One million hashtags
It is not often that I get blown away, however this week I can make an exception. Without really realizing it until after it happened, Tagboard powered its one millionth hashtag for our users yesterday; meaning Tagboard users have searched, curated and/or displayed over 1 million unique hashtags using our platform. Note: this does not include the millions secondary hashtags our system processes.
When you consider that there are only 172,000 words — give or take — in the Oxford English Dictionary, that makes this a pretty cool number to think about. We celebrate this milestone with our clients and their communities, together we have created literally billions of impressions around the world!
I can’t think of a better way to monumentalize this milestone than to look back and talk about a few of my favorite hashtags.
It was September 2012, and I was sitting at my computer on an Autumn Saturday. As usual I was perusing Twitter to see what was going on and I noticed a bunch of chatter around the hashtag #UDUB. Obviously there was a University of Washington game on so I was intrigued to follow along. As any startup founder will tell you in the early days I was obsessed about our page views and product usage (protip: that was a lot of wasted time). I remember celebrating when we first got double digits, then triple digits, then quadruple digits and so on. I remember sitting there watching our stats page and all of a sudden it went from a few dozen simultaneous pageviews, to thousands. It turns out the head of social for the University of Washington, Daniel Hour, found Tagboard and placed a link on their homepage that pointed to the #UDUB search results page on our site.
An analogy that I used early on was that our startup was like a kite. We could build the very best kite in the world, but without some wind, it would be worthless. Community is the wind. This was the moment that our humble little kite caught wind and for the first time we saw it raising up into the sky. It was quite an exciting moment for us, and I will never forget that feeling! No matter where we go from here or how big we get, I will always think back to this very first moment where I thought to myself “wow this thing is really going to work!”
One of my favorite things about this adventure that we’ve been on with Tagboard has been the relationships and friendships that we’ve created along the way. One of those started in late 2012 when I saw the hashtag #SaveDanielle trending on Tagboard’s stats page. It was a hashtag for somebody trying to raise money for a friend with cancer. They had found Tagboard, created a tagboard for their hashtag and shared it with their community.
I was really intrigued because nothing excites me more than using our technology to help others. So I reached out to the individual who set up the hashtag, Chris Yates, and asked him if there was anything that I could do to help. We upgraded his account and enabled him to use Tagboard to its fullest. An event that was supposed to only have a few hundred people ended up having thousands of people join, including NFL Hall of Famer, Troy Aikman. They raised thousands of dollars and had a successful blood drive. Today Danielle is alive and well and even if we only played a very small part in her story, I couldn’t be more proud to be involved. To this day, Chris is a good friend and Tagboard supporter. If this isn’t #socialforgood, I don’t know what is!
In late 2012 we saw the news the Seattle Mariners were installing the largest screen in all of major-league baseball: 202 feet wide. That’s the height of a 20 story building on its side. We thought to ourselves, “we have to find a way to get Tagboard up there!” We had only done a few bespoke live screens at the time (notably, with Audi at their auto shows), but we had never run in a stadium before. I said, “let’s ask and see if we could run Tagboard on their new screen!”
Long story short, we were able to connect with the team and pitched them our idea. During the meeting we felt a huge sense of relief come over the team. It turned out that we were in a position to solve a problem for them, and they were working hard on a very laborious and manual solution. The Mariners became the first sports team that we worked with for live display in-stadium. I remember the first time I saw Tagboard up on that amazing screen, my body covered in goosebumps.
Fast forward to today and we have run Tagboard in over 100 stadiums around the globe. But we will never forget our humble beginnings, right here with our hometown baseball team, the Seattle Mariners! I’m so grateful and thankful for the opportunity that they gave us to prove ourselves and show what we could do. The results of this story is that we now have a partnership with Major League Baseball, where all 32 MLB teams have access to our platform which allows them to fuel fan engagement in new and exciting ways.
It wouldn’t be right to talk about the hashtag without talking about the hashtag godfather, Chris Messina. In our early days, I remember reading about him and hoping to meet him someday. He was a legend to us! One day, he tweeted about Tagboard, and to say we were excited would have been a huge understatement. Before long, he began following us and was retweeting us often. We ended up getting into deep conversations about our shared beliefs about the hashtag and the vision for Tagboard.
As the hashtag grew in popularity, beyond just social media, but also pop culture, Chris’ reputation grew along with it. We were thrilled when Chris joined our advisory board, and officially became a part of the Tagboard family. It was definitely one of the biggest validations I think we have had as a company. His positive contributions to our product and brand have been so great. My favorite part about Chris’ input is that he keeps us grounded. He helps us focus on WHY we are doing what we do, and doesn’t let us get too distracted.
“If the hashtag is the next URL, then Tagboard is building the browser” — Chris Messina
In March 2014 Tagboard acquired a company called TVinteract. This acquisition for us was quite important because it gave us the ability to focus on taking our technology to the media market. The best part of this acquisition was that we got a new business partner along the way in Jenni Hogan, who became our Chief Media Officer (now Chief Strategy Officer). As we launched our media vertical, the BBC came to our team for help on powering the conversation around the hashtag #IndyRef. This hashtag was being used by viewers to talk about the Scottish independence referendum vote. The most critical vote in Scotland’s history.
Tagboard was used on screen for over fourteen hours in their live coverage, and most importantly, they used it to show the vote results within 10 seconds of the Prime Minister’s announcement tweet. The BBC used Tagboard to show this result to millions of people all over the world in near real time! They were the first broadcast company in the world to publish the election results and our technology enabled them to do that.
That was a really proud moment for our team and we are excited to continue our growth in this market.
Our current media clients reach an amazing 70% of U.S. households daily. Social media has become one of the most powerful ways to break news using eyewitness photos and videos. One such example is when the #1 and #2 stations in New York, used Tagboard to show viewers user generated videos and images within minutes of the tragic accident, informing their audience faster than they could have ever done with traditional methods.
When I look back over the last four years of my life I can say, without hesitation, that it has been the most difficult but yet most rewarding time of my life. I’ve never been more challenged personally and professionally, but I also have never grown more. I can say that I’m surrounded by a lot of really talented people that make me a better leader and a better person every day. I have so much gratitude for those who have supported us: our families, our investors, our partners, and those who took a chance on us early on. Also, thank you to the AMAZING Tagboard team that has joined this ride! You are critical to the success of this vision, and each one of you make us a better team. The best is yet to come and I have never been more excited about our future than I am today.
No matter where we go, no matter how big we get, no matter how many hashtags we serve up, one thing still remains: it’s all about community. The heart and soul of Tagboard is to empower communities of all shapes and sizes. We aim to enable them to connect, engage, and make a difference.
Finally: thank you! Thank you for your support, and thank you for using Tagboard to make your community stronger.
Sincerely,
Josh Decker
Tagboard #CEO
@jdbt
