Last week, I pointed to Britt Bravo's blog post encouraging nonprofits to confront their fear of blog comments. But another NTEN member, Marnie Webb of CompuMentor, brings up some important points in the NonprofitTimes that nonprofits should consider when navigating the new terrain of the social web.

The topic of "social engineering" affects organizations whether they've launched a communications plan using the social web or not because, as Webb puts it, "whether they give their employees permission to or not, [the employees] have social networking sites."

This can be a good thing -- and usually is -- because it's likely that the staff members of a nonprofit organization believe in the cause and will be natural mouthpieces for the mission. But in some cases, as the article points out, there's the potential for sensitive information being released and, depending on the nature of the issue or cause, exploited, even harmfully.

Like Bravo, Webb thinks that nonprofits don't need to fear the social web -- but she offers some good tips in the article to help organizations avoid problems and stay in control.

 Whether you call it the participatory web, read/write web, Web 2.0, or communities dominating brands (my current favorite), there comes a point when all of us have looked up from the MySpace page or blog that we are reading and wondered if anyone outside of our geeky friends is actually looking at this stuff. And perhaps more to the point, many nonprofits are wondering if all this social networking and online participation is a good investment, or just a fun diversion.

Two new studies offer insights into this question by taking a look at who is using participatory technology.  Read more.