The social network phenomenon has permanently infiltrated the work practices of employees, whether by design or for pure recreational purposes. A measured result of this 9-5 behaviour is not only a general rise in Internet use by more employees, more often, but a significant escalation in the workplace population of networks like Facebook to the point where an extraordinary 40 percent of all employees now regularly access Facebook – up from 24 percent 12 months earlier.
These findings, as well as further analysis on the ‘digital identity’ in the workplace, is published in a recent report by Australia’s Mailguard. The report is titled, Datacurve Report No. 1: Enterprise 2.0: Looking Inside Out
While the report’s emphasis is on the segmentation of employees based on how Internet active they are, and subsequently, the impact on productivity in the context of their responsibilities, there are some very unique insights into the workplace consumption of online media. The key point is that there is a higher intensity associated with digital content consumed in the workplace, though this is shared by a relatively small number of publishers. In other words, once a news site, for example, embeds itself into the employee’s repertoire of daily ’surfing’, it is virtually locked-in over a relatively long period of time. Across an aggregated workplace audience, a publisher will experience higher averages for visitor frequency, page impressions and, consequently, session times.
Take www.news.com.au and www.smh.com.au as examples. In a typical month, their respective visitor frequency rates are approx. 9.2 and 10.9 (Nielsen Online). By comparison, the Datacurve project demonstrates that workplace-only frequency is 15 and 23 respectively (more than 50 percent higher in both cases).
The question remains: are AUS publishers securing day-part premiums which reflect this level of workplace engagement?
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