Welcome to issociate – the social networking site for professional and industry associations. You’ll want to start experiencing the power of issociate as soon as possible. But, first, there’s some housekeeping to do. Here are the first 3 things you should do.
- Confirm your details
- Complete your CV
- Decide who sees what
1. Confirm your details
Your association administrator will have uploaded some basic information about you:
- First name
- Last name
- Email address
- Membership type
Are they are all present and correct? If not, change them. And if you’re known professionally as Dick Kernow rather than Richard Kernow, then feel free to make that change. The one thing you can’t alter is your membership type. If that’s not correct, you’ll need to call your association.
2. Complete your CV
When you make contact on issociate with someone you don’t know, what’s the first thing they’re going to do? Check out your CV.
If it makes good reading, they might accept you as a Contact. If not, you might get shunned. Take the time to create a compelling CV – it will repay your effort in spades.
Why padding your CV could backfire
It’s almost expected these days that people will pad their CVs. But remember this – any “exaggerations” in your online CV may be exposed and that could be embarrassing at best, and destroy your career at worst. We recommend keeping your CV in the non-fiction category.
3. Decide who sees what
issociate lets you control who sees what and we assume you don’t want to expose your personal information to any old Tom, Dick or Harry. Check out the default privacy settings here and decide whether you want to be more – or less – discreet with your personal details and contacts.
Categorise your contacts
issociate lets you to set access privileges for 6 different classes of people.
- General web users
- issociate users
- Members of your association
- Acquaintances
- Business Contacts
- Personal Contacts
You probably don’t want to share much with general web users. But, as you go down the list and the level of trust increases, you will probably want to give people more access.
Why Acquaintances are useful
You’ll find “Acquaintances” a useful category. If someone wants to join your network and you don’t know them very well, instead of rejecting them outright, you can make them an Acquaintance. That way you avoid giving offence but protect your details and your contacts.
What next?
We haven’t had much fun yet, have we? We promise things will get a whole lot more interesting from here.