Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Reading Blogs at Work

Reading Blogs at Work

Get this—apparently sometimes blog readers are actually killing time at work, instead of being productive members of society. I, for one, am shocked.

AdAge put up a story this week with the headline ”What Blogs Cost American Business: In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Years Reading Them” (free registration required).

About 35 million workers—one in four people in the labor force—visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks—blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

The real kicker, I think, comes toward the second half of the piece. According to Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, blog reading is happening in addition to other Web-surfing and Internet use. This seems shockingly significant to me. It would be one thing if blogs were taking the place of other forms of Web tomfoolery, but the that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that workers are adding blog reading to their existing activities, taking time out from whatever else they are supposed to be doing to read blogs. The AdAge article goes directly to the conclusion that blog reading is actually decreasing productivity, taking hours that belong to the employee and replacing them with an activity that does not benefit the company.

But this seems wrong to me. In fact, we all know that we spend a certain amount of the work day engaged in non-work activities—getting coffee, chatting to colleagues, reading news, whatever. But my experience in the workforce tells me that most people have a little internal censor that keeps a cap on those activities. After all, we know we’re there to do a job, and there’s a finite amount of time you can spend goofing off and still accomplish enough not to get fired. Frankly, my fooling around schedule doesn’t have room for an additional 40 minutes of slacking every day. Which begs the question of why folks think they can get away with reading blogs instead of working. I think the answer just may be that a lot of that blog reading is seen by the employee as working, whether it’s reading blogs that pertain directly to your industry or job, or doing research, or figuring out what the competition is up to.

The Ad Age article acknowledges that some blog reading may actually be blog-related, putting a guess at around 25%. That’s pretty much speculation though, as is my own belief: that employees are reading blogs on work time because they feel that most of this activity is work-related.

UPDATE: Scott Adams has started a Dilbert blog!

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/25 at 11:12 AM • Blogs and Business

Comments

The problem with statistics like this is that they present the picture that if it weren’t for blogs or Internet access people would be spending that time being productive at work. This may or may not be true - the information is just not there. I would like to see a study of similar companies - half of which deny Internet access to employees, and see what real differences in productivity are.

People have been slacking in analog since jobs were invented.

Posted by J D Moore on 11/29 at 04:38 PM