Perhaps you, like most employers, see Social Media at work as "Social Notworking". Are you wondering what your employees are doing on their web browsers all day? Larger companies think they know, and they're doing something about it.

In general, mid-size companies, like members of Chief Executive Boards International have modest IT budgets, and may be ignoring this potential productivity drain. According to a recently-published Facebook Fact Sheet, the average user spends 55 minutes per day on Facebook alone. Depending upon your assumptions about how many of those 55 minutes happen at work, you can do your own calculation on lost productivity.

Web security and filtering provider Scansafe, recently purchased by Cisco, says:

"Currently, 76% of companies are choosing to block social networking and it is now a more popular category to block than online shopping (52%), weapons (75%), alcohol (64%), sports (51%) and Webmail (58%). Surprisingly, employers don’t take the same stern approach to online banking and less than half (47%) of our customers block this category." Full Article....

At the recent GROWCO Conference, sponsored by Inc. Magazine, activity was brisk at the booth of Spectorsoft, a supplier of web activity monitoring software. Clearly, smaller companies are taking more interest in what their employees are doing on the web while at work.