Our focus this time: social media policy and how it affects social media use and decision-making in the workplace.

The topline: despite a 35% increase in social media consumption to 5.88 hours per week, more than half of respondents across IT, HR and finance either do not have a social media policy at their company or are unsure if they do.

That was pretty surprising to us, though it reflects what we’ve heard anecdotally from clients: ‘You can’t use Facebook or Twitter at work; well, unless you get a special dispensation. Or, you know, if someone in Legal lets you do it and you promise not to tell anyone else in Marketing.’

Imagine if Internet access was dispensed in a similarly slapdash way.

For companies without a clear policy, or no policy at all, it’s clear they’ve got to step up and guide employees on how to properly represent their company when engaging and how to make their own IP accessible in social channels. We’ve seen plenty of examples of what happens when employees take social media into their own hands with no lines or limits drawn for them.

As our President Mike O’Toole noted in a quote I wrote for him (just kidding), “Based on these results it’s clear that you really need to bring social media and user-generated content into all the ways you communicate with your colleagues and customers to be effective. There’s a clear opportunity cost if you don’t have a simple, clear policy that balances self-monitoring with company regulations. And since marketers are the owners of where social practices are moving for companies, these policies really ought to be coming out of collaboration between Marketing and Legal, with Marketing leading the charge.”

And the need is there, because social media usage at home and at work (which are more and more blurring into the same thing) continues its relentless march upward:

*  IT professionals spend an average of 5.86 hours per week engaging with social media content, versus 3.81 with editorial content and 3.41 with vendor content

*  HR professionals spend an average of 6.02 hours per week engaging with social media content, versus 3.89 with editorial content and 3.10 with vendor content

*  Finance professionals spend an average of 5.50 hours per week engaging with social media content, versus 4.45 with editorial content and 2.75 with vendor content

Next post: what the 3,000 survey respondents told us about mobile usage. And their wish list for their next mobile device.

In some cases these companies have their business strategy set but no story with aspiration or vision that sits above the strategy and unites every business unit. As a result they can’t get the right valuation from analysts or they’re stuck in the wrong competitive set. In other cases the company has chosen a position and is interested in a gut-check, hiring us on a consultative basis first. (These ‘trial-size’ contracts are a classic sign of an economic downturn.)

In other situations the company’s markets are consolidating by the minute, driven by the entrance of a behemoth competitor (on Mondays and Wednesdays insert “Google,” on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays insert “Microsoft”) and they need an irrefutable statement of why choosing best-of-breed still matters over giving in to the inevitable one-stop shop.

In still others, the company is growing too quickly to come up with a new position that works for the next stage of growth, realizing that if they don’t, they’ll put the brakes on that growth because they just don’t pass the smell test of the CXO customer versus the regional VP they’ve sold to successfully in the past.

I’ve wondered this week whether these urges to position move in cycles, like the stock market, and that we are just in the midst of another surge in positioning anxiety to suit a leaner economic profile.

On a more “it’s something in the water” note, there’s also the election. In case you’ve been cyrogenically frozen since 2006, it’s hard to watch two minutes of a news program and avoid seeing the very real implications of how a single phrase dropped at the end of a thousandth church supper can be blown up, distorted, cleaved out of context and heralded in the next half-hour’s headlines as a definitive statement of position. (One rogue sales rep with his own deck in Tokyo can do a lot of damage as well.) When everyone in the country is preparing to choose, having the right position suddenly matters more, especially when our 24 x 7 news cycles can distort two relatively similar positions to the point where what should be a rational choice is suddenly one between, to quote Dave Barry, “ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks” and “godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.”

Or to get at what Dave Barry was really intending to say, do you want to sell a software package or a business process platform?

In the end, I think it’s a reflection of who we are as an agency as much as anything else. We’re not an Ogilvy & Mather, who can put 2,000 people on a single account and run a huge marketing machine. We’re not a mom-and-pop agency pouring our heart and soul into winning the billboard campaign for the local newspaper. We’re a mid-size agency of business marketing specialists serving health science and technology companies who are nearly always on the verge. You see it in their eyes when they talk to you, and hear the strain in their voices on the Polycom. They are impatiently striving for the next surge of growth, looking to get pass the phalanx of executive assistants into the C suite and be seen as a partner rather than a purveyor of a niche application they were founded on 15 years ago.

It’s a classic capitalist play, and one we enjoy every time. It’s a process that pushes you to be clear, something that can be very hard to do when you’re in the midst of a lot of complexity. In an update to Joan Didion’s classic line “We tell each other stories in order to live,” in business we have no choice but to tell our customers, analysts and prospects compelling, fresh stories in order to thrive.

“I hate it when someone says they’re in a commodity category. We don’t accept that there are any commodity categories. We are growing Charmin and Bounty very well, and if there is any category that people could say is a commodity, it’s paper towels and tissues. We have developed tremendous equities, tremendous loyalties from our consumers. So, no, I think that is a cop-out. That is bad marketing and an excuse. We are not in any commodity categories.”

How often over the course of a month does a BtoB marketer hear a client or prospect whine that they’re in a commodity category? No doubt pretty often. How often do they respond as Stengel does? Based on what you see when you flip through most magazines, a lot less frequently. If there is inspirational equity in a product or service – and you could argue that anything possesses it if paper towels do – it rarely makes it to the surface or is even pursued.

Look at the target customer. How well do you know them? What’s the inspiration? What’s the aspiration? A freelance team I know once went through a supermarket and chose the most commodity product they could find, bouillon cubes, and designed a campaign around them for their book. As I remember, it focused on the entire experience of opening the cube: where you likely were, what you were likely thinking, and how relaxing it was to be cooking from scratch rather than sitting in traffic. It worked for me. And there’s no barrier that exists just because we’re in BtoB to say we can’t be inspiring and compelling, either.

It’s working for Jim Stengel with a $6.7 billion ad budget, so it should be workable at our slightly lower budgets, too.