I'm live-blogging at the BtoB Magazine NetMarketing Breakfast in San Francisco this morning. I always show up at these events because it's valuable to see what marketers pull out of their bag of tricks to show off to their peers when they're in front of a microphone. What am I seeing?

Last time I attended one of these, everyone was talking about content. Today, social seems to be the thread that binds.

Not surprisingly to her Twitter followers (I've been one for a while), Petra Neiger spoke about social media at Cisco. They actually made the decision to give admin access to their brand advocates on one of Cisco's online communities. Talk about being ready to give up control. Much respect to Cisco for hopping on the Cluetrain.

Don Marzetta, Head of Integrated Marketing Campaigns at Sybase (an SAP company), talked about how they used a sponsored blog on ZDNet to promote their mobile applications platform. They get over 100,000 visits a month.  Thought leadership is the fuel for the fire. 

More importantly, they built a rich tablet-friendly destination site to promote it. You can't sell mobile if you're not mobile. No brainer? Perhaps, but you'd be surprised.

Alex Flagg runs social and content marketing for HP's Enterprise Segment Marketing group. Thought leadership is also key at HP. Getting decision makers to participate in community is hard, so their strategy is to influence the influencers. On the back end, they focus on share of conversation as a metric to measure their success.

Shawnn Smark from Bio-Rad had a different story. He's a very humble guy—referred to his co-panelists as marketing rock stars and himself as maybe the head roadie. But Shawnn has a much bigger challenge on his plate in my opinion—driving fundamental change across the entire digital marketing spectrum. It may seem anathema to readers of this blog, but there are still plenty of companies out there who don't really get digital yet. Shawnn is a great example of how that entire dynamic can and must change.