Many real estate agents still have a fair degree of trepidation when it comes to using social media online.  Getting started seems like it’s the hardest part.  PC World and CIO.com just published a good interview with analyst Jonathan Yarmis on how businesses should approach social media online – I like this piece of advice:

CIO.com: How would you describe the method for implementing social software to start? How is it different than traditional software?

Yarmis: In some ways it’s optimized by Google: throw something up there and see what sticks. The days of these multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts and software deployments – I won’t say they’ll be gone completely, but they basically just don’t make sense anymore. If you start with some lofty business objective like “we want to improve customer satisfaction,” you still need to just take a first step [with social media] and see what happens.

I see so many companies come up with 137 ideas about that they want to do with social media, but they should just start with one. Get comfortable taking that first step and see what works along the way. That is way different than the software model we’re used to.

The article is meant for larger businesses, but the advice works for Agents too: Choose one approach and dive in.  If you start a blog, do everything you can to build that blog up.  If you Twitter, do everything you can to make it relevant and useful for your customers.  Once you take that first step and develop something of real value for your business, its easier to know where to go from there.