While attending today’s Gravity Summit at Harvard University, I was thoroughly impressed with the lineup of speakers that organizers Beverly Macy and Rodney Rumford managed to assemble. It was a phenomenal cross-section of disciplines that demonstrated how social media has fundamentally affected advertising, PR, B2B corporations, media conglomerates, small business, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and yes…celebrities (That’s MC Hammer below).

Broadcast live through a partnership with CNN.com, the packed room and online viewership managed to make the #gravsum hashtag the 7th trending topic on Twitter at one point with in excess of 4000 tweets over the course of 8 hours.

While the attendance of keynote speakers MC Hammer and Gary Vaynerchuk drew a lot of pre and post-event media buzz (and for good reason as both were outstanding), every presenter brought valuable content to the table.

And when mixed together and boiled down, there appeared some very clear and simple business themes:

• - Social Media isn’t a fad and isn’t going away
• - For social media to work, employees must be empowered and trusted
• - There are no shortcuts with social media – you must roll up your sleeves
• - At the end of the day social media enables customer service
• - Those who have the passion for it are the ones to succeed with it

I was particularly touched by Ramon De Leon (above) who is a franchisee operating partner for a set of Domino’s Pizza stores in Chicago. This is a passionate guy who has whole heartedly embraced his customers using social media in every way possible to connect and communicate with them. “If you can’t be a part of the conversation, you know what? You start one.”

And of course, Hill Holliday was very proud of Dunkin’ Dave Puner (above) who shared his insights and lessons learned in starting up Dunkin’ Donut’s very successful Twitter Channel: “We knew there are a lot of conversations happening about Dunkin’ Donuts out there and we simply wanted to be a part of the conversation.”

Check out all of my notes and sound bites from many of the speakers, a video of MC Hammer’s intro and a slideshow of the pics I snapped.