Coaching Successes With Web 2.0

Insight on Coaching Coaching Successes with Web 2.0 Transcript

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Confidential | May 14, 2008

Coaching Successes with Web 2.0 Transcript

Time Speaker Transcript

00:28 Tom Floyd Hello everyone and welcome to Insight on Coaching.

Insight on Coaching explores the many facets, flavors and size of the emerging professional coaching field.

I’m Tom Floyd, I’m the CEO of Insight Educational Consulting and your host for today’s show.

Well this week our topic is Coaching Successes using Web 2.0 technologies.

We’ll discuss what Web 2.0 is, we’ll talk about why it’s become such a phenomenon, we’ll talk about how Web 2.0 is changing how corporations are doing business both externally and internally and most importantly we’ll talk about what Web 2.0 means for our coaches out there. How can they use it to grow their businesses, how can they use it in working with their clients and what technology should they leverage. Well, with me to explore this topic today are four guests and let me give you a quick overview of who we have with us on the show today.

Our first guest, Robyn Logan, is the founding director of the International Coach Academy (ICA), a global coach training school with students in more than 40 countries.

With more than 20 years experience as a consultant, corporate trainer and business coach, Robyn’s current fascination is the growth of Web 2.0 technologies and concepts, in particular online social networks and their relationship to learning and coaching. Robyn has more than 15 years experience building strong international networks with coaches, trainers and consultants.

Prior to founding the International Coach Academy, she spent more than 10 years in education and training in both teaching and leadership roles including managing a Registered Training Organization.

She later founded and operated a successful multimedia and business planning consultancy, Logan Strategic.

Welcome to the show Robyn.

02:03 Robyn Logan Thanks Tom.

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02:04 Tom Floyd Our second guest, CBS tech media personality Larry Magid, is the co-author of MySpace Unraveled and the Co-Director of ConnectSafely.org.

A syndicated technology columnist and broadcaster for more than two decades, Larry regularly contributes technology reports to CBS News, the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, and other major media outlets.

His reports can be heard regularly on CBS Network and CBS affiliates throughout the U.S. and daily on KCBS in San Francisco, the CBS Evening News and local TV news stations. His columns and reviews also appear on CBSNews.com.

An Internet safety advocate, Larry is the founder of SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com, and is the Co-Director of BlogSafety.com.

Larry has made repeat appearances on “The Larry King Show,” “The Today Show,” “CBS This Morning,” NPR’s “Talk of the Nation Science Friday,” and many other programs. He also has written for Fortune, ForbesASAP, Family Circle, PC World, PC Magazine, Upside, Information Week, Modern Maturity, ComputerWorld and numerous other publications.

Welcome to the show Larry.

03:14 Larry Magid Thank you very much.

03:16 Tom Floyd And our next guest, Derrick Sorles, is a Web 2.0 strategist and a blog coach and consultant.

Derrick is the Co-Owner of both BusinessBlogging Consultants.com, and YourBusinessMDs.com.

Upon investigating some of the unique Web 2.0 tools available, he began to submerge himself in learning everything he could about these new technologies. Today, he helps businesses and entrepreneurs expand their Web presence utilizing new social media such as blogs, podcasts and video podcasts.

His emphasis is on helping clients accelerate sales and expand online communities and conversations through a combination of Web 2.0 strategies, social networking, and leading-edge business blogging skills, and growing their Web presence.

Welcome to the show Derrick.

03:59 Derrick Sorles Thank you for having me Tom.

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04.01 Tom Floyd And our fourth guest Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues.

Dave founded Intuitive Systems, a consulting firm that helps companies develop marketing strategies and build better software systems.

A prolific author, he has been published more than 1,000 times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, and has written 20 business and technical books. Dave also maintains three blogs which help companies learn how to grow through savvy use of business blogging: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com (focused on business and industry analysis), “Ask Dave Taylor” which is devoted to tech and business Q&A, and The Attachment Parenting Blog, discussing topics of interest to parents. Dave also most recently authored The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google..

Welcome to the show Dave.

04:50 Dave Taylor Thanks Tom, great to be here.

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/

http://www.apparenting.com/

http://www.findability.info/

http://www.findability.info/

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04:53

Tom Floyd Great to have all of you.

Well, as we do with each show I’d like to share some data that our research team pulled together to set the stage.

Just published last week, January 28th, in fact, on ReadWriteWeb.com, according to Forrester Research, there will be "strong demand" for Web 2.0 tools in enterprise in 2008. Even though 42% of enterprises say adding Web 2.0 tools is not on their agenda, according to a Q3 2007 survey, Forrester expects that half of those will change their mind and embrace Web 2.0 tools by year end.

Now according to Forrester, their definition of Web 2.0 is, "A set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures."

According to Forrester, “Web 2.0 technologies include podcasting, flash video, and wiki, which has replaced contact management systems as the current user-preferred technology for editing online content.

Also according to Forrester, “Web 2.0 is distinguished from “old” Web technology by the wide-scale harnessing of collective intelligence and enlisting of virtual users as content co-developers.”

Now the results of another survey, these results being from an international Web 2.0 survey conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton that was published on March 2nd, 2007, showed that online interaction is changing consumer behavior worldwide. The 2007 survey concluded that, “Web 2.0 is a massive phenomenon applicable to all users regardless of age, social class, gender, or education.”

The Booz Allen survey revealed that more than half of all Internet users already rely on advice from a massive worldwide user community, indicating a wide acceptance of new ways to form opinions and make buying decisions.

Well, Dave, I’d like to start with you.

To set the stage can you build upon the Forester definition of what Web 2.0 is and give us a little history with things like, what it is, how did it get started and why has it become such a hot topic over the past year especially?

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07:16 Dave Taylor Sure, thanks Tom.

I have to say that I kind of laugh and cringe simultaneously every time I hear the phrase Web 2.0 because no one really seems to know what it is and I’ve heard so many differing definitions.

I think perhaps the best way to characterize it is that it represents a higher level of interactivity with on-line applications.

If you go back maybe five or six years ago and look at things like say the original hotmail. Everything you clicked on generated a new page and it worked, but it certainly wasn’t something that was flashy and you didn’t look at it and say, now this could replace my major applications.

But if you look at things like Google maps. I think Google maps is probably an under sung Web 2.0 application in as much as it’s very sophisticated behind the scenes and there’s a lot you can do with it and really I don’t know anyone that actually runs a mapping program anymore because the Web based applications are so sophisticated.

And not just data, but I mean in the way you interact with them. I think that that’s an evolution that’s been happening over the last at least five or ten years as the need for internet based interactive applications has increased.

I go back far enough that I can remember when there wasn’t any network at all. And things have definitely evolved from there.

But it’s really been just in the last couple of years that Web 2.0 and if you will, social media have collided. And I think that it’s the social media.

You know, you hear that it’s citizen journalism for example. I know Larry talks about this a lot. I think that’s really where this has become very interesting.

08:57 Dave Taylor When you look at things like FaceBook or MySpace or blogging or pod casting, all of these things are basically ways where the common man and the common woman get a voice.

And from a company perspective, it’s something that is fairly terrifying because what it means is that you, as a company, have lost control of your message and you no longer own your brand, you no longer own how the market perceives your product.

You go back, I don’t know, 10, 20, 50 years and a brand was defined by the advertising and PR agency. That’s no longer true nor relevant.

And for a lot of companies it is absolutely critical that they recognize that this isn’t something they need to get involved with, this is something they need to have already gotten involved with because it’s already happening, even if they are not willing to acknowledge it.

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09:50 Tom Floyd Do you feel like more companies are taking it seriously?

I thought it was interesting in some of the information from Forester that some said “well this isn’t really on our agenda for this year.”

Are you starting to see that change, though?

It got my attention when you said they are losing control of their message, for example and their brand.

10:09 Dave Taylor Yes, and I definitely think that it’s changing and in fact I would go back and go to people like Charlene and Jeremy over at Forester and challenge them to ask these companies exactly what they mean when they say it’s not something they are planning on doing in the next year.

Because I will bet all of those companies have someone, somewhere on staff that, for example, watches Facebook to see if there are any groups that come up that are related to their product or service.

Or to see if bloggers have mentioned them.

Or to go to trade shows and even just something as simple as how do you determine which trade shows to exhibit at, that is something that is a function of modern social media, just as much as it is the PR agencies that are promoting those events.

10:52 Tom Floyd And do you think that we’ll even start seeing positions and things like Facebook analyst wanted or things like that where people are starting to actually have job roles to find around, specifically marketing towards some of these specific media?

11:06 Dave Taylor I would say that that’s exactly what I do. I might not call myself a Facebook analyst, that just sounds a little ominous.

11:15 Tom Floyd I just made that up by the way.

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11:17 Dave Taylor It’s not bad, it just sounds a little analytic.

But, in a lot of ways if you think about companies that say well gosh we have this major chain of car dealerships and we know we have a website, we’ve had that for years, but now we have to get involved in the conversation going on, on-line. That’s a whole another ballgame.

We really don’t know how to do that and we really need to have someone help us get started in the right way. Because this is also, like going into a really popular party on campus is you go in and you say the wrong thing or you act stupid or you dress poorly or something, and that’s going to be something you are going to have to wrestle with for the next six months.

People are going to say, “oh aren’t you the guy that like came in with that pink tie on?”

11:59 Tom Floyd So like “weren’t you the guy that had that terrible blog and completely handled the entire thing wrong?”

12:03 Dave Taylor Right.

And there are companies that are doing just that.

Like Dell, for example, is still struggling with trying to figure out how to be consistent to the vision of someone like Michael Dell and to also embrace the fact that there’s a much higher level of chaos and noise in the on-line world, but you can’t just turn away from it.

And then you look at companies like Apple and Apple refuses to even partake and it’s a fascinating thing that they are as successful as they are because really by a lot of measures they should be very unsuccessful because they don’t blog, they don’t get involved in all these social media, they don’t have a Facebook page, they don’t even like to have Apple employees participate.

