Allan Mulally [Ford], Tony Hsieh [Zappos], and Howard Shultz [Starbucks] embrace social media and their companies have benefited. However, many CEOs despise social media. This can be challenging for the social media champions within companies or social media consultants trying to help companies. For the socialmediarati, we have a choice; we can call these CEO’s disparaging names, or we can better understand why they hate social media. The first may be more fun [name calling], but the later is more productive and beneficial.

In a great post from the executives at DemingHill [Why Executives Hate Social Media] we get an unfiltered viewpoint – straight from the executives – on why they feel this way. I discovered this posts because they use many facts from my Social Media ROI post & video. I encourage you all to read the DemingHill post, but it is VERY long, so below is the Cliff Notes version.

Follow the ‘via’ link to go to the source…

A survey conducted by online regional job network MyJobGroup.co.uk estimates that 55% of the UK’s working population access social media at work and 6% do so for more than an hour each day.

The site polled 1,000 UK workers on their social media behaviors at work and ultimately concluded that social media is costing the UK economy $14 billion in lost work time.

Fourteen percent of respondents also revealed that they were less productive as a result of their social media activities on sites like Twitter () and Facebook (), while 10% reported increased productivity with the help of social media.

There’s no question that social media in the workplace is on the rise. A recent U.S. study by Cisco found that more than half of surveyed employees ignore social media policies to access their favorite social networking sites. Their midyear security report identified FarmVille as the primary secret reprieve.

Still, MyJobGroup’s findings are a bit circumspect, if only in their generalization that 6% of their sample equates to 6% of the entire UK workforce.

Has your company spent seemingly countless hours tweeting on Twitter, networking on Facebook and writing the company blog? Have you found yourself wondering if it’s all a waste of time? Maybe that last Facebook fan page contest saw fewer entries than you’d hoped for, or that last Twitter-only coupon had fewer redemptions than you’d expected, but perhaps that’s not all that matters.

According to the the latest report by analyst firm Forrester, many people are looking at the face-value dollars and cents of social media marketing and, put simply, they’re doing it wrong. Beyond clicks and coupon redemptions there lies a case for social media marketing that shows its value is well beyond what we see on the surface.

Analyst and report author Augie Ray writes in a blog post this morning that traditional measurements of success for return on investment in social media marketing lead to an incomplete picture.