Jenni Hogan hosts a radio show called “The Next Big Thing,” and now, the Seattle social media maven is moving on to her very own “next big thing.”
Tagboard, the Redmond startup that curates social media content for brands, today announced that it is acquiring Hogan’s TVinteract app and bringing on Hogan as Tagboard’s Chief Media Officer.
Hogan, who previously was a KIRO 7 traffic anchor, left the TV news station in December 2012 and eight months later launched TVinteract, an app that enables TV anchors, reporters and hosts to select social media content they’d like to show on live TV.
In her new role at Tagboard, which raised a $2 million round in August, Hogan will lead the startup’s broadcast and media strategy. She’ll continue to develop the TVinteract business and use the Tagboard platform to integrate social content into her users’ websites and mobile apps.
“As a T.V. visionary I predict hashtags are going to be the way we curate news in the future,” Hogan told us. “I’m excited to be teaming up with an innovative company that is on the forefront of trends for the industry I’m so passionate about.”
Hogan first met Tagboard CEO and co-founder Josh Decker at the GeekWire Gala this past December. She wanted to scale TVinteract quickly, and Decker saw an opportunity to help.
“Although we already had customers in the broadcast market using Tagboard, we had not yet designed tools specifically for them,” Decker said. “Acquiring TVinteract shows that we are ready to invest heavily into the broadcast market and build the best social media integration tools available.”
TVinteract co-founder David McLauchlan will remain at Seattle-based Buddy Platform as CEO.
Hogan, who calls her new gig a “dream job,” is Tagboard’s 15th employee. The company, founded in 2011, is capitalizing on the usage of hashtags in social media and essentially has built a landing zone for specific hashtags or topics that are alive on social media. Users can find out more information about a certain subject, while companies like Microsoft, Intel and Boeing have the ability to customize the design and imagery of their pages to help frame the conversation and brand, all in real-time.
Decker said the company is seeing “hockey stick growth” that him and his fellow co-founders only dreamed about when they founded the company three years ago.
“It is a very exciting time for us here,” he said.
