It was a star-studded group of social media mavens at Harvard, both on stage and in the audience. Presenters included Southwest Airlines Social Media Manager Christi Day (@christi5321), Rebel Industries Josh Levine (@jlevine), and Dominos Pizza Super-Francisee Ramon DeLeon (@Ramon_DeLeon). EMC’s Polly Pearson (@pollypearson) stressed the importance of community as an internal resource, allowing insight into cross-discipline initiatives. And Red Cross Social Media Director Wendy Harman (@wharman) stressed the importance of Twitter as a disaster management communication medium. A very interesting case on a regionally distributed brand personification strategy.

Key themes that reigned throughout the day: Listen to your user base, learn from them, and react accordingly. Perhaps the group was best summed up by the conference’s first Keynote Speaker Stanley Kirk Burrell (aka rapper, musician, and preacher MC Hammer) when he said: in this day and age, “perception has trumped reality, and if you’re allowing somebody else to control the perception of your brand, you’re in trouble.”

Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee), true entrepreneur, famed host of the widely popular Wine Library TV, and fearless leader of “Vayner Nation” hosted a high-octane question and answer session where he offered summit attendees a couple of key messages: “Sweat equity will define winners and losers,” and it is ON YOU to leverage the tools available to you.

The day closed with @garyvee offering to the audience a challenge when he said that “It blows my mind that we’re still debating whether THIS is going to stick. If you have eyeballs, you can make money. You can sell eyeballs. Period. End of story.” How you decide to do it is up to you. Inspiring words.

We found it interesting that all these brilliant innovators came together in the hallowed halls of the Harvard Faculty Club. Marketers and technologists talked about the future of business not at Harvard Business School but in the center of Harvard’s campus on the first floor of one of Harvard’s oldest buildings. Old meets new? Perhaps. But we saw it as a metaphor for how these trends in technology are changing us from the inside out.

Kudos to the Gravity Summit team for putting on a great day. Excellent presenters and good content. And those who couldn’t attend were treated to solid streaming coverage via cnn.com/live.

Some feedback to consider: We’d like to see more interaction between those presenting and the audience. Considering you have all of those social media mavens in a room, we’d love to see more audience participation. And while the day was rich with content, oddly there was too much reliance on PowerPoint as the platform.

A summary video by @needgraphics can be seen here: http://www.viddler.com/explore/KnowItUp/videos/21/.

Photo credits: @gradontripp, http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodguygrady/