Michael Donnelly, director of worldwide interactive marketing at Coca-Cola, seemed like the most knowledgeable guy in the room at DigiDay: Social's panel discussion. After all, Donnelly’s employer stood out amongst a slate of speakers mostly from recent startups and small businesses.

“I’m just here to see Mike talk,” confessed fellow panelist Michael Lazerrow when introducing himself.

But the man in charge of social media for one of the largest companies in the world echoed the sentiment of every other presentation that day.

"I’m not here to say we have it figured out, because we don’t. There’s [still] a ton of learning," he said.

From small marketing agencies to large ad firms like Razorfish, marketers are grappling with changing the way they operate. Social media, while highly disruptive, is just starting to be accepted as the industry standard as a means of increasing engagement with consumers. And, like content, marketing is searching for its new post-social media center.

This, of course, puts marketers in exactly the same boat as publishers. Below are some of the overarching themes that bubbled up frequently at Digiday: Social that have implications for the publishing industry.

Don’t outsource your social media strategy to a PR firm.

For brands, embracing social media must come from the top down. After all, social media is primarily about the conversation and if the person representing the brand is not authentic, the audience will know.

“Social media needs to be adopted at the top,” said Paul Beck, Executive Director of Interactive Media at Ogilvy Worldwide. 

One marketer said that one of his biggest mistakes was assuming that company leadership did not want to embrace social media. If editors and publishers ask employees about interacting more with readers, maybe they will discover the same.

In the same vein, Razorfish’s Shiv Singh said that marketing departments had to be fundamentally restructured to not separate by medium but by goal. By restructuring, CMOs can assure that social media, and other digital efforts, are not pigeonholed in a forgotten department but made part of the company's overall marketing strategy.

It’s a struggle to deliver metrics.

Do we count pageviews? Time on site? Clicks? Advertisers are grappling with these questions just like publishers.

Avi Savar, CEO of Big Fuel, an interactive marketing agency, detailed how his company measured the impact of a campaign for the Colgate Whisp in terms of “engagements,” which included any kind of customer interaction with the digital products.

“I did something, I said something, I watched something. That’s the world we live in now, " he said.

The mass market is dead.

You can partially thank the recession for this one. When marketing budgets get slashed, advertisers must be smarter with ad buys.

"The down market is the best thing that could happen to the industry,” said Dr. Augustine Fou, Chief Digital Officer at HCG. “Otherwise we’d still be spending money on TV ads."

A side effect of more targeted conversations is that the concept of the general interest ad buy is falling by the wayside.

Publishers likely already know this as the shift to niche publications dates back to the start of the magazine. But the effectiveness of advertising – and in our case, content  – should no longer be measured by just counting viewers or readers; it should be about measuring the readers that matter.

“Reach is irrelevant,” said Fou. “You don’t need to reach everyone, just the people who would want to use your product.”

Though with the above problem of metrics, defining success and value will be a struggle as social media and online publishing mature.

Experiment early and often

One of Coke’s biggest problems was that it is too large of a company to maintain a conversation with its customers. However, the company played its size as a strength by using all of its individual markets to test social media strategies.

The theme was echoed by Big Fuel’s Colgate campaign. The company tested several ways to elicit customer interaction before settling on a viral video campaign, a Facebook application and a contest.