But they, I think, are an anomaly for most.

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12:48 Tom Floyd I thought it was interesting what you said too, where I’m not liking the term Web 2.0. I actually feel that way myself at times.

My first response was, what is that?

And it seems like in both my professional and personal circles that people still struggle with that too.

So in terms of what we are talking about kind of, if that’s an umbrella term, some of the categories that fall within that, another definition that I saw “broke Web 2.0” technologies into four categories.

So one category was content productions and things like video sharing, blogs, pod casts, Wiki’s, another was social networking, so on-line social networks and virtual worlds, etc.

13:20 Tom Floyd A third was Web services, things like mash ups and on-line applications like My Yahoo and Google docs.

And a fourth one was collaboration pools. So mobile services like Helio and on-line video communications like scape.

What are your thoughts?

Are those kind of the four major categories, is there anything that you would add there?

13:47 Dave Taylor This just makes me think of the word folksonomy. I don’t know if you’ve bumped into that one, Tom. But, you know what a taxonomy is, right, it’s what you just did.

It’s someone trying to take a large thing and categorize it into sub elements.

And a folksonomy is a community generated taxonomy and what makes me sort of amused by this is that if you really look at what you just said, what you really said was anything that’s been written in the last five years.

It’s like going into the library and saying, “hmm, how do we organize all of these millions of books into some sort of coherent organization?”

14:30 Tom Floyd I can’t help it, okay, I always want to organize things all over the place.

14:34 Dave Taylor Yes, but you know maybe we should just call this Web 2.3 beta or something?

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14:40 Tom Floyd Larry, I’d like to loop you in on the conversation next.

What are your thoughts so far?

Is there going to be a stronger demand for Web 2.0 tools and technologies in 2008?

14:50 Larry Magid Well, first of all I want to echo a lot of what Dave said.

I mean, it is a highly disruptive technology because not only do companies not only get to their message, but Dave mentioned that back in the old days you had advertising and PR and of course PR their goal was to influence pundits and journalists and people like me and people like Dave I suppose.

But we are no longer in control.

So I get to write for the New York Times, well at one point that would have been it.

If the New York Times said it, then it must be true or I get to go on CBS News, but now when I do write for the New York Times or CBS or anywhere else, I’m competing with thousands of bloggers, some of whom have a very strong voice, some of whom have never been anointed by anyone.

No editor in New York ever had to vet their credentials, these guys and gals just emerged, they developed a following, people liked what they have to say and they have a great deal of influence.

15:43 Larry Magid And then second of all, when you write for almost any major publication today your writing will appear on their website and on the Web, every case that I can think of, certainly every publication that I write for, there is a comment section.

So if you go to CBSnews.com and click on Sci-Tech which is the area I write for and the PC Answer which is my area, you will see my columns and below every column there will be comments and I can’t get away with anything.

If I have an opinion people disagree with they are going to say it.

If I were to make a mistake, trust me, I will hear about it. I will hear about it a lot.

Recently I wrote something in the New York Times and I made a small technical error and people acted like it was a conspiracy, like it was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public and I went back and said, “wait a minute don’t give me that much credit, I just made a typo, come on.”

16:37 Tom Floyd And that just sounds so scary hearing that too, I mean what’s the best way to handle things like that?

I think that some people do have this fear around Web 2.0 because they are like “oh my god I’m going to get eaten alive.”

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16:46 Larry Magid The best way to handle it is to, if you make a mistake, admit it right away, thank them for pointing it out and correct it. And not dwell on why it happened, how it happened, but just simply say oops you are right and here’s the correct answer and to thoroughly research it.

And, that’s the way Tylenol handled their tragic situation, when they had the tampering issue.

Any company today, who is smart, when they seriously make a mistake they should just acknowledge it and the difference is that the time factor, it’s no longer a question.

For example, look at the Facebook situation when they introduced it as a Beacon service and then they got pounded on for privacy violations and MoveOn.org wound up doing a petition. They waited, I think, too long. They waited about a week.

Now in the days of Web 1.0 a week was nothing. In the days of Web 2.0 a day is something.

And so things move very quickly.

17:49 Larry Magid So one of the things you have to do, whether you have your own Web 2.0 venue, whether you have your own blog or wiki or social site, whether you are simply being talked about on other peoples’ sites, which means everyone, so there is nothing in the public entity, no journalist, no company, no analyst, no celebrity, no anybody who has a public face who isn’t participating in Web 2.0 either as a participant or as a subject.

So one way or the other you are part of the conversation.

The question is, whether you actually get to participate in the conversation or whether you are just being talked about.

And so one of the things you need to do is to be aware of this.

18:28 Larry Magid For example, I would urge everybody to have a Google alert, go to Google news and have an alert for your name in quotes so it doesn’t – it might be tough with Dave Taylor because it’s a common name and your company’s name so if someone does say something about you on one of the thousands of sites and blogs that Google news poles then you will at least hear about it.

But if something comes up, you should be part of the conversation.

