There are thousands of social networks out there. There are social networks and communities built around sports and hobbies. There are social networks centered on shared demographics or life situations. There are social networks that aim to help you connect to your family, your friends, your colleagues, your former friends, your future soulmate, your pets… you name it. There are tools to help you communicate in small chunks, using only text. There are tools out there to help you communicate using pictures, or video, or with presentations.

Trust me, I have signed up to many, many of them. Some are very good. Some are useful. Many more are simply very poor clones of something else – yet another place to sink a new user login and password, yet another place to share the same old stories with the same people … again. You can find my credentials there for sure. Just look up “louisgray” on most of them, and I’ll have left footprints showing my journey.

But very often, the case is that many of these sites lack purpose, relevancy and community. They are there seemingly for the purpose of being there, trying to slice your social graph and your time in a new way. In other cases, the impact they have on my life is simply trivial.

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Ecademy is different. Ecademy is the only social network that I know which offers the vast array of communications vehicles it does, combined with a very real, impactful, offline community, targeted at delivering you advocates for your business. And while you may be blogging, or posting your notes out to Twitter, on Ecademy, as you do elsewhere, you are immersed in a sea of likeminded folks as yourself, working to make a living and trying to work together as a group to achieve success.

Take a look at the major social vehicles out there today (simplified):

Twitter: A microblogging platform whose goal is to track what is happening at a given time. One’s community can range from peers to a simple one-way relationship where you listen to celebrities or brands.

Facebook: A social networking platform designed to help you keep tabs on current and former friends and family members.

LinkedIn: A social connections platform acting as your online resume, letting you clearly sort out your partners and previous colleagues, as they move from company to company.

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To cut it down even further, Facebook is to have you connect to former friends. LinkedIn is to have you reconnect to former business colleagues. Ecademy is here to help you connect to future business colleagues. Offsite events and gatherings from BlackStar members are held frequently in regions around the world to keep you on top of business’ frequent changes. You can be confident knowing that participants on Ecademy are entrepreneurs in spirit working to find likeminded individuals who can support their aggressive goals.

Ecademy matters to me because the company’s leadership, and its most active users, have seized on a collective work to connect business people, period. It’s about growing one’s business network, not in a crazed attempt to drive up total follower counts (like on other networks), but to blaze future trails that bring revenue to all. Ecademy is working to bring in top-notch content from around the Web for premium members, and the site is already top of class in terms of functionality. The more I learn about Ecademy, the more I know it holds a critical role in the social Web – the social business Web – and that it is winning because the goals are the right ones. I believe in Ecademy and it makes sense for us, every time and again, to step back and remember why this site is so important.

Onward and upward.
Written by Louis Gray

– Find more about me at www.louisgray.com

Synopsis

Your Brand Image – Kick StartThis training / seminar was created because of the revolution that has been silently taking place in personal branding. If you are looking for job today, before you get to be interviewed you are Googled. If you go to a meeting, the savvy people Google you in advance to work out if you really can offer what you promise or how to take advantage of you if they are selling to you. If you start a new relationship, the first thing someone does before making the next date is a web search.

Everyone is doing something with personal branding. But very few are looking after his or her profiles. People join some networks, forget about others and generally pay lip service to maintaining their brand image. Very few people take any care in looking after they way they look on the Internet. Do you go to work in your pyjamas? Have you disconnected your phone? Or even worse someone that you do not know answers it for you?

The personal branding revolution has already happened. The Dutch population is 16.5million people. More than 8million of them have an account on Hyves. It is suggested that there are more than 300million accounts on MySpace, they certainly had their 100 millionth user signup in 2006! Whatever the real number, it’s big, very big. Internet World Stats say that there are over 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide. Most if them use some form of social or business networking.

So we know that everyone is doing it – but they aren’t doing it with thought and some kind of plan. This is where Your Brand Image brings order to the chaos. This seminar teaches you what it’s all about and how to look after yourself, plan for the future and

How to Improve – The brand that is You!