Spoken Word

VBProfiles.com, the force awakens

2016-01-26T09:41:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, we issued a features and benefits survey with the question: "What would be your recommendations to take VBProfiles.com to the next level?" The top answers we got centered around 3 things:

i. Deeper reports and monthly summaries

ii. Ability to create your own reports by downloading the data

iii. Customize the site for your benefits:

And here’s how we responded to your recommendations.

Deeper reports and summaries:

On top of the existing Daily Hub, which features all the must-read industry related news delivered straight to your email, we have introduced the Monthly Briefing and the Quarterly Intelligence Report.

The Monthly Briefing summarizes the emerging trends, the new and upcoming companies, latest product innovations and Funding & Acquisition related information. The Quarterly Intelligence Report provides deep strategic insights on your market.

Ability to create your own reports and conduct your research by downloading the data: you can now export all the people and company data from our platform to run your own research. Use cases include: building up your sales list, identifying investors and board members for your company, building your own market performance insights, etc.

Customize the site for your benefits: what we are basically doing is giving you access to all our tools to create your own markets or lists to generate the data you need regarding the specific things you are interested in. Here’s how to do it:

- Clone our markets: You can now take one of our markets and make it yours. This allows you to remove the companies or topics you are not interested in, and add the ones that make sense to you. You can then track these lists and generate your own market summaries.

- Generate Your Own Market Summaries: Say you want to know about a list of investors by the companies that they have invested in. You can now create a list with all these companies, generate a market summary and get all the important information about the people, investors, partners, and customers that are associated with the companies that you’ve selected, which saves you hours of research.

- Create your own landscapes: You can now create multiple public and/or private lists, and combine them into one list (i.e., “a list of lists”) to build out your own custom landscape.

So now let’s look at how you can combine these powerful new features. Say you want to track the entire BigData industry. Go toVBprofiles.com and identify all the BigData lists we have. Create “a list of lists” with all these Big Data lists. You are now able to download all the Big Data Companies, People and VCs. You will also receive all the must-read articles for your new list through our Daily Hub, as well as the Monthly Briefing, which will provide all the new entrants, funding, trends, and product innovations. On a quarterly basis, you will also receive our Quarterly Insight Report, showing your market’s deep drivers.

To see all this in action, check out our getting started with the new VBProfiles.com video and our how to refine your market video, or book a 15 minute meeting with our team: aaron.garcia@spokesoftware.com

Releasing New Features

2016-01-24T22:14:00.002-08:00

The team has been tirelessly working to improve the platform. This new VBProfiles.com evolution is a major step towards our vision of being the ultimate market intelligence platform for curious minds, strategists, experts, and market researchers. We have plenty of ideas on how to drive the site forward and are very excited to get your take on where we are heading.

A few months ago, we issued a features and benefits survey with the question: "What would be your recommendations to take VBProfiles.com to the next level?" The top answers we got centered around 3 things:
o Deeper reports and monthly summaries
o Ability to create your own reports by downloading the data
o Customize the site for your benefits:

And here’s how we responded to your recommendations:

Deeper reports and summaries: On top of the existing Daily Hub, which features all the must-read industry related news delivered straight to your email, we have introduced the Monthly Briefing and the Quarterly Intelligence Report.

The Monthly Briefing summarizes the emerging trends, the new and upcoming companies, latest product innovations and Funding & Acquisition related information.The Quarterly Intelligence Report provides deep strategic insights on your market.

Ability to create your own reports and conduct your research by downloading the data: You can now export all the people and company data from our platform to run your own research. Use cases include: building up your sales list, identifying investors and board members for your company, building your own market performance insights, etc.

Customize the site for your benefits: What we are basically doing is giving you access to all our tools to create your own markets or lists to generate the data you need regarding the specific things you are interested in. Here’s how to do it:
- Clone our markets: You can now take one of our markets and make it yours. This allows you to remove the companies or topics you are not interested in, and add the ones that make sense to you. You can then track these lists and generate your own market summaries.
- Generate Your Own Market Summaries: Say you want to know about a list of investors by the companies that they have invested in. You can now create a list with all these companies, generate a market summary and get all the important information about the people, investors, partners, and customers that are associated with the companies that you’ve selected, which saves you hours of research.
- Create your own landscapes: You can now create multiple public and/or private lists, and combine them into one list (i.e., “a list of lists”) to build out your own custom landscape.

So now let’s look at how you can combine these powerful new features. Say you want to track the entire BigData industry. Go toVBprofiles.com and identify all the BigData lists we have. Create “a list of lists” with all these Big Data lists. You are now able to download all the Big Data Companies, People and VCs. You will also receive all the must-read articles for your new list through our Daily Hub, as well as the Monthly Briefing, which will provide all the new entrants, funding, trends, and product innovations. On a quarterly basis, you will also receive our Quarterly Insight Report, showing your market’s deep drivers.

Philippe

Comparison between VBProfiles Unicorn and Atomico Billion Lists

2016-01-19T15:39:00.000-08:00

After an article released by John Koetsier on Unicorns, we received questions from Robin Wauters about the validity of our number of Unicorns for Europe. He introduced two different lists from Atomico and then from GP BullHound.

Comparison between the Atomico and VBProfiles lists:

The Atomico list identifies software companies that got valued more than US$ 1 Billion either as a Unicorn, while being public or through an acquisition. the term software companies is taken at large as it includes companies such as Prosper or YouTube, which are not technically software companies, but technology enabled services. And Atomico's list doesn't include Unicorns like Fitbit which is a hardware company.

Atomico's list contains 236 companies:

· 165 Unicorns defined as having reached the US$ 1 Billion valuation while being private:

· 50 companies that reached the Billion Dollar valuation after going public;

· 15 companies that got acquired for more than one Billion without reaching Unicorn Status;

· 6 companies for which we could not find evidence the company reached a Unicorn status.

Regarding the VBProfiles 206 Unicorn list, while comparing our list with our Atomico's, we identified 14 new unicorns (8 from Asia, 6 from the USA, 1 from Finland (Europe)) and we are adding those to our Unicorn landscape. 1 other Unicorn in the Atomico list (Anaplan) was not part of the 206 Unicorns as of 12/2015 because the company announced their funding in January 2016.

