularly when it comes to using these tools to grow their businesses," executive vice president of Citi's small business group Maria Veltre said in a release. "While social media can provide additional channels to network and help grow a business, many small businesses may not have the manpower or the time required take advantage of them."
The two, both of which classify "small business" as a company with fewer than 100 employees, really seem to serve up fairly conflicting results. But let's look a little deeper. The Internet2Go study, affiliated with a company (MerchantCircle) with an obvious interest in small businesses and social media, only polled existing MerchantCircle members. That means that those small businesses have already made at least one big leap toward trying to become more social-media-savvy.
Internet2Go senior analyst Greg Sterling told CNET News that the decision to only poll existing MerchantCircle members was made because it's difficult and expensive to pin down small businesses to survey them. The social network has "a large population of SMB users," he said in an e-mail.
That said, he admits the survey's results aren't totally random as a result: "These results should not be automatically generalized to the entire (small business) population," a blog post by Sterling explains. "They're qualified by the following: the survey targeted the most frequent content-publishers among MerchantCircle's small-business members. However, we believe these respondents may be a leading indicator of where the market is heading."
So it's more than likely that the Citibank survey shows the scenario closer to the current reality. Fine print, you know, can say a lot.
This post was updated at 10:52 p.m. PT with comment from Internet2Go's Greg Sterling.
A majority of U.S. workplaces block access to social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, new survey results commissioned by consulting firm Robert Half Technology indicate. Fifty-four percent block social networks "completely," while another 19 percent only permit it "for business purposes."
Only 10 percent of companies surveyed permit social-network use on the job for any kind of personal use; 16 percent allow "limited" personal use, according to the results released Tuesday.
The study, conducted by an independent research firm, surveyed about 1,400 chief information officers at U.S. companies with 100 or more employees, which means that the results obviously don't encompass small businesses.
Regulating social-network use at work is a complicated matter. There are some nuances that numbers like these don't bring up: "limited" personal use of social networks sounds like it could mean anything from blocking the majority (but not entirety) of social sites to simply instituting a "don't trash your boss on Facebook" rule. Some companies, additionally, may have different standards set for different degrees of employees--the guy running the company Twitter account and the human resources department may have extra privileges, for example.
There also isn't a differentiation in the results regarding which percentage of "blocked completely" workplaces use filtering software to keep employees off banned sites and which ones have a rule by which employees are supposed to abide (but might not).
Internet controls and filters in the workplace are nothing new. But social networks pose an interesting case: their potential for professional as well as personal networking, not to mention the well-publicized use of Twitter for marketing and customer service. There's also the fact that they've become so ingrained in culture and communication that some companies choosing to block them can appear draconian rather than prudent.
But they're still great for procrastination and counterproductivity, so it's not surprising that most businesses put the clamp on them.
"Using social networking sites may divert employees' attention away from more pressing priorities, so it's understandable that some companies limit access," Robert Half Technology executive director Dave Willmer said in a release. "For some professions, however, these sites can be leveraged as effective business tools, which may be why about one in five companies allows their use for work-related purposes."
Along with the survey results, the company also offered a number of tips for social networking on the job: be aware of your employer's policies, don't complain about your co-workers or boss online, and keep tabs on your usage so that it's not too much of a time suck.
This post was updated at 8:06 PM PT to add comment from Bebo.
Remember that controversial study awhile back that pegged Facebook as having the worst performance out of major social media sites? Get ready for controversy, because a new one just came out that puts youth-oriented Bebo in the top, er, bottom spot, with Facebook pulling in a rather respectable ranking.
Representatives from Pingdom, a performance monitoring software company, posted a blog entry on Tuesday with the results of a study that monitored how much downtime 14 major social networks experienced between January 1 and February 25. Bebo, which is most popular in the U.K. and Ireland, clocked in a total of 12 hours and 28 minutes of downtime. In second place was Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, with seven hours and 25 minutes of downtime recorded, and Friendster came in third with six hours even.
"More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook-style," the Pingdom blog post read. "It could be putting more strain on Bebo's systems than they anticipated."
Bebo representatives did not outright deny the downtime statistics, choosing instead to highlight the site's recent rapid growth and popularity of its developer platform. "Bebo has hit an all-time high in pageviews, capping off a favorable January, as reported by ComScore," a statement from the company read. "Last week, Bebo broke all previous pageview records and has recently enjoyed record-setting demand for two major initiatives launched at the end of 2007. To date, 400 media partners have joined Bebo's Open Media, and 1,300 applications are now available through Bebo's Open Application Platform. Our system is fully operational."
Pingdom monitors sites by regularly calling them up with automated "pings." "Downtime" is defined as when a site is unavailable, produces an error message, or takes more than 30 seconds to load.
Facebook and MySpace.com did comparatively well in the survey, with Facebook reportedly experiencing one hour and 35 minutes of downtime and News Corp.'s MySpace only 25 minutes. But the best performance came from Yahoo 360, more a Web of profiles than a social network proper, which clocked in only five minutes of unavailability.
Messaging site Twitter, whose frequent downtime has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley punchline, was not included in the survey.
On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."
WatchMouse used its "Site Performance Index" (SPI) methodology to track the reliability and load time of the sites in question; this figure is computed by calculating the time needed to call up a site's home page and applying a penalty for each failed request. Lower is better: an SPI of 500 is considered good, whereas the Utrecht, Netherlands-based WatchMouse considers over 1,500 to be indicative of "a seriously negative user experience."
According to the study, social networks in general are not particularly reliable: 51 of the 104 sites surveyed came up with SPIs of 1,500 or more, and only six small social networks were awarded with SPIs under 500 (Faceparty, Tagged, ASmallWorld, Flirtomatic, Rummble, and StudiVZ). At the top of WatchMouse's blacklist was Facebook, which it assigned a whopping 6,629 SPI. That was the worst ranking out of any of the sites surveyed--even microblogging service Twitter, whose frequent downtime has become a punchline of sorts. (WatchMouse assigned an SPI of 1,467 to Twitter.)
Facebook has not yet issued a response to the study.
Many of the other poorly-performing social media sites aren't exactly household names, like Searchles (SPI 5,856) and RateItAll (SPI 3,370). Music-based social networks tended to come in with disconcerting indexes, perhaps because of the amount of streaming media hosted on many of them--Last.fm, acquired by CBS Interactive last year, had an SPI of 1,837; the fast-growing Buzznet was assigned an 1,868; and Mog had an index of 1,911.
But according to WatchMouse, many of the highest-profile social networks didn't perform all that badly. MySpace, which had a famous outage in the summer of 2006 when a heat wave crashed its servers, clocked in a rather respectable index of 923. Business network LinkedIn came in with a 1,006. The youth-oriented Bebo achieved a score of 912. And Google's Orkut, third-string in the U.S. but dominant in countries like Brazil and India, had an enviable index of 564.
WatchMouse is only one company, however, and every study's methodology has limitations--just look at the controversy over traffic monitoring statistics. The SPI is based on home page load time and reliability rather than individual pages on a social network--it's monitoring, for example, Myspace.com rather than Myspace.com/whinyemoband. Other performance monitoring firms would likely show different results on a similar study. We've contacted a few for comment.
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