Last week, a few Forresterites and special guests took a break from the end of quarter crunch to participate in a panel event in our beautiful San Francisco office. The theme of our panel was "The Top 5 Social Media Trends You Should Care About." Our audience included tech marketers (mostly from Silicon Valley). We had a great mix of companies in the audience, which included both large enterprises and small startups. I moderated a great panel of local Bay Area thought leaders, including:

 
Jeanette Gibson @JeanetteG  Senior Director, Social and Digital Marketing, Cisco
Dan Ziman  @LostInTheFlog VP Corporate Marketing, Lithium Technologies
David Hurwitz  @Serena_Software, SVP of Worldwide Marketing, Serena Software
Zachary Reiss-Davis  @ZacharyRD, Researcher, Forrester Research. 
 
We spent a very interactive 90 minutes discussing social marketing best practices. Our panelists covered the following 5 trends: 
 
Social intelligence
Influencer engagement
Role-based content
Thought leadership campaigns
The shift from "media" based marketing to "conversational" based marketing
 
The panelists spent a lot of time discussing the importance of high quality, consumable "content" for a successful social marketing strategy. Content was was definitely the word of the day at this event and our Forrester research reflects this as well. Check out the latest research from my colleague, Peter O'Neill, for more on this topic!

Instead of writing a complete recap of the event, check out my Storify post that includes a sample of interesting sound bites from #FSP12.
 
Are there other social media trends you would like Forrester to cover in our research?  Please comment!