According to legal firm DLA Piper, a total of 65% of employers do this, whilst more than three-quarters of employers say that they have a social media presence. Altogether, 86% are on Facebook, 78% are on LinkedIn and 62% are on Twitter.

The findings appear in DLA Piper’s new report Knowing your tweet from your trend: keeping pace with social media in the workplace. The report investigates the problems that employers face in staying abreast of social media and suggests procedures that could be put in place to minimise the risk posed by employees using social media at work.

According to the report, only 25% of respondents have a standalone, dedicated social media policy. Less than half (43%) have a social media policy as part of another policy, for example as part of their HR rules and regulations.

Kate Hodgkiss, a partner in DLA Piper’s employment practice and author of the report, said:

“There is widespread recognition that social media is not just a tool for marketing, but something that needs to be considered by all aspects of a business; from HR, to risk, to the upper echelons of corporate management. Our respondents recognise the benefits of social media to get their messages out to a wide audience, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods and far more quickly.”

According to a new survey from OnePoll and sales software company Salesforce, 76% of graduates are also attracted to employers who actively use social networks and tools.

The survey aimed to find out the importance of social networks during the recruitment process.

It also looked into stats regarding the use of social networks by SMEs – and showed that nearly half (47%) of those surveyed use social networks and tools to engage customers and prospects.

Meanwhile, nearly 70% of respondents say that social networks and tools are important to the future of their business. This figure rose to 86% amongst decision-makers aged 18 to 24.

SMEs are also more liberal regarding the use of social networks in the office. Only 15% of SMEs ban all use of social networks whilst 37% have no restrictions in place at all. This could work in those SMEs’ favour, as 40% of graduates surveyed said that they would be deterred from working for a business that had banned Facebook and Twitter.

Nearly 30% of managers in SMEs look to new graduates to teach them about how best to use social networking sites to grow their business.

Tim Barker of Salesforce.com said: “To attract and retain tomorrow’s talent, SMEs need to understand social networks and tools and use them to engage with customers, prospects, employees and in the recruitment process.”

In a more modest research project (in partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University), we’ve actually been doing our own SME survey, looking at SME Return On Investment (ROI) by using Social Media. The first outputs can be found in the links below:

Prezi : Social Media ROI Survey – as presented at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh, and Social Media Week Glasgow.

Return on Investment: What Literature Exists on the Use of Social Media and ROI? – an annotated bibliography of academic journal articles, professional publications, authoritative blogs and other resources that address social media and return on investment (ROI).

BBC Worldwide, which owns the rights to the programme, announced this week (22nd August) that users will be able to rent full episodes of Top Gear through the social networking site.

Fans will pay for their episode rentals using the Facebook credits currency system.

Users will need to become a fan of the Top Gear page first. After they do this, they will be able to choose episodes to view before streaming the content online.

They will have 48 hours to view each episode after paying and will not even have to leave the Facebook site to watch them.

Not all episodes of the hit show will be available on the social media site, however.

BBC Worldwide is planning to stagger the availability of select episodes.

The ‘Polar Special’ will show this week, the ‘US Road Trip’ will go live next week and the ‘Vietnam Road Trip’ episode will be available to view from 4 September.

Fans living in Europe, the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand will be able to access the shows.

Each show will cost 15 Facebook credits to rent – equal to 94p each.

But that could change.

This week, Facebook announced a tie-in with consumer audience measurement giant Nielsen which will see launch a new social media measuring tool, Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings.
The service, which launches in the US with a UK rollout later this year, works in a similar way to how TV ad audiences are measured, offering daily demographic reports of data gained from Nielsen’s TV viewing and online user panels and Facebook’s own database.

This announcement comes – with no great surprise – just as Google+ plans to launch its brand pages.

Ever popular Google Analytics is expected to be integrated within the Brand Pages (as well as Google Display Network, AdWords and DoubleClick advertising products) which will make Google+ a very attractive proposition, allowing advertisers to see clearly just who and where their fans are, and what online content they engage with.

