Does Social Networking cost the British economy £1.38bn?

The Telegraph reports that social networking is costing the economy £1.38bn.

I'm always bemused by these sorts of figures but there's so many strangled routes on how to get to the big numbers. How does a survey of just over 1,300 works get to £1.38bn (apart from long multiplication and is this the US or UK version of a billion?).

So a company loses 40 minutes a week per employee to social network, much lower than I expected.

A number of local companies asked my opinion on such matters. My idea was to limit access during the working hours and release the Facebook IP's over the lunchtime period. So you could do your thang before 9am but then it was blocked until 1pm where the flood gates opened until 2pm then it was back to the grind until 5.30pm. I'm not even claiming that to be my idea, it was just sensible.

As for the company content, it's really up to the company to put together a policy of nominating one person to Tweet/Facebook on behalf of the company and make sure it's in the job description.

Giving customer service via Twitter comes with it's own set of challenges. As it's a service in realtime users expect responses in real time. The classic 24 hours to reply (as in the days of email) doesn't wash anymore.