Comparison between the GP BullHound list:

GP BullHound list relates to 13 European companies valued more than US$ 1 Billion in 2015. Again Anaplan announced their funding in 1/2016 so were not part of our study. We could not confirm Ve status as a Unicorn and Skrill was acquired for US$ 1.2 Billion but was not valued US$ 1 Billion privately so is not technically a Unicorn.

Work Ahead:

This exercise enabled us to identify two sources of problems:

We are counting some companies such as YouTube as Unicorns when they should not;
Through the GP Bullhound study, we identified 3 companies that we categorized as US companies when they were originally from Europe. We are going to scrub all our addresses to make sure that the companies are associated to the countries they are originally from, not with the country of their current headquarters.

We are going to report back to John and Robin about our findings moving forward but, at this point and based on this initial work, we are not expecting major changes in the study for the number of Unicorns coming from Europe. I will keep updating the blog as new information is available.

The new UI is live :)

2015-06-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

Finally!!! The new UI is live. After 18 months and the gathering of thousands of useful feedback, we are getting even closer to our vision of providing a platform through which people can effortlessly access information about the markets they care about.

With this new version, we had two overarching goals: to make the information more accessible and readable, and to make our existing use cases more apparent while building a solid foundation for growth. We are anxious to hear what you think — have we achieved significant progress on all fronts? Of course, our platform is still fairly young and we have many more iterations to make, but the overall look and feel will essentially stay the same.

Make the insights more accessible:

The overwhelming feedback we got on the prior site was that, while the information was readily available, the insights were too difficult to reach. Our business users want to access insights quickly and with their existing apps.

In this context, we completely rebuilt our search result page. Instead of showing data based only on the relevance of a keyword, we now show the most important results for each specific category of information: markets, company, people, or topic. Markets are now front and center, as this is the category people most want to see. From the search page, you can refine your search by clicking on “view all” and navigate through this content or, leverage the advanced search section.

We have also completely rebuilt our daily newsletter so that information is more readable. Our users will also get access (recommendations) to companies or markets they should be tracking based on what they are already tracking in their emails.

Focus on our main use cases:

We realized that people are using the platform in three different ways that mutually feed on each other. The first one is the one we started with. Executives want to have access to all the information about the specific markets or group of markets they care about. Highly powered but also very busy people have three main considerations:

They want to be able to consume the information in less than 5 minutes before their day starts, with their tool of choice which, at this point, is mainly their email systems;
They want to have 95% of the information their industry generates every day and not to miss important news. Our surveys show that the Spoke Intelligence provide 60% more news than other sources and 3 to 4 need-to-know news per week that they wouldn’t have found elsewhere;
They want to get insights in addition to news without having to search for them

The second use case is Research: our platform is being used for a lot of different research needs from identifying potential candidates for a position to fill, to tracking more granular markets for sales and marketing purposes, to finding the most successful angel investors or venture capitalists for fund raising purposes. For all those needs, the pages accessed when hitting “view all” are the pages that people will use to browse through the content and identify news, companies, or people based on specific criteria.

Lastly, we now have consultants and companies organizing their ecosystems on the Spoke Intelligence Network, tracking entire industries without the traditionally insurmountable clutter and effectively discovering new players and innovations for the innovation they care about.

Build the foundation for Growth:

With this new platform, the opportunities to develop the platform and derive value are almost endless. Adding browsing criteria to search through information, building mini apps so people can access the information based on the use case they need, accessing deeper insights more quickly, and adding more data sources for each specific market will be our main goals moving forward, so stay tuned as we develop the platform moving forward.

Philippe Cases

CEO Spoke Software

philippe.cases@spokesoftware.com

The Rise of Sales Tech

2015-05-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

The new Digital age is leaving no function in the Enterprise immune to change. In particular, the past 5 years have witnessed a profound transformation of the world of Business to Business sales.

The new buyer's journey

Buyers have taken upon themselves to research the products, solutions and services they need or might want to consider. They do it on their terms, using the internet as their primary source of information. Gone are the days when sales representatives would be called or invited to “educate buyers”. The Corporate Executive Board found 57% of the Enterprise Buyer's Journey takes before vendors get formally engaged.

Content is the new currency

In response to this trend, Businesses have massively invested in building and sharing content. According to the Content Marketing Institute, marketers are spending 28% of their marketing budget on content marketing. This content is offered to help buyers and potential buyers in the early stages of their exploration. The quality of the content created has become a mean for businesses to build preference. But the widespread availability of great and valuable content on the internet can also disintermediate brands. So, the understanding of the information consumed by prospects is an essential proxy of their interest. It is further exacerbated by the Social Transformation. Indeed, Social Networks and communities of interest have become places where people share experiences, get feedback on products through peer reviews, and look for information.

Purchase democratization

Corporations used to have a few Buying Centers where decisions were centralized in the hands of a few, easy to find, roles. Nowadays, a growing number of purchases are made at all levels and functions in the Enterprise. This trend is exemplified by Gartner prediction from a few years ago that, by 2017, Marketing organizations would spend more on technology than their peer IT groups. Even large purchases made centrally now involve a much larger number of decision makers. Captera found that 2/3 software purchases involve 3 or more people. Finding potential buyers and other decision stakeholders has become a daunting task for sales organizations. Furthermore, the sheer volume increase of leads and potential contacts to handle has become overwhelming. So, they need to turn to the Internet to get the best possible insights on organizations and buyers.

Sales transformation

Sales organizations have started to transform themselves to respond to these trends and become more effective. They increasingly leverage new communication tools to shift their engagements with prospects and buyers away from in person meetings to the phone, emails, online meetings or other forms of remote interaction. Marc Benioff, the founder of salesforce.com, coined the term of Inside Sales for sales done remotely. He keeps on reminding us that he only used Inside Sales during the first 6 years of his company. This trend compounds with the imperative for sales organizations to become more productive as pointed by Bain.

The rise of Inside Selling

Topo is predicting that in 2017, 85% of the hours spent by sales professional, will be so selling remotely. Accordingly, new roles have emerged:

Inside Sales to sell remotely,
Sales Development to engage prospective buyers showing potential signs of interest, give them information for their explorations, and detect the appropriate moment to connect them to a Sale Representative, and
Business Development to proactively identify potential buyers and reach out to them.

[Inside] Sales is enabled by technology

These roles exist because of the widespread availability of communication technologies that make remote interaction seamless and convenient. They have led to the emergence of a new set of tools to:

gain insights on companies and potential buyers,
steer interactions towards desired goals,
improve these interactions with relevant information,
increase sales productivity,
make remote selling smooth and effortless, and
use analytics along the way to drive and, in hindsight, improve the entire selling process.

