Todd will be providing live updates on Twitter and Facebook — and stay tuned for some updates here, as well.

First, I will point you to Charlotte Observer columnist Jeff Elder’s posts on the conference here and here.  (And some great photos of the conference by Armando Bellmas.)

As with any conference, there were a lot of obvious and/or less useful sessions — so what I like to do is pull out the gems and review the overall theme of the day.  As someone who attends quite a few industry conferences, it’s always interesting to see industry “thinking shifts” based on the content of these events from year-to-year.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, last year saw a heavy premium on tech, as we saw an explosion of new communication tools.

This year, I’ve seen a shift from a focus on tech (although there certainly is plenty of discussion of new tools) to a discussion of strategy and content.

This conference was no different.

In fact, the discussions about technology now are related less to how new tools can help us communicate and more to how they can help us scale, analyze and report on the data from the communications tools we are already using.

This “scalability” issue was the subject of much discussion at May’s TWTRCON conference — and even more so at Social Fresh.

For a company using social media as a customer service feedback tool, how can you possibly sift through the dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of comments in a reasonable amount of time?

And, how can you gather the data from the flurry of activity on all your online networks into a report that makes sense, shows return-on-investment (ROI) and justifies your efforts to your bosses or clients?

These seem to be the major issues of the day — and rightfully so.  As companies and organizations put more time and resources into the social media space, they are expecting more evidence of ROI.

So there was a general discussion that a mini-industrial revolution involving the development of new analytical tools will spin-off from this need for easy, simple, data-crunching and scalability help.

Another major theme of the day (which I particularly liked) was the destruction of the notion that Twitter and Facebook are communities unto themselves.

No, no, no.  They are communications tools.  Just as email is a communication tool.

How you utilize that tool to build and engage your community around your compelling content is the strategy that is key to your success.  Please see our earlier blog post on this very topic.

The big difference, of course, is that these new tools allow real-time updates from you — and real-time feedback from your followers.  This provides a valuable market research tool for you to find out what your audience likes … and what it doesn’t like.

By founding out what they’re passionate about, you can provide them with the content they want and need — empowering them to advocate on behalf of your brand, cause or organization.

Unlike the broadcast, interruption-based marketing tools of the past (TV ads and blast emails), these new tools provide you the opportunity to build your community one person at a time.

True word-of-mouth marketing by people passionate about your “stuff.”

That’s marketing at it’s best — and most basic.

And that’s what I took away from Social Fresh.