Such a level of detail is imperative to help advertisers create more targeted online campaigns, relevant content, and most of all, maximise online marketing spend.

However, with a heavy-weight consumer insight company like Nielsen behind its data analytics, advertisers will have renewed confidence in Facebook, which could mean some hang on for the UK launch of this new analytics tool, rather than transfer their existing loyal and engaged Facebook base over to Google+, at the of risk of losing fans and customers.

According to US broadcaster CNN, the search engine giant wants its rival to Facebook to become popular amongst actors, musicians and other public figures.

CNN says that it found out about Google’s plans via a number of emails from Google.

The emails detail a new system that aims to verify the identity of a public figure when they sign up for Google+.

The system follows the model of that operated by Twitter, where celebrity accounts are authenticated and then stamped with a “Verified” icon. Twitter’s system was introduced after a number of fake accounts appeared purporting to be those of various well-known figures.

Experts speculate that Google may verify celebrity accounts by asking them to fax over official documentation proving their identity, such as their driving licence.

A number of celebrities have already joined Google+, including Ashton Kutcher, Taylor Swift and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Google remained non-committal on the subject in an official statement, merely saying: “We aren’t yet sharing any details on future plans around Google+. We plan to add a lot of features and functionality to Google+ over time.”

Meanwhile, regular users are clamouring to join the site, which has already amassed 10 million members.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has made the recommendation because it fears that in befriending their patients doctors may risk breaching confidentiality.

It advises medical staff and students to decline friend and follow requests by patients current or past in order to maintain the clear boundaries needed in the doctor-patient relationship.

The BMA guidance, which was published earlier this month, also warns medical professionals against posting “informal, personal or derogatory comments” about their patients on social media sites.

The advice follows a series of mistakes that have got doctors into trouble on Facebook.

According to Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA’s medical ethics committee, most doctors already refuse to accept Facebook friend requests from patients, although a small percentage would think about befriending them.

He told the Guardian: “Accepting Facebook friends presents doctors with difficult ethical issues. For example, doctors could become aware of information about their patients that has not been disclosed as part of a clinical consultation.

“It would also be wholly inappropriate for doctors to disclose information about their patients online.”

The Nursing and Midwifery Council also published similar guidelines this week, asking nurses and midwifes to refrain from posting photos of patients, discussing work and publishing sensitive information onto their social networks as well as not befriending their patients.

Such was the huge amount of interest in the new hotly anticipated social networking site that invitations to join had to be closed down in a matter of hours.

That hasn’t stopped Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg from joining: he’s one of the few thousand lucky users who have managed to join up in full.

Those who successfully joined Zuckerberg as members of Google+ were greeted with a well-designed social networking site which some say might eventually overtake Twitter and Facebook altogether.

Google+ is centred around the concept of Circles. This concepts is a further extension of Facebook’s straight friending system, where you see people you know and send them the same simple friend request whether they are your best friend, your mother or your boss.

Circles, by contrast, sets your networks in circles, starting you off with the default categories of Family, Friends and Acquaintances.

Google+ starts your networks off automatically by showing you your contacts. Unsurprisingly, it shows you your Gmail contacts by default and then gives you the option to search and import contacts from Yahoo and Microsoft. There is no option to import your contacts from Facebook, although there is a (slightly convoluted) way round this: import your Facebook contacts into your Yahoo and then import your Yahoo into your Google+. It’s worth opening up a Yahoo just for this alone – without your contacts, it’s going to be difficult to have the full Google+ experience.

Once all of your contacts are in, you can drag a person into the appropriate circle. This is a visual feature that’s as simple as it sounds.

Updates are a key feature of Google+, much like with Facebook. You will see a stream of posts from your contacts, although the difference from Facebook is that you can filter the stream by the circles you want to see.  Sharing photos is easy too, especially if you are already using Google’s Picasa photo storage and sharing site.