Making sense of a new market?

I lived through this transition as an Executive of the Enterprise Software industry. Since I became an Advisor to technology companies, I often get involved in the implementation of Inside Sales roles and processes. It has given me a unique appreciation of how critical technology can be, but also, how confusing this space can be to its practitioners.

Yet, I found it has a lot of similarities with Customer Engagement, a domain that I know very well. So, with the help of Spoke and VBProfiles, I have embarked on a mapping of this new Inside Sales technology landscape.

In my next post, I will share existing market categorizations and why I thought I should create one.

Stay tuned and, in the meantime, share your thoughts!

Nicolas De Kouchkovski

Do Unicorn really exist in the ChiefMartec Landscape?

2015-04-29T17:21:00.001-07:00

A lot has been said about Unicorns since Aileen Lee seminal study was published on Crunchbase in November 2013. A surge of private companies being valued at US$ 1 Billion could either be a sign of an upcoming bubble or the next renaissance. Josh Kopelman coined the term “private IPOs” while Bill Gurley was urging to not mistake highly priced private deals with IPOs. In the meantime, opportunistic Venture Capitalists like Glenn Solomon from GGVC were advising CEOs on how to stay in the moment and leverage this burst of valuation while keeping their heads cool.

In a recent EBook built on top of the Chiefmartec Landscape, VBProfiles (a partnership between
Spoke and VentureBeat) identified the 29 companies (1.5% of the total landscape) belonging to the Billion Dollar Valuation Club including 12 Unicorns (0.66% of the total landscape).

In spite of an incredible burst of innovation due to the emergence of the cloud in the ChiefMartec landscape, the increased number of companies that we have seen joining the Billion Dollar Club in 2010-2015 is due to a catch up of older companies founded in 1995-2004 that have survived the two nuclear winters and materializing their valuation later in the cycle. Furthermore, we are seeing a steady rate of 2 companies created every year between 1990 and 2010 that ultimately reached billion-dollar valuation, except during the nuclear winter of 2000-2002 when only one such company was created for the entire three years.

Compared to their going public counterpart, ChiefMartec Unicorns have a tendency to raise fewer funds to become US$ 1 Billion valuation and are doing better after having reached the Unicorn mark with a median valuation of US $ 2.1 Billion versus US 1.8 Billion for public companies.

Whether we are at the beginning of a Unicorn Era or witnessing an anomaly remains to be seen. Billion dollar private deals exist because a combination of stars is aligned: First, there is an existing demand from Financial Investors who trade better protection and early access to deals against liquidity. Most of the time, investors who invest in Unicorn deals also invest in public companies and will switch the balance to more public or private deals based on changes of market conditions.

Second, some CEOs prefer to delay their IPO, creating a supply of companies interested in highly priced private deals. If conditions change, those CEOs may decide to go the IPO route if the private highly priced deal terms are not favorable anymore. After all, the number of IPOs in 2014 was only half of what it was during the 1990-1996 timeframe.

All the while, secondary markets are taking care of liquidity for private investors and employees alleviating the pressure from the existing shareholder base to push for an early exit.

After having reviewed the data, one can only ask if the unicorn phenomenon really exists and if there are significant differences between companies that decide to go public versus ones that want to be financed privately. In the ChiefMartec landscape, Unicorns appear to be companies like the other members of the Billion Dollar Valuation Club, taking the same amount of time, raising the same amount of funds and being valued about the same.

The Venture capital market from a funding standpoint seems also to be fairly healthy selecting the same number of company year over year. This obviously may change in the coming years with a new vintage of start-ups created in 2010-2015 and if the market heats up even more.

Philippe Cases

CEO

Open letter to CB Insights CEO about leadership and term of service

2015-02-05T09:15:00.002-08:00

Dear Anand:

I tried to leave you a comment on the following blog but apparently it didn’t pass moderation so I am going to leave it on my blog and tweet it so you are aware of it.

Sorry to hear about DataViz. This is annoying to say the least. This said I now understand why I was not able to download the 46 page corporate VC whitepaper goodie you offered me via one of your marketing email. It is probably because Spoke is considered a competitor. Truth is I didn't know and I didn't despite 10s of marketing emails you sent me. If you truly care about this terms of service, you should explain as well why you have touched me at least 100 times through marketing materials and offers to download free reports and never let me know that I was in breach of your terms of service. If you want to be one of the leaders of our industry, I strongly advised to be consistent in your message across the board and use marketing techniques that you can swallow otherwise you are going to frustrate a lot of people like the ones who were on this wall.

If I am appalled by what Dataviz did, I seriously advice you remove this paragraph about competitors from your terms of service because it is a serious impediment to the productivity of our industry as well as unenforceable.

1) You basically are asking your competition to ask their employees to read the terms of service of all the sites they visit. You know as well as i do that this is not enforceable and completely counterproductive;
2) You are also asking your competition to limit their choice of consultants and limit the consultant ability to perform their work;
3) Lastly, if you are serious about asking your competitors to enforce this clause, I am surprised that you show screenshots of Dataviz in your blog. By doing so, you are using information obtained by a source that would clearly breach your term of service.

If you want to be one of the leaders of our industry, you need to accept that you are going to be copied because this is what people do to improve. You should blame people like Dataviz if you feel they broke a line. But this term of service is like the Berlin Wall, it has to be brought down for the sake of your company and the industry before people tear it down for you.

Lastly, if you want to frame a culture and lead the industry this way, make sure you let people write comments on your blog posts. After all, we live in the 21st century in the open internet and this wall you have created for yourself seems very very old school to me.

Philippe Cases, CEO Spoke Software

PS: in the spirit of full disclosure, I received this blog tracking your company through Owler. You can see how bad I am.

VB Profiles and the Spokeintel Network recognized by ChiefMartec

2015-01-16T18:58:00.002-08:00

Difficult to start the year better for the Spokeintel Network: VB Profiles, one of its feature sites, was selected by Scott Brinker in the "Vendor/Data Analysis" section of its new 2015 ChiefMartec Landscape released on January 7, 2015. In this section, VB Profiles is the only profile database alongside but ahead :) of Crunchbase and is featured with established brand names such as Gartner, Forrester...

