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What do social media and economics have in common? Turns out all social network leaders got together in one room for a powerhouse panel in Davos to discuss how social software is changing society.

I have summarized a few sound bites from this session that went on for almost two hours.

George Colony, Forrester Research, on customers interactions:

• 1% of consumers consult a corporate blog
• 8% of consumers follow or fan companies

How will “social” change leadership? It creates an obligation to listen. You should be good, because in the future everyone will know about you.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn, on social networking themes:

• How do you get robust connections between people?
• How do you get transparency of information?
• How to think about web 2.0? What happens when every person has an online identity and is a participant?

Owen Van Natta, MySpace:

• Distribution of content is happening much more through people, as opposed to a limited number of portals

Gina Bianchini, Ning:

• In 2009 people spent three times the amount of time on social sites than they had in the prior year

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics:

• Young people are giving away their personal information too much
• Thousands of people will not get their dream job this year because their employer did the reference check on Facebook

Evan Williams, Twitter: Twitter is looking to do three things:

• filtering and discovering engine
• generating of content and having influence over others
• building relationships of all types

Tim Berners-Lee:

• We need to study web as a scientific discipline, we need people to study social networks
• It is fascinating how a meme spreads across Twitter.

…it is, indeed. Here’s the full session on YouTube: