In an earlier posting, Jim Cashel noted that "the days of worrying about only your own web site ended in 2007." The standing-room-only turnout and high-quality dialogue at "Social Sites for Social Good" last week proved that people from policy-focused groups are thinking beyond their sites' walls.

This most recent installment in our ongoing series of Web Executive Seminars at the National Press Club in Washington featured six engaging speakers who presented case studies of their forays into the social web.

We hosted speakers from the Centers for Disease Control, Ogilvy PR, Health and Human Services, the Genocide Intervention Network, the Nonprofit MySpace, and the Nature Conservancy. Our speakers are listed here.

Each speaker shared advice for getting your feet wet with social media and networking sites ranging from MySpace to Facebook to Digg. Here, I boil their presentations down to a delicious five-tip reduction:

1. Do your research. If you think that people aren't already actively socializing online on the issues you and your organization care about, look harder. There's probabaly a community out there talking about everything from avian flu to zinc water treatment. You need to find out who is blogging, posting to message boards, uploading viral video, etc. related to your issue. These are your "influencers" and you'll need their support to succeed in your social web efforts. Useful places to search for communities and blogs discussing your issue include Boardreader, BoardTracker, Clusty, Technorati, and Google Blog Search.

2. Give your advocates some ownership. The social web is, by nature, a democracy -- not a representative, two-party democracy mind you -- but a direct democracy where the only barrier to participation is an internet connection. There are no "Super Delegates" here. You don't need to be a member of Congress to vote for a post on Digg or fillibuster all night long to write on your blog. The last thing your online audiences need is a big organization coming in and demanding that they play by its rules. So listen to your advocates, early and often, and give them a degree of ownership of your initiatives within the sites and online communities you sponsor or promote.

3. Measure what you can. No matter how cool your boss is, chances are he or she is not going to let you invest countless hours building a Facebook presence if you can't demonstrate some returns that support your mission. But it's important to set realistic goals for yourself as these social sites are new. Few organizations are raising much money directly through social networks. But there are other ways to assess value. Membership or "friends" counts are an obvious one. Quantity and timeliness of various social networking activities are worth tracking. Sometimes you can track newsletter signups that originated from a social site. But the main output of many of these efforts can be simply brand awareness, which is very valuable, but difficult to measure.

5. Don't be afraid to experiment. Social media and networking sites are big and growing. They are influential, popular, and worthy of investment. But they are also overwhelming. Decide on one or two key social sites you are going to concentrate on, learn them, and stick with it. It will take time. It will take patience. It may take internship labor. And you may not see immediate results. But, like the earliest days of the internet, experimenters enjoy first-mover advantage. Don't wait.

Check back here soon for narrated "slidecasts" of the speakers' presentations, and let me know in the comments if you have any tips to add (whether you were at the event or not).