For those who have followed us in 2014, you know that you can access the 2014 Chief Martec Landscape for news, funding and people information. You can even receive a daily update email by subscribing to this landscape. You can also access the 43 lists that compose the ChiefMartec Landscape by clicking here and get the same benefit for a much more narrower list.

Witnessing the level of requests, we know you are very anxious to see the 2015 ChiefMartec Landscape on VB Profiles. We are in the process of working on it and we should release it before the end of February.

Oh and one last thing, the average time our members spend on our sites per visit has been above 15 minutes for two weeks in a row from 8 minutes back in October 2014. Love it...

Philippe Cases
CEO

Introducing Similar Companies

2014-12-01T11:14:00.000-08:00

I hope you had a great Thankgiving.

The team at Spoke Network is very excited to release Similar Companies, a feature you will find on company profiles.

With this feature, you can now very quickly and easily identify which companies are competing with each other. They are the first ones on the Similar Company list and as you are moving down, you can also surface companies that are competing on part of somebody’s offering or similar companies that are part of the same ecosystem.

Taking Cloudera as an example, you can identify the first two direct competitors as Hortonworks and MapR who appears on 10 lists together (hold your thoughts we will come back to that) and then Qubole, which provides a managed solution for Hadoop and then companies such as DataStax, Pivotal and IBM BigInsights who are providing analytics to the enterprise. As you are clicking on more, more companies are appearing which are less similar but still relevant.

Coming back to the question that is now burning your tongue: how are you ranking the companies? This comes straight from our scalable Semantic Web Platform. As our team and partners are creating lists where they assemble relevant companies together, we basically count how many lists a specific pair of companies are together and use the number of lists as our ranking mechanism. If two companies appear the exact same amount of time together with another company then we are using the number of employees and then amount of funding to finish the ranking.

Few points to note:

Our classification is stronger where we have coverage. At this point, we feel very really strongly about our classification for Big Data, Marketing Technology and Mobile.
Our classification favors the bigger companies. They are covered more by analysts and therefore appear in more lists together so they should appear first in any classification. That said, we have been surprised that the true competitors seem to be appearing on a consistent basis first despite their size.
Clicking more to see the entire list makes sense: As the bigger companies appear first, the eventual disruptors of a particular company will appear later down the list.
Clicking on the similar company is very important in your analysis as it could give you hints of particular clusters of companies. In our Cloudera case, if you click on DataStax, you will see surfacing companies like MongoDB, Couchbase and Marklogic before Hortonworks and MapR Technologies.
The more you go down the list, the more a notion of ecosystem appear. Companies become more similar or are playing in the same space rather than being direct competitors…

We consider this approach as a first draft so we are relying on you to give us feedback. Easiest is to do it directly on the site using Intercom.io. Based on those feedbacks, we will make adjustments.

One final note: talking to experts in the industry about our approach, we realize that the notion of similarity is very vague and that we are tackling only one notion of similarity at this point: are two companies competing or part of the same ecosystem? But there are many others and a list of other similarities could include: same founding groups, same past company employees, same location, and same investors among others.

We will wish all of you happy holidays.

Philippe Cases

Welcome market summaries and ChiefMartec.com

2014-09-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

We have been pretty quiet since we announced our partnership with MedCityNews but we have not seat idle in the meantime and have been working on solving tough problems.

The first problem we worked on is one that I have been faced with during my career as a Venture Capitalist and it goes something like this: You are doing a due diligence and one of your partners asks you a question like this: who are the players in this Space? How much has been invested? Do we know anybody that we can talk to about this investment? Sounds familiar, you may have faced variants of this problem if you are a headhunter sourcing candidates, a business developer trying to make sense of a market, a consultant trying to categorize a market or simply an entrepreneur looking for information about who the investors, the journalists, the consultants, he should be talking are.

At this point, you have two options: one is to call the company and ask for the information, the other more common is to do it yourself because you want to make sure that the work has been done thoroughly. So you crawl the web and after an hour, you find a landscape of companies organized in categories and lists. It is usually a 2D graphic filled with logos. Once you have seen this list, you have to understand who the companies are and then for each companies figure out the information you are looking for and then aggregate it to make sense of it. If you are lucky or not controlling, you will find an analyst or an associate to do it for you. But either you or him will take forever to do it. And, at some point, there will be a point where you will regret to have found this landscape.

This doesn’t have to be this way and we think we have found a solution that bridges the gap between the landscape graphic and the information you are looking for. As John Koetsier puts it, landscape on VBProfiles becomes alive. This has been possible because of two major milestones:

1) Introduction of the Market Summary: for each markets or public lists you are tracking, you have now access to the summary of that public list. We let you know:

a. how the specific lists you are tracking are related to other public lists in our portfolio;

b. who the companies are and how they stack against one another;

c. how much funds has been raised in that specific market or public lists;

d. who the players are: executives, investors, journalists, consultants,…

This is free for now and for at least a couple of month so you should try it.

2) Partnership with ChiefMartec.com: We have done one partnership with ChiefMartec.com who published the famous ChiefMartec.com Marketing Technology Landscape. ChiefMartec.com edits every year a marketing technology landscape of 1,000 companies organized in 43 different categories of product. We have ported this landscape on our platform so that everybody can start tracking the lists, categories as well as the entire landscape.

The combination of those two announcements is now extremely powerful for the Marketing Technology Industry. You can now have access to all data about this landscape, follow specific categories, know who funds what, who is covering those spaces as journalists and consultants. And with one click, you get now information that it would have taken days to get.

We hope you’ll enjoy those new features.

Philippe Cases

New Guidelines for content on the Spoke guidelines

2014-09-22T16:57:00.001-07:00

I am writing just to inform you that we have been obliged to remove 4,600 companies from the SpokeIntel/ VBProfiles/Capsules database. I would like to explaim why we do this as well as give some guidelines for profiles we are going to accept moving forward on the Spoke Network.

About a month ago, Google put our network in a penalty box to the point that we were not seeing any traffic coming from the search engine. This forced us to review our policies and ask the very hard questions including which content needed to be on our current network of sites. We decided to move on a certain number of fronts, the main decision being to focus Spoke.com on local directory listings and the Spoke network on competitive intelligence.

What does that mean for the content on Spoke Intelligence Network? A profile will need to be:

1) At least 65% complete;

2) Updated on a regular basis at least every 6 months;

3) In an Industry that we are currently tracking: Technology and Healthcare Technologies (including Bio Tech).

