Last week, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion (hosted by @TheAdClub) with three of New England’s sharpest marketers around the topic of Social Media Strategy. Over breakfast and dazzling views of the Charles River (from Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center or “NERD” as they’ve lovingly nicknamed it), the panelists shared thoughts on the business value of social media, lessons learned from early “experiments,” their approaches to measuring and calculating ROI on social media activity, and advice for brands just entering the social sphere.

Janet Swaysland, Senior Vice President, Global Corporate Communications & Social Media for Monster Worldwide summed up her brand’s social media strategy in three simple words: “Trust. Learn. Do.”

David Puner, aka “Dunkin’ Dave”, Communications Manager for Dunkin’ Brands, Inc. spoke of how his brand quickly discovered that social media transcends traditional silos, revealing opportunities for all areas of the business to benefit from the conversations that are happening online.

And Tom Matlack, Co-Editor of The Good Men Project, a collection of first-person stories about what it means to be a man in America today, discussed how social media is the ideal format for storytelling and how the “old model” of communicating simply doesn’t work.

As for my contribution… well, I kicked the morning off with a brief discussion of how much has changed in the past five years in terms of social media adoption—and how the next five are poised to be even more monumental.

Just think: five years ago, Facebook was just a fledgling startup with a few thousand users. Twitter didn’t exist. Neither did YouTube. But today, we collectively produce over 3,000,000 tweets per day, watch over 100,000,000 YouTube videos, and log more than 6,000,000,000 minutes on Facebook.

SIX BILLION. EVERY. DAY.

Last week, Twitter officially became the most popular word in the English language—surpassing even “Obama”, “H1N1″, “stimulus”, and—lo and behold!—”vampire” as the most used word among English speakers in 2009.

And as the eve of 2010 approaches—and with it, the dethroning of the Baby Boomers as America’s largest demographic segment (Millennials—or “Digital Natives”—will outnumber Boomers by the end of 2010)—well… I say, baby? You just ain’t seen nothin’ yet.