Facebook, YouTube at Work Make Better Employees: Study — This is the news that all of you have been waiting to hear. Now, the next time your boss catches you poking someone on Facebook, you can tell him/her/it (this last one if you don’t like said boss) that you’re on Facebook in the name of worker productivity. Really, it’s for your employer’s benefit, not yours.

Here are the key parts that you need to show your boss:

• The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.
• “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration,” Coker said on the university’s website (www.unimelb.edu.au/)
• “Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days’ work, and as a result, increased productivity,” he said.
• “Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos, using social networking sites or shopping online under the pretence that it costs millions in lost productivity,” said Coker. “That’s not always the case.”

6 Features Twitter Users Say They’d Pay For — Twitter is going to begin offering premium features soon and Silicon Alley Insider has identified six of them that users say they would pay for.

At BeatBlogging.Org, we’d certainly pay for analytics. Of the six would-be features listed, analytics is a given for business users. Companies like to be able to quantify ROI. Here are the other ideas we like a lot:

• Unlimited or prioritized access to API. (Twitter limits how many requests an account can make per hour.)
• Guaranteeing that their old tweets (all of them) are available forever, and easier to sift through.
• More reliable service. (Can’t really charge on a per-user basis for this though, unless there’s a separate Twitter that’s more reliable, right?)

We agree that these are features that business users would be willing to pay for. I’m sure there are many more, but these seem like no-brainers to us.

So, how about it Twitter? You offer us premium features, and we’ll pay you money. Win-win.

How (I Think) Newsrooms Can Use Twitter — Yes, we’ve done similar posts ourselves, but this is another good list of ways that news organizations could use Twitter. Here is one use of Twitter that is often overlooked:

to humanize – This is highly important. Your news organization is viewed as a gargantuan, soulless corporate entity. Trust. Take this time to let the awesome humans who work in your newsroom share a little of themselves. Mention that the leftover pizza from the meeting in the morning was snagged in under 45 seconds. Mention that it is the anchor’s birthday. A little humanity makes people invested in what you’re pedaling.

Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter to humanize your corporation. @Starbucks has done a great job of this on Twitter. This is something that @Starbucks does really well on Twitter:

to listen – No, this one is most important. Follow those who follow you, and read what they have to say. Your operation is no longer one that uses a megaphone. You’ve got to hear what your audience is saying if you want to survive.