We will be very proactive in letting you know if your profile doesn’t match the criteria to remain on the Spoke Network or if the profile has not been updated.

If you are not in Technology and Healthcare related field, we suggest you register your company on Spoke.com. There the criteria are not going to be as stringent but it is important to keep the profiles updated.

For the people who had created a profile on the Spoke Network (VBProfiles, SpokeIntel, MedCity Capsules) that were removed, I would like to express my sincere apologies for having been obliged to do this. You should let us know if you want us to port your data on Spoke.com and we will do it for you.

Philippe Cases

CEO

Welcoming MedCity Capsules and what it means for you

2014-04-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

This is with great pleasure that I am announcing that the Spoke Intelligence Network has a new member. As of today, MedCity News is launching MedCity Capsules, the first Healthcare Business Intelligence Website powered by the Spoke Intelligence Network technology and content.

We are very proud to partner with MedCity News as MedCity News is one of the most (if not the most) thoughtful and interesting blogs in the Healthcare Industry. Entrepreneurial at its core with a great leader at its helm, MedCity News is the type of companies we strive to partner with. MedCityNews is also very complementary to VentureBeat in term of Industy and Geographical coverage. It covers the Healthcare Industry in depth and given its location, it has a strong following in the MidWest and the East Coast.

This partnership has several dimensions:
1) As already mentioned, MedCity News is launching MedCity Capsules, a website dedicated to Healthcare Business Intelligence based on the Spoke Intelligence Network content and Technology;
2) MedCity News will actively promote MedCity Capsules to its community and will link their articles to our content;
3) MedCity News will start populating the Spoke Intelligence Network automatically with their thoughtful content
4) MedCity News is contributing content beyond news by creating lists and Industry Trackers for the Healthcare Industry. Of course those lists and industry trackers will be available on all sites of Spoke Intelligence Network;
5) Lastly, MedCity Capsules will promote the lists created in the other part of the network as well.

For the Spoke Intel community, this is the best of both worlds as you get more content and more reach without any work. If you have content on one of our existing sites, this content will now reach more and different type of users through MedCity Capsules. And it is not going to be another site to maintain either, as the content you have created on one site will automatically update the others. Same if you are monitoring your pages or lists of pages on one of the SpokeIntel sites, any time that there are updates from any other sites, you will be alerted as well directly within the site you are a part of.

For Spoke Software, this is of course a major evolution, as MedCity Capsules will cover HealtchcareIT, Medical Devices and Biotechnology. With VB Profiles, Spoke Intel and MedCity Capsules, we are now covering 5 of the 6 most important verticals in term of Business Intelligence and now addressing a potential market of more than 100,000 companies.

We look forward to hearing from you….

Real Estate Professionals Need a Solid Foundation Online

2013-08-19T17:36:00.000-07:00

Real Estate And Marketing
Realtors and brokers have a long-standing relationship with brand marketing, both at the company and personal levels. They were early adopters when things began to move online, and today's consumers know they can just as easily find realtors on Google or Yelp as they can by driving past park benches and for-sale signs. However online, the velocity of change continues to increase, as new tools are being released that provide a richer and far more functional experience to the consumer; and those realtors who take advantage stand the best chance to thrive.

Let's look at 2 examples of realtors doing an excellent, and not so excellent, job of using online tools to build their reputation. Think of Spoke.com as the scorecard by which to compare these examples, because it's a powerful place to store all the different pieces of your reputation puzzle.

A Great Example: Danny Evatt
A quick glance around this page and it's clear that Danny knows what he's doing. Consider the mix of tools he employs, ranging from familiar things like a website and linkedin page, to things like a trulia presence, a company blog, a facebook presence, and even an active twitter feed where he posts great pictures of his locality (nice!) One of my favorites is a link to the Wikipedia history of his last name -- for the sheer creativity!

Danny's page is 80% complete which is quite good; though if we were to offer some advice, it would be (a) to include an already existing YouTube presence to the page, and (b) to take greater advantage of the 'Achievements and Recognition' section to post links to milestones and press mentions (maybe he sold a flagship property and could add a link to the successful listing; or perhaps he was mentioned in the paper, or won an award from his company or an association.)

A Not-So-Great Example: Jesse Continental

Unfortunately, this is a much more common story. An office or realtor will begin to work on their online reputation, but stop before they have a chance to realize the huge potential upside. 30 seconds on this page is illustrative that Jesse has lots of real-world experience and understands his market niche, but that's where it stops. With only a 40% completion rating on Spoke--by posting a name, summary, industry, website and (discontinued) facebook link, Jesse is leaving real value on the table! He could invest a very minimal amount of time to learn and deploy industry-specific tools lik trulia.com, zillow.com, and even the more general yelp.com. If you're in the real estate business, make sure you understand these at the very least.

Final Thoughts

There are two important takeaways from this analysis. First, remember that each outside presence and link that you add to your Spoke page represents a unique channel to attract new clients, and impress existing ones. For example, many realty offices are great sources of local market news and conditions. Have you written articles or blog posts? Add a quick link to the notable links section of your Spoke page.

And secondly, think about the broader implications of having a rich and varied reputation on the internet: Danny is clearly a quick-study when it comes to learning and taking advantage of new tools and technology; and when you look at all of these on something like his Spoke page, it can send powerful subconcsious signals that he has the creativity and tenacity to represent a client extremely well. So push yourself to new levels this year, because more and more people rely on these channels everyday for increasingly important information (like finding a real estate agent.)

The Verdict: Lawyers need help with Online Reputation

2013-08-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

Legal Reputation Building 101

Let's jump right in and look at 2 examples of firms doing an excellent, and not so excellent, job of reputation building. Think of Spoke.com as the scorecard by which to compare these examples, because it's simply a place to store all the different pieces of the reputation puzzle.

A Great Example: Douglas J. Smith Law Office
30 seconds on this page is all it takes to see the variety of reputation tools at legal firms' disposal. Mr. Smith's page has a 90% completion rating thanks to presence of a website, a blog, a facebook and twitter presence, and he has even produced a few YouTube videos. Now, none of these is overly difficult to establish, and they all represent unique channels to attract new clients or impress existing ones. He has also used the 'Notable Links' section to link to his other web-presences: merchant circle, insiderpages, yahoo local, etc; though if we were to offer some advice, it would be to take advantage of the 'Achievements and Recognition' section to post links to major milestones or press mentions (maybe Mr. Smith won a major case, or won an award within his industry circle, or was mentioned in a local news outlet -- those kinds of things)

A Not-So-Great Example: Offices of Johnny Law
Unfortunately, this is a much more common story. A law office will begin to work on their online reputation, but stop before they have a chance to realize the huge potential upside. 30 seconds on this page is illustrative that Johnny Law has a great niche to share with the internet audience, however has only taken enough digital strides to reach a 15% completion rating on Spoke--by posting a name, summary, address, and phone number. This may have been valuable information in 1995, but today it's not even enough to be taken seriously, we hope that they just haven't updated their Spoke page lately.

Now to clarify, we're not saying that everyone needs to have a universal internet presence. Our view is simply that it's important to push yourself to new levels in the year 2013, because more and more people rely on these channels everyday for increasingly important information (like finding a lawyer.) Even if you don't have a website, get creative! I'd be willing to bet that clients have left reviews on Yelp about your office -- and you could post that link to your 'Notable Links,' or make it your 'website!' You could even use your avvo.com page. (Oh, if you haven't heard of Yelp or Avvo, go check them out this second, they're critical to your firm.)

So go experiment with these important digital tools, and send us messages on twitter or facebook when you do!

Understanding Digital Reputation

2013-06-26T21:10:00.000-07:00

Though people are spending more time on Social Networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn, the web is still the main place where people search for information.

Digital Reputation Management requires understanding what tools and services are available to monitor your personal online brand and promote the good content that shapes your identity.

What is Digital Reputation

Wikipedia describes Reputation as a commonly-held opinion, or a social evaluation based on a set of criteria. It is important in business, education, online communities and many other fields. Online, information is being published all the time: by us on our social profiles, by others on blogs or their social profiles, and by professionals on news sites and across the internet as a whole.

Our digital reputation is being shaped as much by us as by other people; and as a result, checking frequently what is available online and making sure that the good content appears first is important for somebody conscious about their personal brand.

Simplified, Digital Reputation Management involves both a discovery element, and a curation element.

To learn more, check out the Reputation Management topic page on spoke.com to dive in!

Reputation Management Lesson 1: The Professional Picture

2013-06-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

When it comes to online reputation, no matter the medium, you'll often be leading with some kind of profile image or logo; yet this is often one of easiest aspects to overlook--to just grab something off of your desktop and think "I'll get a better one later."

No more! Spoke wants to put you on the offensive. Whether you already have Spoke pages built with images, or you haven't added your page yet (by using the big Orange "Add Page" button on spoke.com.)

Selecting the right image (for a person or company page,) is all about 3 things:

1. What level of professionalism are you trying to convey?

This seems like a no-brainer, but in reality, people often don't take that extra minute to really question what their current image says about them as a professional. Are you an undefeated trial lawyer? A no-nonsense corporate accountant? Chances are you're professional persona will benefit greater from a serious portrait in a business suit, while someone in the marketing/creative or service industry will want to find ways to inject a bit of warmth or even quirkiness.

2. Is there a uniqueness or special sauce

Think about how you can personify your competitive advantage, as a person or as a company. One of the best examples of this is Apple. Their guiding principle in hardware and software design is simplicity--design so complex and so intuitive, that the end result is something simple and beautiful. And their entire corporate brand could not be better suited: a beautiful neutral-colored apple. No fireworks, no flashy colors, no crazy fonts, etc; just an elegant piece of fruit.

3. Technical attributes: dimensions, good focal point, and color contrast

Think of these as things to check off, once you've selected an image. Does your image fit the dimension requirements for the location you are posting it? Some websites will want your image to be a perfect square (such as Spoke,) while others allow for elongated images in either orientation. Next, is the most important part of your image the sole focus of it? Don't use a busy image for a professional application--either your logo or your face should be front and center. And finally, does that focul point blend into the background of the image or the webpage itself; or rather, do the colors pop out and draw the eye?

Give yourself and your company a quick visual audit. A great way to start is by visiting your Spoke pages and applying these criteria, or creating new ones.

And Look for more lessons in Reputation Management in the coming weeks!

Spoke Users Take Advantage Of Big Offer

2013-05-29T10:06:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago, we presented our Spoke users with a special offer: to update or build their page for them, to tell their story and serve as the cornerstone of a rich online presence. And the response was impressive! Many asked us to update company and person pages that were already started; but some even had us create brand new pages!

Here are examples from some great new company pages:

Commonwealth Capital Advisors received a new company page that opens with a nice mix of profile data

We also pulled in their video presence

Himalayan Glacier Trekking has an extensive social media presence, which was well highlighted on their new company page

And Puritan Automation received a diverse set of links

to display information about their company as well as

technology they use to create a competitive advantage

And in taking advantage of this offer, not only did these users get a free content, but we provided custom advice to each on how they could take their digital reputation to the next level.

For a taste of that insight, see a guest blog post by Rebecca Haden (an expert in digital reputation, and prominent Spoke member.)

Look for similar promotions in the future, and in the meantime, start your own page on Spoke -- it's an opportunity to tell your unique story that only takes a few minutes.

Unlock The Power Of Lists

2013-05-20T09:26:00.004-07:00

Ever get the feeling you spend far too much time reading news? Or even worse, that no matter how much reading you do, you'll never catch all of the important market intelligence happening every day. We know the feeling, and we built a solution!

We're flipping the flow of news on it's head, and in case you haven't had a chance to try it yet, go create a list on spoke.com. By following very specific companies, people, and topics, you can simply sit back and let us watch everything for you. And we'll simply deliver the important stuff to your inbox -- daily or weekly -- laser focused on just the information you really want!

How To Quickly Get Started
Visit spoke.com, find the pages you are interested in, and click "Follow" on each. At this point you can create lists, and organize pages for more efficient news consumption. Perhaps you want to follow all of your competitors, clients, or sales leads -- you can do this in minutes and then sit back while we feed you all of the valuable information happening to those pages.

Want a visual example of how to do this? Here's a brief instructional video.

We want you to spend less time becoming more informed than ever!

Free Promotion For Spoke Users

2013-05-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

The Spoke team couldn't be more excited! We just released a major enhancement to our brand new 'Lists' feature-set (if you missed it, watch how to use Spoke to automatically stay informed) and to celebrate, we're throwing a special one-week promotion for all our users: we'll build/update any page that is important to you. Why? Because 'Lists' rely so much on following great Spoke pages, and we want your experience to be invaluable.

