Beth Kanter is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest-running and most popular blogs for nonprofits and co-author of the forthcoming book, “The Networked Nonprofit,” to be published by J. Wiley in 2010. Beth is also the CEO of Zoetica, a company that serves nonprofits and socially conscious companies with top-tier, online marketing services. SmartBrief on Social Media Lead Editor Jesse Stanchak caught up with Beth to ask about social-media best practices for nonprofits.

PolicyTool is a policy generator that simplifies the process of creating guidelines that respect the rights of your employees while protecting your brand online.*

It’s easy. The streamlined process simply requires you to answer a brief questionnaire and provides you with a complete Social Media Policy customized to your company.

PolicyTool has been developed by rtraction in collaboration with Harrison Pensa lawyer David R. Canton, one of Canada’s leading authorities in internet and technology related legal issues.

FourSquare is definitely starting to catch on with enterprising techie folks that love to be early adopters. That’s a good a sign. Most check-ins revolve around restaurants and cafes, but below are five simple ways you (and the nonprofit techies) can also use FourSquare to promote the nonprofits and causes your care about:

For everyone in PRL 530 thinking about the possibility of using FourSquare for their clients! Okay, I bet not many were thinking about it, but this post has some great ideas. Worth checking out.

1. Go with the Brill Street approach.  Say you’re the expert even if you’re not or at the risk of seeming plastic to the world around you.  LOTS of companies and people doing this.

The HR Capitalist has a great take on what you should—and should not—be putting into your social media profiles, bios, and “About Me” pages.

It’s easy to end up sounding like a tool if you overdo your personal branding efforts. But you shouldn’t limit yourself either.

The big no-no? Leaving it completely blank.

I love Frontline. They produce some of the best journalism and each episode is always on a strikingly relevant topic.

Their February 2nd episode digital_nation is no different, which poses the question, “Is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we’ve gained?”

In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, Frontline presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world… [and] embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations.

You can watch the full 90-minute episode online now for free at PBS or Hulu.

Doing business by believing in your intuition is the most important skill you can have. There’s a great deal of risk being taken in the new media/social media space, and it’s important that companies are willing to take those risks in order for the space to grow. I’m nervous about some of the guidance being provided, as it counteracts the already uphill battle we’re fighting. Businesses need to be taking smart risks. If they can’t trust their consultant to pilot them through this asteroid field that we’re all flying through together, who can they trust?