Helping Hands For Coaches

Wouldn’t you love a community full of people all over the world supporting your business, helping it grow, referring to it, all while building relationships with current and past clients?  In the past, this would have taken a lot of effort – putting on events, networking, in-person meetings. But, as a coach, you can have potential clients from all over the world – so building your community in your geographic area may not work for your business. To quoting Seth Godin: “Realize that one day soon, you’ll be spending much of your time working with people who you will probably never meet in person.” The good news about the Internet: you can easily build that community through  online social networks – especially with Ning.com.

Ning.com is a great service for coaches because it allows you to build your community, support your current clients, and potentially attract future ones – all with very little cost. You can customize it’s look and feel, control who can join, and control the content of the site. Members can have their own blog, upload video and audio, upload images, and participate in the online forums. This allows you to see what your clients, and prospects, are struggling with, interested in, and connect to them to build the strong relationship and brand that will help your coaching clients coming back for more. You can read a ‘how-to’ for coaches on Ning.com at the ICF-OC website.

Seth Godin, in his blog post “Your brand is not your logo“, stated that the logo is not as important as the story, product and experience that the customer/client has of that product. While I believe it’s true, I believe it’s important to have an identity that your customers can easily identify as yours – one that helps tell the story of the product.

Seth mentions Starbucks as a good example of a logo that hasn’t changed much – yet it’s logo has changed from the brown twin-tailed siren used from when it opened until 1992, to the now recognizable cropped image of the siren in green. Then there’s Apple‘s logo, which has changed 4 times since it started in the early 1970s.

The logo is important, and helps tell the story of the product or service – but I do agree that it’s not what we should ultimately focus on. Nirzhar and I are going through this process ourselves as we change our website and logo to match the changes we’ve made within our company – so, what came first: the logo or the changes? The changes, of course – the logo is merely a reflection of our evolution.  (Stay tuned to see these changes come to life at IndraMarketing.com in November 2008.)