So for one week, starting now, if there's any company or topic page that is important to you, tell us about it using the short form below and our dedicated team will work for you to make sure it is updated.

Use This Quick Form To Tell Us What Pages Are Important To You

It's free, fast, and we'll tell you when it's complete so that you can follow the finished page and start getting all the intelligence you need, delivered right to your inbox or browser (just as our company video describes.)

VIDEO: How To Create A Stream

2013-05-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

Since we released it (two whole weeks ago,) many of you have asked for more information on how to best use our most powerful feature: Activity Streams.

So we created a short video to explain just that:

Click To Watch

This 2-minute video can save you hours every day! Let us know if you have any questions or comments here.

What The Blue Angels Can Teach About Captivating An Audience

2013-04-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

This guest post is by John Foley, former lead solo pilot of the US Navy's Blue Angels. He is the founder and CEO of John Foley Inc., which provides keynote speaking, coaching, and hands on training services for Fortune 500 companies, professional sports teams, healthcare service providers and beyond. The core of his teaching is The Diamond Performance Framework, which translates the Blue Angels’ culture of excellence and peak execution for the World of Business.

Social media and content marketing have changed the way that companies share themselves with the world. The speed of that interaction continues to increase, and new channels of communication are born every year. However, those advanced techniques are still grounded in basic principles that have been in use for at least a century. At the end of the day, people still like doing business with companies and individuals who are open, honest, and especially those who share.

Sharing Creates Goodwill

The Blue Angels are bound to their audience by a definitive congeniality. It's part of their overarching mission to act as ambassadors of goodwill. Even as my journey has carried me into the world of business, I still meet people on a daily basis who are eager to share their fond memories of Blue Angel air shows. From a business perspective, the Blue Angels mission to share that goodwill with the world solidifies a very effective campaign for public outreach and recruitment.

Sharing ourselves with our audience is a great way to create that same sentiment. And creating that mutual feeling of goodwill opens up our environment. On a fundamental level, people like doing business in an open environment; it creates a space in which they can learn, interact and contribute. Unlocking that feeling of 'open-ness' is a valuable tool on multiple levels.

Sharing Accelerates Learning

Let's look at a classic example from a familiar brand: Jell-o. In 1904, Orator F. Woodward led an initiative by The Genesee Pure Food Company that produced and distributed free promotional cookbooks featuring Jell-o themed recipes. These books became incredibly popular, and by 1909, gross sales for Jell-o exceeded one million dollars.
By 1913, that number was doubled, and Jell-o was on the way to becoming a household name. Look at the success of that campaign, and just imagine the speed of that kind of success in today's world. In 1904 it took a long time and huge amount of effort to deliver those cookbooks. Today, using social media and aggregators like Spoke.com, we can complete that B2C circuit, almost overnight.

What It Means For Companies:

In the midst of the new media climate, our job is to find the most effective ways to exercise that fundamental idea. Lately, I've found that information hubs like Spoke.com offer some very effective opportunities for execution. The Spoke system allows you to follow, post, and collect stories from around the web in order to create an entry point that can allow your company to begin sharing in new ways. So use these strategies to inspire a unique approach to sharing within your own organization.

To learn more about John and his novel approaches to bringing excellence into the organization, visit his website and follow him on Twitter.

5 Easy Ways To Take Control of Your Online Reputation

2013-04-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

Andrew Shotland is a search marketing consultant with a specialty in Enterprise and Local SEO. He writes about this and other strange topics at LocalSEOGuide.com and AppleMapsMarketing.com.

Last week I got a call from an old client I hadn’t heard from in years. He had been arrested for a DUI and now when you search his name in Google, the first result is the court report of his hearing. Oh yeah, and he was unemployed and looking for a job. Not good.

The future is guaranteed to be some mash-up of The Minority Report, The Matrix, Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Social Network and Looper (if you haven’t seen it yet, rent it now) where all information is available all of the time. In the always-on world, managing your “personal brand” – a fancy marketing term for “your good name” - is critical. There are all sorts of reasons to be aware of how your name appears throughout the Web, from protecting your privacy to improving your ability to make that sale or get that job. But the basic premise is that if you don’t control your personal brand online, someone else will.

So where do you start? Some basic tips:

1. Get Your Own DomainOwning a domain for your own name is one of the simplest ways to improve how you show up in search results and to control your online identity. Don’t be intimidated. A simple one page website www.yourname.com with a photo and some text about yourself is all you need. The domain will cost you <$20 and there are plenty of instant website companies that have easy-to-use templates.SquareSpace.com has a good service for this that starts at $8/month.

2. Claim Your General Social Media ProfilesIf you haven’t already created a page on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest, go ahead and do so. Each of these sites typically ranks well in Google for searches for user names. Fill out the profiles as much as you can and make sure each of these sites links to the others (e.g. link your Google+ page to your Facebook page) as well as to your website. Of course, these URLs are more likely to rank for searches for your name if you are active on them and connected to a lot of other users on each service, so it couldn’t hurt to put some time into them, but don’t feel like you need to be a social media butterfly. Even occasional use of any of these for most people will affect their ability to rank in Google.

3. Claim Your Industry Social Media ProfilesMany industries have directories and other types of sites that allow people in the industry to create and claim profiles. For example, Avvo.com allows lawyers to claim a free profile and get listed. Find the big sites in your niche and claim your profiles there. And don’t forget to link them up with your social media profiles and your domain.

4. Keep As Much As You Can PrivateWe online marketers are known for over-sharing on the Web. That’s part of our game, but there’s no reason why most people should feel the need to air all of their laundry (clean and dirty) in public. Once you put something on the Web, even if it’s a benign photo of your hamster, it’s hard to control what happens to it from there. As a rule, set your privacy controls on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to limit what you share and what can be shared. Here are the basics on the privacy settings for the main social networks:
-Facebook Privacy Settings
-Twitter Public and Protected Tweets
-Managing Your LinkedIn Privacy Settings
-Google+ Privacy Settings
-Pinterest Account Security

5. Create a Power Page on Spoke.comWhile creating your own site and using social networks can help a lot, most of those tools are fairly narrow in their ability to create customized pages to help with your online-reputation. That’s where taking advantage of your Spoke pages can come into play. Spoke allows you to basically create a Wikipedia for yourself. You can create pages for every job you’ve held, links to major accomplishments, links to mentions you’ve received in the media, if you’re an author you could create a bibliography page, etc. All of these pages can help you control how you appear in the search results and provide a professionally curated picture of yourself to those searching for you. And by linking your Spoke page with your other social media profiles, each site could influence the rankings of the others.

