By Karen Rynes, Director of Marketing

Happy New Year!  My resolutions this year include the usual suspects...lose a few pounds, exercise more, spend more time with friends, read more -- which is no easy feat with a 12-month old baby who is on the verge of walking & is getting into EVERYTHING!

My resolutions also include a pledge to listen more & learn from what I hear.

As I've said before, blogging is conversational -- it's about people & relationships.  One of the important aspects of business blogging is not only posting to your company blog and sharing your own knowledge or observations, but to listen & respond to what others are saying about you & your industry.

Mike Sansone, on his Converstations blog, posted a great list of tools back in September to help you "eavesdrop" on the conversations happening in the blogosphere.  A couple of items to note from his list are:

1. Use a Feed Aggregator, such as GreatNews or NewsGator, to monitor RSS feeds
2. Set up free Technorati blog searches using your own keywords & tags
3. For the full list go here

Thanks for coming back to check out my Social Media Series this year!  In case you missed it during the holiday craziness, my Dec. 18th post touched on a really thought-provoking subject:  Should companies control what you blog about and/or require confidentiality agreements...even for personal blogging?  What do you think?  I'd love to hear (see...I'm listening!) and learn from your thoughts & opinions on this sure-to-be-controversial topic.

Also, you can review ALL the segments in my ongoing series here.  You'll find that while some of these posts are a couple of months old, they're still current as they communicate best practices.  And, if you haven't read them yet...they're new to you!