eMarketing Vs Employee Productivity

Warning: Please note that this article is based only on
a. Companies focused on eMarketing and b. Internet users at work place

Have you ever wondered why your focus is slowly shifting towards terms like impressions, traffic, CPC, CPM, optimization etc? And have you wondered what relation does this have on your employee productivity?

Here is a theory in eMarketing. You are the reason why people spend more time online than the other way around. With free access to internet more employees spend time on their desk for a. To appear to be working b. To surf the internet. Ok, you already knew this.

But imagine this. With 1000s of establishments providing Desktops with internet connections to their employees, it is likely that you are targeting your products and services to millions of office workers. Again, you already knew this.

While you are happy with so many netizens around the world, are you thrilled with the fact that other businesses are happy too? To target your employees!! Would you rather have your employees shop online than complete a project proposal? (Note: Employees can be both, active or passive shoppers).

The easiest way to curb this user behaviour is to cut off access to general websites and social networking sites at the office. However, this would also mean employees meddling with the system admins to obtain easy access. This is especially true in small to medium sized companies. Aren't they spending more time cracking ways to browse than browsing itself?

I would think that browsing the internet is not essentially bad. It is definetely an asset to have access to so much of information but not knowing when to stop is! So how do we drive a message home?

Like a few companies I know, the best way is to use the timer system. An employee can browse anytime of the day on any website but those sites unauthorized by the Network administrator will go off if the usage exceeds a certain time-limit...say 1 hour per day.
Also asking employees to maintain a log of all sites visited and profiling themselves with their areas of interests. This will help you track user profiles and behaviour using your own employees as consumers. Be it any product! Just make sure you assure your employees that it's ok to do this and it has no reflection on their performance reports. This may not be the most conventional idea nor would every company practice this. But if you are Computer/Consumer product company trying this will surely not hurt your pocket, unless you have a stringent Internet policy at your office! ;-)