Few qualities are more important for marketers these days than candor…

Hi Chris,

Thanks for getting back to me and sorry for the delayed response.  It’s been busy since the launch last week as other duties related to product planning, system application management, and website designing have monopolized my time. 

As I was preparing this email today, I took a second to revisit your blog where I noticed your response to my initial inquiry.  I hope that you are not too tarnished on my efforts, this was my first PR/Product launch without an agency tethered to my side and I acknowledge it was not perfectly executed.  But I’m learning and moving forward and your sights into the effectiveness of my process were helpful.

Because your blog focuses on enterprise marketers, the specific release of the ConnectUs email service in Spoke is not an exact match.  That I will admit.  However, many of our corporate customers are in fact enterprise marketers who utilize Spoke to build relationships with other companies in order to broaden their marketing reach.  Targeted lists of potential partners for alliances can be developed, managed, and contacted from within Spoke by enterprise marketers; hence the reason your blog was included in my launch campaign.  I thought that since you review many different approaches and tools for enterprise marketers that our launch would have been something of interest to your audience.

For marketers Spoke fits into the resource mix alongside LinkedIn or Plaxo while offering a complimentary value to each.  Simply put, businesspeople you would like to contact via LinkedIn or Plaxo must be members.  You can’t reach out to someone who is not a member of either service.  Spoke’s business connection service does not have that limitation.  Hence if you need to reach someone who is not a member of LinkedIn or Plaxo, then you need Spoke.  Spoke provides an extra layer of privacy by not giving away direct contact information of members (or non-members) to anyone, bust still providing a way for members to reach any businessperson found in Spoke.

I hope this addresses your questions.  Again, I apologize for the delayed response.  From the tone of your blog it has done our corporate (and my personal) brand harm in your and your audience’s eyes.  I don’t want you to think that you got this response solely because of your post on Monday, as noted at the end of you last post.  I had full intention of responding to you, I just got side tracked with other projects.  I do appreciate the bump in my title to Director level, just wish my pay scale mirrored your perception J.

If you would like to discuss my comments further personally or have additional questions, please feel free to contact me directly through my information below.

Best,

John Dering
Senior Marketing Manager
Spoke