So don’t wait for a robot to travel back in time from the future to start helping you with your online reputation issues. With only a few hours of work, you can easily
take control of it yourself while still leaving plenty of time to watch Looper (Trust me, it’s awesome).

Major Release: Introducing Lists and Streams!

2013-04-11T12:26:00.001-07:00

As we are moving the process forward to be the place where you find business information about your industry, companies and people, the Spoke team is thrilled to announce the release of our most important feature set of the year: Lists & Activity Streams.

CLICK TO WATCH OUR NEW VIDEO

Up until now you may have been using Spoke for a variety of purposes: to manage your online identity or your company's, to find business information, or to promote yourself as an expert. However today we unveil a new -- and our most powerful -- use for the world of information consumption. You can now leverage Spoke to get real time updates in YOUR INBOX every day or every week on the companies, people and topics that you are interested in -- laser focused on only the information you really want!

How To Quickly Get Started

Simply visit spoke.com, find the pages you are interested in, and click "Follow" on each. You can follow as many pages as you want, and organize them into lists for more efficient reading. Perhaps you want to follow all of your competitors, clients, or sales leads -- you can do this in minutes and then sit back while we feed you all of the valuable information happening to those pages.

Need a visual? Here's a brief instructional video.

We want you to spend less time becoming more informed than ever! And we'll go one step further: if there's a company or person that you want to follow, but the page could use updating, just Use This Form and we'll update it for you! Or if we're missing something, click the big orange "Add Page" button, name the page, and then send it to us using the same form.

7 Tips to Building a Brand for First-Time Small Business Owners

2013-04-04T12:08:00.002-07:00

David Bakke is a small business owner based in Atlanta. He writes about his experiences and personal finance tips on the blog, MoneyCrashers.com.

If you're a first-time small business owner, you may know how to use Spoke.com to track your industry, your competition, and your customers - but how much thought have you given to your brand? According to the website SmallBusinessDelivered, branding "is the process of creating a clear, consistent message about your company or product." Crafting an effective and unique brand has become an essential element of all successful companies in today's business landscape. Here are six ideas for building an effective brand for your small business:

1. Be the Face of Your Organization If you want to build an effective brand, you've got to give your business a face. As an entrepreneur with your nose buried in numbers 18 hours a day, it's easy to lose sight of the fundamental principles of a consumer economy. A buyer doesn't identify with a product or service itself, a buyer identifies with a person who creates, sells, or uses that product or service - much like you don't put your hope and faith in an ideology, you put your hope and faith in a politician to champion that ideology. As the owner of a small business, it's your responsibility to be that person. Post a welcoming picture of yourself on your company website, or go out and press palms, getting to know people near your place of business. When potential customers see an actual human being who cares about their needs running a business, they're much more likely to patronize it.

2. Strive for Superior Customer Service Once you've launched your business and established your brand, constantly keep it in a good light by accepting nothing less than stellar customer service. It's a lost art in many organizations, but good customer care can turn a one-time buyer into a lifelong devotee. It can spark a word-of-mouth campaign that can draw business your way and christen new customers at an exponential rate. If you ingrain this philosophy into your corporate culture and practice it diligently, customer service can in effect become your brand - and that's a powerful tool.

3. Choose the Right Logo Choosing the right logo to represent your business is critical, and the sheer number of studies about visual brand recognition are dizzying. Many businesses try to convey multiple layers of meaning in their logos, and to use them as sort of subconscious attractors, but the most essential elements of a good logo are simplicity, attractiveness, and cohesion with your business. Hiring a consultant or designer to create your logo can be a pricy endeavor, but if done well it can yield significant returns. Two good websites to get you started are Red Antler or 99Designs, and once you've got your logo nailed down, distribute it as much as you can both offline and online. There are dozens of great free destinations on the web, such as Spoke.com.

4. Accentuate What Sets You Apart When creating your brand, it's important to understand and emphasize what it is that sets you apart from your competition. It can be as basic as specific services you may provide, or your pledge to offer lower prices than your competitors. If you offer free gutter cleaning as part of a roof inspection service, for example, emphasize that. If you offer "best-price matching," put that out there. In a competitive economic environment like this one, branding yourself as unique in a certain market can help your business break away from the pack.

5. Be Consistent With Your Message Once you establish the tone and message of your brand, never stray from it. Whether it's your social media posts, your email marketing strategy, or your in-person communication, being consistent is key. A business with an unclear or muddled brand is going struggle - no matter how intelligently conceived or positive its message is.

6. Make Sure Your Staff Fully Understands Your Brand If your entire staff doesn't understand the image you're trying to portray, all your efforts could be lost. The first thing to teach your incoming staff should always be your brand identity. For employees that have been with you from the start, constantly reinforce the importance of your message in staff meetings, memos, and in every task you assign. A company that lives and breathes its brand identity is a cohesive unit, and when every part functions to serve the machine, there's no stopping you. This will also help everyone involved to develop better communication skills in the workplace.

7. Centralize Your Brand Spoke.com is the only place on the internet where you can store all of your company's profile information and digital content from all over the web, whether links, videos, etc. And in doing so you can express the uniqueness of your brand in a much richer way and show your customers everything at once.

Final Thoughts If you're having trouble crafting an effective and unique brand for your small business, don't be afraid to ask for help. If you have the resources, bring in consultants or marketers to advise you. If not, ask your friends and family how they perceive your business. Sometimes it takes that perspective from a trusted person examining you from outside your bubble to help you really identify what it is that makes you so unique. Putting time, research, and effort into developing and projecting your brand is one of the early steps to creating a thriving business.

You can find more helpful advice on MoneyCrashers.com

How to Leverage any Content to Market Yourself

2013-03-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

Whether you're more interested in Managing your Reputation or displaying your Subject Matter Expertise, the way you leverage links and external content is paramount to your success. It seems like a simple concept, but it is an extremely powerful way to tell your story beyond your average profile website. If you don't take advantage, you're leaving money on the table!

This is where Spoke can be Extremely Valuable

Because Spoke pages allow you to Change the Title for any link/video you post, you can describe any piece of content out there on the web on your own terms. Just try it for yourself to understand its impact on your web presence.

Go Try it Now: Here's a video that shows you how.