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You should match the amount and direction of the lighting in the scene. You should match not only the brightness of your objects to existing objects in the scene (especially to ensure that your objects aren't too bright), but you should also match the depth of the shadows, so that the shadows aren't darker than existing shadows in the scene.
SynthEyes has a system to help you determine the direction to lights in the scene (especially sunlight), based on tracking both the location of the shadow and the location of the object casting the shadow. While the scene may not always have appropriate trackers available, this method can immediately produce accurate results.
You can use the Shadow Map Maker script to help create a physical object for a shadow; it can be rendered as a separate layer if needed. To do this, create a mesh from the trackers in the area the shadow will fall, then run the script to generate a texture (stored ON the mesh) that corresponds to the shadow. You'll see that texture with texture mapping turned on in the perspective window. You should then save the map to disk by opening the Texture Panel, clicking Create Texture (you've already done that, but you're setting up the next step), click Set and select the filename where it should be stored, then click the Save button to write the texture map. As a last step, turn Create Texture back off; this will make the texture map available to be reread from disk later and minimize the chance that any texture extraction operations overwrite it.
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