I was reading a post on KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog entitled, “Get to the Point!” and I thought I would get to the point about who my influences are in what I do on the job every day. Well, to put it briefly, there are many. To put it bluntly, I want to emphasize soaking up what others have to say before you say anything yourself. It is one of the most important lessons I have learned while diving into social media both personally and professionally. Sure, there is a lot of white noise out there, but every once in a while I stumble across something of substance and quality.

Here is a quick list of Web sites I visit or podcasts I listen to and watch at least once per week.

• Beth Kanter’s Blog, How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change
• Photoshop User TV and in the same frame of mind, Layers TV
• Katya’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog: Getting to the Point
• Nonprofit Tech 2.0: A Social Media Guide for Nonprofits from Diosa Communications
• Donor Power Blog
• Care 2’s Frogloop Blog for nonprofits
• PSD TUTS+ and their whole family of blogs inluding Creattica for design inspiration

There are others, but these are the main ones that I pay attention to on a regular basis. I am posting them here so that you too will understand what it means when I say listen, learn and adapt (I wrote this article for UCP) in future blog posts.

Have you heard of any of the Web sites that I have mentioned here? What do you think of them? Do you have any that you visit regularly and would like to share with me and fellow readers here?

I hope you do. I look forward to hearing from you.