A study from the team at Trend Micro has highlighted that not only are workers getting their Tweeting and Poking pleasures in their own time, but while they’re at the office, too. It would seem that over the past two years social networking in the workplace in the UK, Germany, U.S and Japan has risen from 19% to 24%.

While this may come as no big surprise – social networks can be engaging, interactive and relevant, in other words, one great big attractive distraction waiting to happen – the reason for the surge is complex.

Is this figure representative of the ease of which many of us can have a cheeky web wander while at our desk or in fact demonstrative of a shift in understanding of how social media marketing activity can empower a business?

There’s no denying that the Internet has become a massive resource of information and insight, where paying a visit to an active forum thread can be just as enlightening for a brand as the feedback they receive from a focus group. The ‘real-world’ experiences and observations people online can talk about define communities and move markets. Therefore, if you’re not around to listen to what people have to say about you – and someone, somewhere, will be talking about you – you’re missing out on an awful lot of feedback, inspiration and potential interaction between you and a crowd that could make up the perfect target audience.

Then there’s the customer service element. Brands like Zappos use Twitter to resolve their customer’s issues directly, ask them questions and swiftly deliver them answers. Even the CEO, Tony Hsieh, is a regular contributor. Innocent Drinks have built a phenomenal reputation around the ease of which they use social media to collaborate with the very people who buy their products. They Tweet, Facebook, blog, upload media to YouTube and post photos of employee shenanigans to Flickr. As a result they’ve built a solid fan base online made up of people who find them approachable and accessible, enjoy interacting with them and want to produce user-generated content for them.

Few employers would argue that social networks are inherently bad, but what makes sites like Facebook great is also what makes them troublesome, and this is why not every business welcomes unrestrained Internet access with arms wide open.

There are far too many instances where employees turn rogue and launch online attacks on the companies they work for, instances where employees become indiscreet, instances where online communities grow volatile and start to threaten your reputation. And there is the old traditional argument – social media dallying can be dangerous (the theory that, rather like Pandora’s Box, giving in and letting social media out will result in heinous destruction) and it’s just too difficult to measure its results.

What do people think? Is this a key indicator of burgeoning social media acceptance at work? How can businesses still recovering from the recent economic meltdown be encouraged to set aside the resource, time and money to put good social media into practice?

Follow Rachel Clark on Twitter.