<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"A recent survey from eMarketer.com seems to show that U.S. executives are warming up to social media usage in the workplace. \nOut of 438 management, marketing and human resources executives polled, 81% saw social media as being useful for both brand-building and enhancing customer or client relationships. Just under 70% see it as a valuable recruitment tool, 64% think social media is useful for customer service, and a lower sampling at 46% saw it as improving employee morale.\n\nAsked how they themselves actually used social media in the workplace, respondents listed brand-building as their top goal (82%), followed by networking (60%), and a long tail of other reasons including customer service, sharing project information, monitoring their competitors, prospecting for sales, research, and other.\n\n\nExecutive Fears About Social Media\nYet many executives still appear to have concerns about using social media in the workplace. Of those in the survey who reported not using social media, over one half listed the reason as not knowing enough about it. \n\n\n\n\nFour out of ten executives worried about security and confidentiality issues, and almost as many as 37% also worried that employee productivity might drop as a result. Only 14% of the non-users said they were currently researching or planning to implement social media in the workplace.\nThese concerns echo an early study from February by security company Sophos, who found between 50 and 60% of companies surveyed actively blocked access to social networks from the office. The top concerns listed were employee productivity, fear of malware, and a worry that employees would share confidential information about the company on the sites.\nUnfortunately the eMarketer survey doesn't break down the percentage of executives in the survey who used versus didn't use social media, but it's interesting to see the reasons both for and against social media in the workplace.\nDo you use social media in your business? Have you worked in an office that wasn't social media-friendly? \nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, Akirastock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/09/10/executives-social-media/>