(Cathy Brooks Tweets while listening to Brian Solis (standing) Susan Etlinger, Tim O'Reilly and Jodee Rich.)

I popped into PeopleBrowsr's SF event which featured a panel moderated by Brian Solis and featuring Tim O'Reilly, Susan Etlinger from Altimeter Group and Jodee Rich, Founder and CEO of PeopleBrowsr.

The topic was: "The Evolution of Listening: From Monitoring to the Collective Intelligence."

Here are some of my notes from the event:

Susan Etlinger: It's a mess what companies try to do with listening to social media. Many don't know what to do. It needs to go beyond silos and what it means to the company as a whole.

Jodee Rich: The trend I'm seeing is that the world is evolving from a social graph towards an interest graph.

Tim O'Reilly: Listening works best in organizations where everyone is empowered to act as if they are the CEO and help in customer service.

JR: We see brands being mentioned 2 million times a day and that's just on Twitter. 70% of the time the response in good.

JR: Do you know what mommy bloggers write about the most? Saving money, next is love.

TR: We need to move beyond business intelligence and reports. We need algorithms that can provide some autonomic responses.

JR: Search will change, right now it is basically PageRank combined with some tweets, it is upside down. But in the future you will search your friends first, then your city, then wider.

SE: I see social graphs and interest graphs converging. FOr example, people into fashion conecting online and going to events together.

TR: I'm not interested in listening to someone based on how many followers. I'm interested in what is interesting and true -- even if that person has 1 follower.

Brian Solis: Leadership has to be earned and it has to be earned every day.

TR: Listening is not about "whack-a-mole" - responding to everything that comes up. Listening is about what does it make me think about? What ideas does it spark? The result is often non-linear.

TR: The secret of AI is that the human is the "last mile." You have to make the final decisions, search/analytics, etc can only get you into the right proximity.

SE: The onus is on the business to decide what things mean.

TR: Smart companies make money because what they do is useful to people.