Chat offers more than Facebook chat: there is a Hangout room where you can chat with up to ten of your contacts. You can arrange your chat window into boxes, with each chat participant in a box, meaning that the conversation should be relatively easy to follow. There’s also the Huddle group chat app that works on the Google+ app on Android phones.

Accessing Google+ has been made extremely easy. Google have created a black bar which runs across the top of all of its services. This contains one-click links to all of the other services, including your Google+ profile, ensuring that users will be more connected than ever to their social networks.

It’s still very early days to predict if this will be the next facebook killer (probably not), but it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on, and already here in the NSDesign office we can see some of the immediate advantages (and differences) that Google+ gives us over some of the other big players in Social Media…  Namely more private (internal) communication, and more control of the type of data we share and who we share it with….  interesting times!

The figure is a massive US$5bn higher than expected and the highest valuation of a US internet company since Google went public in 2004. The first shares in LinkedIn traded for US$90 each.

Experts are heralding the news as proof that global stock markets are ensconced in a technology and social media bubble, with excitement and valuations over internet companies almost rivaling those of the dotcom boom in the 1990s.

LinkedIn had a profit of US$15.4m on revenues of US$243 last year. This year’s valuation is 35 times that of last year’s revenues.

It is thought that the business nature of LinkedIn, as opposed to the purely social focus of Facebook, has given it such a high value: it means that advertisers are able to target business users and income groups.

The site offered 7.8m shares priced at US$45 each, which was above its initially expected price range of US$32 – US$35. A further 3m shares in the IPO were offered by some of the firm’s backers, including Bain Capital Ventures, Goldman Sachs and McGraw-Hill.

The site may well be the first of many social networking sites to go public this year.

Groupon, the online discount business, and Zynga, which makes games like FarmVille and CityVille for Facebook, are both expected to float by the end of 2011.

According to a new survey of 2,000 employees in the UK, 48% of organisations have banned them from using Facebook during working hours.

The survey, conducted by IT firm HCL Technologies and Lewis PR, also found that 63% of the bosses who have not officially banned access to social networking sites actively discourage their use during working hours.

Nearly half of the employees quizzed felt that the ban was not related to productivity but rather for the sake of the firms’ reputations. In total, 45% of respondents thought that employers “feared business reputation was at stake” if employees posted negative comments about their firm in public.

This survey is not the first to show employers’ concern over the use of social networking sites in the workplace.

Last year, a report by Webroot found that around half of the SMEs in the UK and the USA had banned workers from using social networks in the office. However, that survey blamed security concerns for employers’ fears.

Vineet Nayar, chief executive of HCL Technologies, said that UK businesses were risking “corporate suicide” by neglecting workers’ interests in social networking sites. He said: “Social networking is like food and drink to Generation Y workers; they are so used to communicating in a more open and collaborative way.

“Forward- looking companies should be aiming to encourage social media activity amongst their employees rather than stifling it. While we always advocate responsible use of social networks in the office, banning them outright will impact employees’ approach to work in a negative way, having a detrimental effect on the business as a whole.”

According to a YouGov poll, UK organisations with less than 50 employees generated just 2.4% of their annual sales from online activities last year.

That’s in contrast with companies with more than 250 employees whose online revenue totalled 18.7% of their total income.
In monetary terms, that equals total online revenues for small businesses of around £36bn last year compared with larger businesses’ online revenues of £349bn.

A worrying 38% of respondents said that they were not investing in any online tools such as social media, email marketing or SEO.

A correlation between the low amount of investment in online marketing and low online sales is clear.

Phil Kingsland, from the not-for-profit resource knowthenet.org.uk, told the Daily Telegraph: “While small businesses are beginning to make considerable amounts of money online, many don’t yet see its full potential. There are limitless possibilities for small businesses to profit here – either by selling goods and services directly, or by marketing themselves to customers.”

For small businesses wanting to up their online game, an SEO strategy is a must – and it needn’t cost that much. In fact, small businesses can experience a great return on investment when working with a reliable SEO agency.