Ecademy Offer More to Basic Members

I've just seen that Ecademy have increased the services they offer to Guest Members (For "guest" read non-paying).  I've been signed up with Ecademy for years but never got beyond guest membership.  I wasn't persuaded to the benefits (and as I'm sure you know I LOVE to network). 

Apparently "feedback from members highlights the need to support appropriate interactions between all members and to help grow the activity of members off-line as well as on-line".  Perhaps the growth of their competition is encouraging them to offer a level  of membership more in line with the rest of the market.  As well as the direct competition in the business networking market (LinkedIn, Xing and Vidadeo) they must see sites like MySpace as something of a competitor. 

They are re-branding Guest Membership to Basic Membership.  Previously as a guest member you could receive a message from another member but could not reply via Ecademy.  Now Basic members will be able to respond to messages.  However, they still can not send them.  Basic members will be able to join "clubs" and comment on discussion board threads that already exist in the clubs they belong to (but they can't start threads). They can also use the basic search option.

If you aren't already a Ecademy member, when you sign up you get a "Network Pass" for 14 days.  This allows you to send up to 10 messages a day to Ecademy members, join clubs and start threads in a club, advertise in the "marketplace" and use advanced search options and tools. 

However, if you join from an invitation you get a network pass for 30 days. If you want me to invite you just drop me a note (louise at ukrecruiter dot co dot uk).  I don't do too badly out this either as for every 10 members I invite (who then join Ecademy) I get one month's network pass. If you join up and then build your network using this method you can accumulate quite a lot of free network pass time.

Anyway, on to the benefits.  Ecademy is a lot more club-like than LinkedIn (Viadeo encourage users to start/join clubs).  Full members that I know seem to invest much more time in building their profile and increasing their network.  As well as participates in online clubs and discussions there are lot of real world business and social events.  If you recruit in a niche market (eg handheld devices or geographic area like Newbury) I'm sure it could help build your knowledge levels and profile in that area. 

I also find the search function quite useful.  You can enter a job title or company name to help with target candidate identification for an assignment.  Even if you only have basic membership and can't make contact you should be able to track the individual down via more traditional methods.  However, a word of warning.  Don't get too excited by the results until you have phoned to check the person is still at the company - I have found that many contacts can be out of date.  As always, these types of sites are only as good as the information that people put into them and the effort they take to keep their details updated...networking take a bit of work you know!