That doesn’t mean you should get defensive, it doesn’t mean you should berate people, but you should somehow try to figure out what is the intelligent strategy.

And I can give you some hints on this.

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19:03 Larry Magid Many, many years ago Dave remembers this, he and I go back a ways, I wrote a column for Prodigy, the now defunct on-line service that was run by Sears and IBM and CBS and I learned very early that two things happen.

When you are an authority, people want to go after you.

They want to be able to dethrone the king and it doesn’t matter who you are. If you are Walt Mosberg at the Wall Street Journal or you are at Apple or you are Microsoft or you are Google or Yahoo, any time you can be caught making a mistake, people have an ego gratification in correcting you or in showing you wrong.

But if you go in there and you say, “you know what thank you so much, my gosh I couldn’t believe that happened, yada yada yada, you are right.” Suddenly that same kind of authoritarian principle where they were anti-authority they become your best friend.

Not 100% of the time, but I would say in my experience about 85% of the time, no matter how critical they are of me and I’ve had people accuse me of being in everybody’s pocket, sometimes I’m accused of being on Apple’s payroll, sometimes I’m accused of being on Microsoft’s payroll.

It goes back and forth depending on my honest opinion.

By the way, I’m not on either of their payrolls.

20:11 Tom Floyd Life should be so good, right Larry?

20:12 Larry Magid Right, exactly. I’m waiting for the check from Redmond. Maybe if I had Yahoo stock I’d get a check from Redmond.

But the fact of the matter is that when you simply acknowledge it they tend to become your best friend.

And so I think it’s just embracing it and realizing you are going to take your knocks, you are going to get a couple of bloody noses out of this deal, but at the end of the day you are going to be much more respected if you just sort of go in there and deal with it.

20:39 Tom Floyd And that’s what I was going to say too, it sounds like it’s a respect thing.

I mean, if you go in there knowing you are going to get critiqued and criticism, but you take the time to respond back and engage in that dialogue that you are actually going to get some really good relationships as a result of it.

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20:52 Larry Magid Right, and also good feedback.

You might actually get some good advice that could lead to improving your products or your services or your marketing and you need to listen.

That doesn’t mean everybody is right, but you need to listen.

21:09 Tom Floyd As the Booz Allen Hamilton survey said, back to the general question about Web 2.0 that I know a lot of people ask me this in the consulting work that I do, is Web 2.0 indeed a massive phenomena that really is applicable to all people out there regardless of their age, regardless of their social class, regardless of their gender or education?

I mean a lot of people ask me, “you know what, this is something that only millennial generations is using, that generation of Y, so to speak, is using.”

Is it really starting to be embraced by everybody?

21:41 Larry Magid I think it is use driven.

I think that when it comes to young people and by young people I’m thinking 14 to 24. It is a very much a part of their lives.

I mean they probably don’t even bother with the term Web 2.0, they go on-line and on-line for them means they are in Facebook or MySpace or instant messaging or whatever interactive service they are using.

But the fact of the matter is that once again the youth shall lead and companies are picking up on this and remember that a lot of people who work for corporations today are out of college, they themselves are digital natives, so we are beginning to see sort of the class of corporate primarily lower level, but not totally, of people coming up who grew up with this technology and so it’s increasingly becoming part of all aspects of corporate America.

It’s certainly part of the campaign. None of the presidential candidates skipped the Web 2.0. They’ve all had to embrace it to some extent, some more than others.

So it’s definitely part of the culture, but as I said, whether you are driving the bus or sitting in the back of the bus or being run over by the bus, one way or the other you are affected by it.

22:59 Tom Floyd Real quick, your book MySpace Unraveled, what were some of the discoveries and themes that you really highlight there?

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23:08 Larry Magid Well, we looked at young people, teenagers because part of what we were trying to do is to counter the myth that social networking was somehow a dangerous chaotic terrible, frightening thing and of course it is chaotic, but we found that the chaos actually had a great deal of organization to it.

So one analogy that we had in the book is going onto MySpace for example, is a little bit like walking into a Grand Central Station in New York.

Now if you are not from New York, you’ve never been to New York before and you walk into Grand Central Station you see an incredibly chaotic environment with no organization at all and everything is different, nothing makes sense and things are very ugly and confusing.

But if you are a commuter, if you regularly take the Long Island railroad to where ever you are on Long Island, you walk into Grand Central Station, you see a very organized system, you know where your train is, you know where your friends hang out, you know what coffee shops and it’s not nearly as chaotic as people think it is.

24:07 Larry Magid We also discovered, again among teenagers, that people are using it for all sorts of things that’s having an enormous impact on helping to find your place in the pecking order, helping to validate your opinions, the election has certainly prove this.

I think part of the reason why, for example, Obama has done so well is because he has helped capture the youth vote largely through the Web 2.0 phenomenon. I’m not saying he hasn’t done other things, but that’s had a huge impact on his affect among young people.

24:40 Tom Floyd Interesting.

Robyn I’d like to loop you in next.

Can you talk to me about from your perspective what Web 2.0 is beginning to mean for the coaching profession?

Is it beginning to change the ways that coaching is done if we start to put a coaching flare around this and for that matter, how people are preferring to even receive coaching?

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25:03 Robyn Logan Well, yes thanks.

I think it definitely is changing the way coaching is done.

In particular I think it’s changing the way business is done and if you see that coaches are actually small business owners, they coach but also what they do is they run a small business. Sometimes they run even bigger businesses.

But for me it’s really about the way it changes the way you need to do business.

So I would agree with what Larry was saying about how you handle feedback for example, or criticism.

In the past you might have been kind to perhaps hide that or not respond.

Now with 2.0, it forces businesses to be transparent and to me that’s very exciting. What it means is that—

25:49 Tom Floyd And from your perspective too, are most coaches both, from running their own business from that perspective and from looking at new ways to engage with their clients, would you say that most of them are ready for Web 2.0?

26:02 Robyn Logan Well that’s a different question.

26:04 Tom Floyd Oh I know.

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26:07 Robyn Logan Well, that’s interesting because the whole idea of the digital natives, a lot of coaches are not digital natives.

Many coaches tend to be people who has had one or two professions and they are moving into a new career.

Coaching itself is a new profession.

So, lots of coaches, in fact, you know, these are not the tools that they grew up with. However, they are actually embracing them and I think that it really is just about learning to learn and learning to be open to new technologies.

Not just new technologies, though, I think the whole thing with Web 2.0, sometimes the focus is too much on the technology and not enough on the principles and philosophies behind it.

So it doesn’t actually work if you are a coach, for example, and you want to embrace Web 2.0 to just set up a blog or go to a wiki. That’s not really going to do it.

It’s really understanding what that means and really understanding that it means to have your clients as co-creators of your business, to have your clients as co-creators of your brand, to be transparent.

It means having high levels of integrity, being impeccable with your word, and totally trusting in your users and in your business to open yourself up and that’s what I think really needs to be embraced by coaches.

27:31 Tom Floyd I really like that, that distinction that you just made.

Now Derrick real fast before our break, you call yourself a blog coach and a consultant, can you tell us a little bit about what that means and about some of the work that you do?

27:47 Derrick Sorles Sure.

One of the things, the word I haven’t heard used yet, which I’m surprised because when I’m talking with people about whatever the label is, the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0, it’s just a title.

But what happened was that there was a shift in power and so that means that certainly CBS, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, I mean they were their own hubs, but I can be sitting now in my countryside home in Russia and I can be influencing people on-line through my work.

So I could put a video up on YouTube and be the next superstar overnight.

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28:37 Derrick Sorles So that shift in power I think was tremendous.

We went from, in Web 1.0 it was a push strategy and everything on the Internet was just all this information being pushed at you.

In Web 2.0 what we have now is we have the opportunity to interact and everyone can be a publisher, a producer, the great thing about so many of these Web 2.0 tools is that they are usually free or basically free, very inexpensive, but the problem is that they are very misunderstood and underutilized, I believe, certainly by mid and large corporations.

Most of the clients that I work with as a blog coach or an online consultant are small business owners or entrepreneurs and it makes sense because generally that’s a group of business population where their early adopters and they can move quickly.

So they look at something like LinkedIn, for example.

29:48 Tom Floyd I hate to cut you off, but I’m hearing the music for our first commercial break.

Let’s go ahead and go on pause.

Stay tuned everyone, more from Insight Coaching when we return.

32:30 Tom Floyd Welcome back to Insight on Coaching, I’m Tom Floyd.

Today the topic is Coaching Successes using Web 2.0 Technologies.

With me are Robyn Logan, founding director of the International Coach Academy, Larry Magid CBS tech media personality and co-author of MySpace Unraveled and also the co-director of ConnectSafely.org, Derrick Sorles co-owner of BusinessBloggingConsultants.com and YourBusinessMDS.com, and Dave Taylor, founder and principal of Intuitive Systems and author of the Complete Idiots Guide to Growing Your Business with Google.

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33:04 Tom Floyd Well, in this segment of the show I’d like to focus on a couple things.

One I’d like to focus on the impact of Web 2.0 in corporate America and I’d also like to spend some more time talking about how some of our coaches out there can begin using Web 2.0 and benefiting from Web 2.0 technologies as well.

So let me quickly set the stage.

Now according to the Booz Allen Hamilton survey that we mentioned earlier

“The penetration of Web 2.0 sites in the total population is 49% in the U.S., 45% in Germany, and 26% in the U.K.”

Web 2.0 is contributing to a robust worldwide Internet market currently worth €40 billion euro, with profits originating primarily through advertising and e-commerce.

With unlimited potential growth in the Internet economy, the study predicts that turnover from Internet services in Germany will rise from €17.1 billion in 2005 to €44.2 billion in 2008.

Now according to another article in the March 23rd, 2007 issue of Business Week, author Tim Ferguson reports that, “Web 2.0 technologies are becoming increasingly popular with businesses as they start to understand its benefits following their initial investment in these technologies.”

And from another article, the April 17th, 2007 issue of The Economist: “Web 2.0 has moved from buzzword to reality in many of the world’s largest corporations, according to a survey of 406 senior executives worldwide by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Almost 80% of corporations believe Web 2.0 has the potential to increase revenues.”

Well Dave, I’d like to start with you.

If we think about Web 2.0 from a global perspective, it is truly a global phenomenon, are you seeing it embraced in some areas of the world more than others, is it being embraced universally?

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34:58 Dave Taylor Well, nothing is embraced universally, at least not to my skeptical jaded eye.

But it’s definitely something that has a remarkable reach and I’ll tell you that I daily communicate with people in countries where I sometimes have to go and look on a map to even see where they are.

And it might well be the western hemisphere if you will or not the third world so much, but I’ve got e-mail from people in small African nations asking me about questions that I have written about on my blog or something and yes, the reach really is there.

The thing is, is that if you really sort of think through the implications of everything we are talking about here with the online world transitioning from a publishing medium to a communications and conversational venue then the areas where it isn’t as well embraced are offering up huge opportunities to companies that are willing to try to get there first.

And so if you really want to have, say a travel agency in Mongolia and get people from the western nations to come out and really see what the back country of Mongolia is like, that would be a perfect thing to blog about because you might not get thousands and thousands of people, but if well might be the case that 10 to 20% of the small number of people that do visit your site then convert into customers.

It might not be that week or that month, but they will remember and they will go on all your little photo tours vicariously and they will open up discussions and again, this is one of the things I think Larry was spot on with is that you are opening up a channel, a two directional channel of communication with not just your customers, but your potential customers and not just them, but the people that never would be your customers because of who you are and how you’ve packaged your product or service.

36:54 Dave Taylor And you never get to interact with them in real life, but you certainly can in the digital world and it’s very, very illuminating and from the perspective of a coach for example, there are people that you’d never think to pitch that would probably never hire you to do coaching, but if you just had a slight variation, if you maybe did a one weekend every six months work shop for free and you just covered the expenses out of pocket, maybe you could get some of them to convert into customers in a way that you’d never have thought of if you wouldn’t have actually started to put yourself out there and open yourself up for discussion.

37:31 Tom Floyd And let’s talk a little bit about, and Robyn I’ll turn to you for this, a little bit about the global affect of Web 2.0 and coaching for a minute.

From your perspective do you think that Web 2.0 is going to have a more profound impact on coaches in some areas of the world or others?

Do you think it will be more embraced by coaches in certain areas or do you think it really will be a global phenomenon for coaches too?

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38:06 Robyn Logan Well, I think Web 2.0 is a global thing and coaching is a global thing already so I couldn’t say that there’s any particular country or area of the world where it might be taken up.

I know in China it’s a little bit more difficult because the great firewall of China as they call it and I know we ask students, we implemented a strategy last year where part of their assessment was to actually set up a blog and to use it as a self reflection tool and learning about how they were developing as a coach and the reason we did that is because we think exactly as Dave was saying as a marketing tool when they graduate to know how to use a blog is a very cheap and affective way of getting a presence on the Web when you are starting up in business.

And I know that we did have some issues with our users in China being blocked from, I think it was WordPress, so I think there’s those sorts of issues, but in terms of the take up, coaching are attracted to coaching already because it is a flexible global profession.

Most coaching is done over the phone and has been done over the phone for years now.

I think our graduates, probably 10%, do face to face coaching.

And even that often turns into telephone coaching.

39:31 Robyn Logan So it’s already being delivered flexibly, so to just add on some tools then, like perhaps a forum for your clients or a blog to talk about your coaching is not such a big leap to do that sort of thing.

39:48 Tom Floyd It’s interesting that you say it’s already starting to be done.

I have two coaches, both have been former guests on this show and I’ve only met with either of them once, in person.

I’ve had them both for a year and it’s always virtual and it’s a non-issue for me at this point.

It’s almost a preference for me at this point.

It’s really interesting and encouraging to hear you say that too.

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40:13 Robyn Logan And our company is the same, International Coaching Academy is totally virtual.

Some staff I’ve never met and they’ve been working with us for six years and you know for us it’s normal.

We do all our job interviews over the phone. It’s sort of like the centerpiece of our organization, it’s how we know who is working at any given time during the day.

Instead of having to go and look at timeanddate.com and constantly working out time conversions, I just look on Skype and if it’s green my client is there, and if it’s green my colleagues are there, and if it’s not, then I don’t ring them.

40:45 Tom Floyd Got it.

Derrick, question for you and this question I’m sure applies to folks way beyond folks who are coaches.

But in terms of how somebody goes about starting a blog, I can definitely see that being a question for a lot of our listeners regardless if their coaches or not.

Where the heck do you start doing that?

What are some of the ways that someone would go about starting a blog for themselves or for their business?

41:13 Derrick Sorles Well, I’m not on Google’s payroll, I’d like to be, but I mean the biggest and the best example probably is you can go in and you can create a blog on BlogSpot, through blogger, in a minute.

And then once you are working in it it’s very similar to me like working in a Word document or an e-mail.

You see the same drop down screens, icons, I mean it’s something that most people can figure out quite quickly, the nuances of it.

But yeah, anyone can start a blog immediately through Google’s blogger and it’s completely free.

41:53 Tom Floyd And what are some of the ways, it was Larry I believe, that was sharing some of the certain etiquettes and things to keep in mind when blogging for example and other tools?

What’s the best way to learn what some of those rules are so that you are not the one showing up at the party in a pink suit so to speak?

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42:11 Derrick Sorles I always would say, it really is just a form of communication.

So you behave, you publish and put out on the Internet where it will stay things that you would want out there.

But being respectful of other people’s opinions and their feedback and encouraging feedback and making sure that if someone does leave you a comment that you do reply and you thank them.

There’s just a common courtesy that you want to instill because that’s what keeps readers coming back to you.

52:50 Tom Floyd And if you think of a way, let’s go back to using coaches as an example.

So we talked about how coaches can definitely use blogs to help solicit more business for example, one of the main things that a lot of coaches do are these one on one interactions with their clients and sometimes for some cases they are facilitated sessions too, so they could be doing kinds of group coaching if they are involved in a leadership development program for example and they’ve got multiple folks that are in that.

Can you speak to us a little bit in terms of how, based on what you know about coaches and the work that they do, ways that you could see them using blogs, for example, on either one on one interactions with clients or in facilitated sessions with multiple individuals, things like that?

What are some of your ideas there?

43:38 Derrick Sorles Well, a lot of times people think of a blog as being a lot of work and extra work and often coaches are usually publishing some sort of online newsletter or e-newsletter and I just suggest that information gets repurposed into a blog format because the difficulty of, if you are doing an e-newsletter to your permission based e-mail list is that it’s completely off the Internet’s radar screen.

One of the things that we haven’t talked about here is the power of search and how search has really influenced and changed the way that we will do business forever.

So if you don’t have much of an Internet presence, because what we are really trying to create when we are working with clients is a way for people to do a keyword search around you and your business and it’s going to bring them to you.

So it’s a poll strategy as well because when we are doing searches online that means that we are interested in that news, that service, that information, that entertainment, and so there’s a continuum that has already been collapsed and so hopefully when people find us through search and wind up at our site they are ready to do business because everything has been relevant.

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45:00 Tom Floyd It gives them a way to quickly kind of skim through things, see what the important or significant points are, it helps them get started quicker.

45:07 Derrick Sorles Right. Absolutely.

45:11 Tom Floyd Got it.

Robyn, let’s talk a little bit about social networking and Internet forums.

How can coaches from your perspective best leverage those technologies in their practices?

I mean, one thing that I can think of off the top of my head is that they would leverage them to recruit new clients.

But are there other ways that they can use some of those tools in their engagements?

45:32 Robyn Logan Yes, they can recruit new clients, definitely.

Also they could use them to start to build a community with the clients they have.

You know, I have seen a couple of coaches do this where coaches possibly have clients from all around the world and definitely their clients don’t know each other.

But often coaches specialize in particular areas so you might be a business coach, an executive coach, or you might be a career coach, or a spiritual coach.

So the sorts of clients you get tend to have similar interests and similar issues.

So to open it up and allow them to network with each other, it’s sort of extending the power of your coaching to peer support and peer coaching that emerges into the on-line learning area as well.

So I think that’s one option.

46:27 Tom Floyd I love that example. I never would have thought of that. I love it.

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46:31 Robyn Logan It’s a good one. I think the getting of new clients is always a good one.

I mean, joining a social network and just being who you are is a great way to use it to get new clients.

I think, just for a moment I want to talk a little bit about the back end.

Lots of people focus with Web 2.0 technologies on the front end on what the user can have or what tools you can give your clients, like blogs or forums.

One of the most powerful I’ve seen for coaches using Web 2.0 technology is the sorts of technology that can help them run their business at the back end and so I’m talking about online databases or say online survey tools or project management tools.

All those sorts of tools are very affordable and easy to set up. For example Basecamp is a really good project management tool that coaches can use.

47:30 Robyn Logan Survey Monkey is an online survey software and I remember when we started in business none of this stuff was around and we spent the first three years trying to either create it ourselves or paying a lot of money to get it from somewhere else.

And now you can very easily survey all your clients, or not even your clients, you can survey all the people who come to your blog and get an idea of the sorts of things that they are interested in in getting coaching on.

47:58 Tom Floyd It’s actually a tool that they could use in doing their initial self assessment or their pre-assessments with clients, for example.

They could use it to get feedback from existing clients, how things are going and all of that.

I could definitely see where that would be useful.

48:15 Robyn Logan Dave was talking about the power of search and getting people to come to your website, the thing that you want them to do when they come is fill out a form.

You actually want their e-mail address and their name so that you can build a relationship with them.

So really you don’t want that just going into your inbox, you really want that going into something that you can then segment by interest and market and so on to form an online marketing database.

There are plenty of open source ones available now. There’s SugarCRM for example and these things are all new in the last three or four years.

48:52 Dave Taylor If I could jump in Tom.

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48:54 Tom Floyd Sure go ahead.

48:56 Dave Taylor This is Dave, and my concern with everything that you are saying and I think that it’s terrific stuff, but I see a lot of people get lost in the tactics and don’t really think through the strategy.

It’s just like well there are all these really cool tools, so oh I can put a survey on my site and then I’ll just come up with some new survey every couple of days and then I’ll start asking them things like, “what kind of cell phone do you have”, or “did you like the latest movie that came out” or something.

And it ends up where it becomes very social, but it’s no longer serving the needs of the business or the needs of the consultant or coach.

And I can’t emphasize enough how that can really sour you for years where you spend a few months and you get into all this stuff and it’s great fun.

I have to say that from a personal perspective it’s very enjoyable, but you end up looking back three months later and saying, “I just spent 450 hours and I don’t really see much gain for that and I’m therefore, going to go ahead and throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater and I’m just going to skip all this Web 2.0 social media stuff” and it’s just not – the people getting the results with that are just, you know, I think they are lying. This is just not true.

And I really, genuinely encounter this with clients, with some alarming frequency where the president’s son hooked up some sort of a Facebook page and then started talking about their favorite bands and then the company says, “oh we already have a Facebook presence we don’t really need to go any further.”

50:26 Tom Flody So it’s almost like, to use one of my favorite sales phrases that I’ve heard from our sales clients a couple of times, it almost sounds like you are saying you don’t want to “spray and pray” with some of these Web technologies.

50:39 Dave Taylor I don’t know why, but my whole imagine with that is of my cat.

50:44 Tom Floyd I have three cats, I get that same visual.

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50:49 Robyn Logan I think you are right David, I think that extends to social networks as well, you know, I see a lot of coaches, you know, a couple of coaches recently in my inbox starting a community, starting a social network and my question would be to them, you know, why are you starting that social network?

I agree, you don’t just use the tool for the sake of the tool.

It has to be built into your business plan and there has to be a reason and a motivation to use a particular tool.

51:14 Dave Taylor Right and can I just take ten seconds for a crass commercial plug Tom, is that okay?

51:18 Tom Floyd Absolutely.

51:21 Dave Taylor Thank you so much, and Derrick and Robyn, this is definitely for you too, is that my friend Andy Biel who runs MarketingPilgrim.com and I are actually hosting a strategic planning new media event in Hawaii next month.

And it would be delightful to have any of you come out and join us.

You can learn more at AlohaSummit.com.

That’s it, that’s my pitch.

51:54 Tom Floyd Any excuse to go to Hawaii.

51:47 Dave Taylor That’s what I say.

51:50 Tom Floyd Derrick, anything that you would add in terms of really having around the strategy and plan in terms of how people can use Web 2.0 technologies effectively?

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51:58 Derrick Sorles Well, I was going to say that I really do find that most of my clients as well don’t approach it strategically and so very often one of the first exercises we’ll do is we’ll Google search the company’s name.

What’s out there, what am I going to find, what am I going to find on page one?

Google the person’s name, but beyond that, you know, many of us, again, our company, my company could be called CJS and Associates and so it’s not anything very search engine friendly.

So we spend a lot of time talking about key words, key word searches and usually coming up with a domain name, it’s a series of a couple of top search engine words that would help pull people to you and so unlike in the old days where our websites were always named after our companies, you know, you can call a blog anything that you would like and then hopefully it will all just be relevant and the content will make sense when the person showed up there.

But that’s terrific. You know, we have so many different examples where clients have wanted to be found.

53:11 Derrick Sorles One of my favorite ones is health wellness expert, a doctor that I work with.

His blog site usually sits in the third, second or third spot on Google page one alongside WebMD, you know, and he’s not paying to be there, he’s there organically showing up on page one and he’s gotten a couple speaking engagements, he’s been on talk shows, TV, so that’s a pretty good place to be.

53:40 Tom Floyd Yes, definitely, that’s like the ultimate Web success story that everybody really thinks of.

For my company too, I mean I own a small management consulting firm and we’ve had an SEO vendor for about three months now and I have to say it was like a ray of light shining down from the heavens in terms of the feedback and things they provide.

It was like o”h my god, wow this is so, so helpful!”

54:02 Derrick Sorles Well, I think the great example is my being on your show today.

One of your producers found me by googling Web 2.0 coach or business blog consultant and that’s how I was connected.

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54:18 Tom Floyd Fantastic!

Well I’m starting to hear the music so that means we are up at the end of our show, unfortunately, but a huge thank you to all four of you for joining us today and as always a huge thank you to our listeners as well.

For information about our show don’t forget to visit our website, www.ieconsulting.biz.

Don’t forget you can also download the podcast version of this show through Apple iTunes as well.

Just go to the music store and enter Insight on Coaching in the Search field.

Thanks everyone, we’ll see you next week.

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Coaching Successes With Web 2.0

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Transcript of Coaching Successes With Web 2.0