Chris Brogan pointed me to Mitch Joel's "social media marketing best practices project." The goals are two-fold:

• Push smart people all across the Web to document their ideas for best practices in social media marketing
• Drum up some link love for Mitch Joel's blog (and doing so in a creative, compelling way like this demonstrates a social media marketing best practice, no doubt)

Brogan's chosen best practice is "Learn how to listen. Simple, I know. But it's a best practice. Here are five tools I use for listening, and here's my take on listening to Twitter."

Mitch Joel makes the case for consistency:

Consistency. Be consistent. In everything that you do. Have a consistent username that you use in all of your channels (mine is mitchjoel). Use the same photo, so that you are recognizable in all of these channels. [...] Don't blast out five pieces of content or join three online social networks and fade away. Choose one, stick with it and keep at it. Be more like the tortoise instead of the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

I could go on all day with ideas to help enlighten other social media marketers, but Mitch challenges me to pick just one. Brogan took my first idea, listening â€" the single most important item â€" so I'm going to go a very different direction and step away from tactical best practices.

My best suggestion: Spend some time getting to know people in "your community," getting to know what's important to them, what they talk about, what gets them excited, what you can do for them â€" without worrying about the return on your investment.

Don't spend all of your time working without goals, investing time and energy without thinking about some potential return. But don't spend all of your time thinking about ROI, either. It might be hard, but it'll be worth it.

And really, working like this â€" getting to know people as people, without thinking so much about your own goals, without thinking about getting an R on your I â€" will have a positive ROI. So maybe I can sum up my idea in a more simple statement:

Be selfless and be patient.

(And I'm also instructed to A) point to some other folks who have written well on this subject and B) tag some folks who might be prompted to share some good ideas on the topic, so... Albert Maruggi, Chris Lynn and Jason Falls â€" consider yourselves tagged. You're it.)

Photo courtesy of steefnat on Flickr