OC CIO Minutes June 10, 2010

1993-2010
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
June 10, 2010 meeting

Present: Jeff Hecht, Jeff Reid, Jennifer Curlee, William Zauner, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, David Mann, Dave Phillips

RJTCompuquest are moving their offices to a new building near the airport in about a month. We will let you know the location as soon as we know the moving date – the July 8th meeting will still be at their old office.

The following have volunteered to introduce topics through October 2010:

7/8/10 Agile methodology David Mann
8/12/10 What’s new at the desktop Tina Haines
9/9/10 Microsoft road map Hicham Semaan
10/14/10 Next generation WAN Jim Sutter

We still need topics and speakers for November and December.

Topic: Comparing Social Networking Sites

Despite his disclaimers (see handout), Jeff presented many useful facts and figures about the social networking scene. Facebook dominates, with MySpace, YouTube and Twitter following far behind. Many of the rest I had never heard of! The estimated population of Facebook by Fall 2010 will be 500M. Jeff included several interesting slides on age distribution of users - not as young as you might think – 25% are between 35 – 44 years old, although it does vary by site. Bebo appeals to a young group (44% less than 18); 64% of Twitter users are 35 or older, as are 61% of Facebook users; average Linkedin users are 44. These sites have obvious commercial potential but what about loss of productivity, what are the controls for usage at work, impact on network bandwidth, and hijacking. The inability to control access and the resulting privacy issues are a major concern. Facebook’s “opt out” approach to privacy is a concern, and Google has a similar problem. What access limits are reasonable for businesses? What are sensible business goals for using social networks? One is to use the tools to build a powerful network of users, customers, contacts and friends. Remember that profiles are for people, pages are for businesses. Jeff’s company launched a new B to C business in 2009, and hired a marketing company to develop a presence on Facebook and Twitter. At the end of his handout, he listed several links and references to the material he presented. This was another excellent presentation.

We asked the members which sites they used and why.

Jeff Reid uses Linkedin all the time for personal and professional networking and found it to be very useful. It helped in making and keeping contacts. He also joined Facebook and Twitter to find out more about them but does not use them very much.

Jennifer uses Linkedin, and belongs to a professional organization user group. She also became a Facebook user, and has concerns as a friend uses Facebook extensively, with 1000s of friends, and she has had to caution all her friends against posting pictures of their kids and families on line.

William does not have a personal Facebook account but has one for the business just to capture the name. He does use Linkedin. A family member regards him as the bad guy in his house since he curtailed the use of Facebook!

Sean complimented Jeff on his presentation. He does use Facebook just to stay in touch with the family. He uses Linkedin a lot professionally. He found the social networks to be amazingly useful when following the Chile earthquake.

Jim said that he is an indiscriminative joiner of social networks because he didn’t want to be called an old fuddy-duddy! Among those that he has joined are Plaxo, Zing, Facebook (very good), and Linkedin (very good and has an “opt in” for security).

David also complimented Jeff on his presentation. He is also a user of Facebook just to stay in touch with the family. For security, his solution is just changing the data when you want to opt out.

Jeff's slides are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .