Coaching School Takes Its Show on the Road…to Twitter

A group of coaches got together to talk about coaching Thursday, sharing their thoughts and swapping ideas on a wide range of topics, from having a niche to defining the ideal client.

Kate Griffiths, a leadership coach in the UK, jumped at the chance to network with fellow coaches. “It is a great way to connect,” she said.

The connection came across continents, but without a conference call or chat room. Instead, the coaches gathered for a live back-and-forth on Twitter, the social network. “It’s a way for CTI (Coaches Training Institute) alumni, and anyone interested in these topics, to have a live, ongoing, real-time discussion wherever you are in the world,” said a message announcing the inaugural “#CTIChat” on the group’s website. “The goal of these chats is to provide a way to connect to each other in social media, to share ideas, and to make personal connections.”

The Twitter chat was moderated by Marcia Norris, Corporate Communications Manager at CTI, the coach training school. Norris, an admitted newcomer to the world of “tweeting,” wanted to test a monthly meeting via Twitter, since networking with coaches has been a hallmark of CTI for years.

“For us, social media in general is a natural progression, because we’ve already been doing this kind of thing,” she said, noting that CTI keeps its coaches connected through a website known as the Co-Active Network, or as Norris describes it, “a Facebook for coaches before there was a Facebook.”

At a CTI meeting last summer, Norris and members of the CTI staff talked about what else they could do to stay ahead of the curve…and to make sure CTI had a presence in some of the newer social media platforms. “A few of us in the office put together a little committee and started talking about social media the possibility of dipping our toe into some of these other channels for pulling our people back together, because we know that the further and further we go in time, different people, different age groups, are going to be connecting in different ways.”

And so the idea of a monthly gathering on Twitter, which CTI believes may be a first for a coaching school, was born. Dean Miles, a medical and leadership coach in Colorado, joined in. “I like the idea of getting CTI alums together,” Miles said.

But he did have at least one concern. “Using Twitter, every time I tweeted, my 10,000 followers got an update. I don’t think all of them appreciated it.”

But for Norris, the event was a success—and an opportunity: a chance to keep CTI coaches linked in an increasingly fragmented world. “What we’re looking to do is to pull those people back into conversation, because we know that a lot of coaches move out of training and begin to work for themselves, and find themselves kind of isolated out there.”

What Twitter does that CTI’s Co-Active Network doesn’t, is provide a real time conversation that requires a laser focus—keeping the conversation moving in the form of Twitter’s 140-character tweets.

“Boy, you’ve got to do that bottom-lining and say what you’ve got to say,” Norris said, and added that mastering the language of Twitter is a necessity for coaches who may find themselves marketing their businesses in exactly this medium. “This gives somebody a place to go to talk about a topic that is close to their heart, and a place to be working the technology.”

It’s also—for CTI—a place to reach potential students.

The school, which is seeing a slight rebound in enrollment after a down year in 2009, sees Twitter as direct link to the next generation of coaches. “If we look at the statistics of who has up to this point gone through training at CTI, it’s starting to shift. Going forward, we’re starting to find people coming to us at younger and younger ages.” And those younger people arrive wired into networks like Facebook and Twitter.

“That means we have to be in all of the places that all of those different kinds of people are going to be looking,” said Norris, who said the inaugural gathering on Twitter—intended to be just one of two experiments—went so well, she’s determined to make it a monthly part of CTI’s outreach.

“I have to say we had such a good time.”