John Dering

May 16, 2008 at 3:16 pm

Hello George,

My name is John Dering and I’m the Senior Marketing Manager here at Spoke. I’d like to take the opportunity to address a few of your concerns so that you have all the information.

First, we are not a “spam outfit.” We in no way provide any direct contact information about professionals in Spoke to any member or non-member. The information you contributed during registration is solely for the use of Spoke to communicate with you regarding service and maintenance issues.

We do aggregate information from various different resources including members (via the Outlook Toolbar, profile creations & comments), through third parties, and by crawling the internet for publicly available information. Because of the degradation of information related to non-executive level employees is very high, or non-existent, member contributed and validated information is the quickest and most accurate way to keep Spoke up to date. We do not require that you install the Outlook Toolbar, but its of advantage to members as it powers the referral features for networking and can automatically build your Spokebook (similar to an online roll-a-dex. Please note that any direct contact information which appears in your Spokebook is only visible in Spoke by you, the information’s owner).

Many of our members want to connect with one another via the networking tools. We encourage and direct new members to set up a complete profile because it will lend credibility to their communications with other members. Image going to a conference and only introducing yourself to every one as George, not (at the very least) George from Imulus. How would people perceive you?

As for owning your company’s profile to correct it, I’m not sure what you mean exactly by “The form fails to validate my completed fields.” We require anyone attempting this to submit a request for confirmation to an e-mail address at the company in question. This is the only way we can be sure the person is truly an employee.

I’m sorry your impression of Spoke is not equal to that of your impression of LinkedIn. Both have their place in the professional networking space and we strive to provide a service where businesspeople can find and connect to other businesspeople, even they aren’t members of the service. I’d be interested to get more detailed feedback from you regarding your experience so that we can understand your recommendations for improvement and put them in action when appropriate.

Thanks for taking the time to communicate your concerns about Spoke. Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions.

Adam

May 21, 2008 at 10:36 am

I can’t even access Spoke.com since Monday morning - if you attempt to do a search or click the login button - I get the message “Spoke is currently experiencing heavy traffic levels”. Hmmm… can anyone verify this behavior or know any details? Spoke has no details posted on their site.

John Dering

May 22, 2008 at 9:55 am

@ Adam: You are correct. We are experiencing a higher than expected level of traffic and usage and it has created a strain on our system. The team is working around the clock to address the performance issues and get the service back to its original state.

Adam

May 22, 2008 at 7:54 pm

John - This is bizarre - Spoke has been down all week - how can your servers be under heavy load if no one is using your service? Can you provide any more details? Your tech support keeps sending me e-mails saying the site will be up in 24 hours. Is there any other explanation you can share?

John Dering

May 23, 2008 at 11:27 am

No problem George. Just wanted you to know that your info is safe regardless of product differentiations. Thanks for speaking up about your concerns, maybe we can talk at some point to dig deeper into them and add that feedback to our product roadmap.

@ Adam: Unfortunately at this time I don’t have any additional information as to the performance issues or when you should be able to access the system again. I know our team is working hard to get performance back to normal. As soon as I have more information to share, I will. Thanks for your continued support through this time.

John Dering

May 27, 2008 at 10:33 am

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that Spoke has been back online for the last two days. We had our team working hard from last week through the weekend to upgrade some of our hardware to better support the recent increase in traffic levels.

If you have any questions regarding this period of intermittent access, please contact our support team by logging a support request through Spoke.

It’s great to know that so many people are getting value from Spoke, and we appreciate everyone’s patience as we worked through this period of growth.

Adam

May 28, 2008 at 6:16 am

John - just a suggestion - I think Spoke could do a better job communicating with its users through spoke.com about this issue. There really should be an apology and an explanation upon logging in to Spoke about this extended downtime. (essentially what you have provided here in your comments would be sufficient). It would be great if you guys had an official Spoke blog to communicate with users. It would also help improve your reputation and be a place to clarify how you do business (as you did on this blog). Sure you might take some abuse in comments - but I think overall Spoke would be a better site for it.

John Dering

May 28, 2008 at 10:25 am

Adam:

I couldn’t agree more and made that same suggestion to my superiors last week. I’m in the process of recovering a blog we started a few years back in order to begin that process.

Thanks for the advice, you’re dead on point. I’ll also recommend that we post the reponse I gave into the product for others to see.

John