If your organization is like most, your communications team is working hard to devise the best way to tap into the massive popularity of the social web to promote your message and move your mission. Before you spend too much time and energy trying to devise a clever FaceBook app that's bound to go viral, here's a few practical tips for easing your organization into the wild new world of Social Media.

• Set your content free
  Anything you post to the web should be easily sharable. So first, make sure to give your site visitors the opportunity to post your content to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Newsvine and other social media sharing sites - and seek out niche news sharing sites that cover your sector and include those as well. It's free exposure - and its the first step to spreading your messaging beyond the confines of your own domain.
  
  
• Teach your staff to tag, post, friend, and share
  You may say that your site visitors don't know about those Social Media sites I just listed. Maybe that's true. But it's easy to educate your staff. So let them be the first wave of social evangelists for your content. Here's how: Teach your communications staff and issue experts to create accounts on the social media sites relevant to your sector, you can do that at your next staff meeting in 20 minutes. Now have them click those sharing links you added to your content in step one and you've just turned your staff into social media mavens.
  
  
• Don't be Selfish
  In the world of social media, blatant self promotion is pretty obvious, and so you don't want your staff only sharing your organization's content. They'll gain more credibility, and more friends and followers, if they're sharing news and information of interest and relevance to your sector from any source. Here's how: take advantage of the fact that your staff are passionate about the issues and topics your organization works on. Everyday they see interesting and relevant news and stories all over the web that would be of interest to others like them. In fact, they probably already email them to each other all the time. Train your staff to post to social media sites instead of locking all that great information up in your office email.
  

So what's in it for your organization? The goal is to give your ideas and messages the ability to be rapidly spread through the networks of millions of real people that are consuming news on recommendations from their friends. By positioning your staff as evangelists, you'll be well on your way to making many new friends. These are friends that are likely to listen, because they trust your staff as smart providers of useful information. And of course, their friends have friends who listen to them too, and so on. So the next time you launch that great campaign, it will have an entirely new channel through which to spread - and it's a channel that's growing as fast, or faster than anything we've seen on the web to date.