Some exciting news to announce!

As of Monday, we’re bringing one of our most awesome power users officially into the fold, with the wonderful Katie Felten joining the team as our Evangelist Program Manager. This is our first community management hire and it’s long overdue.

One of the greatest joys from the start with Hashable has been connecting with users and creating a family and a community around our product. Not only do we believe that building relationships with our users is as important as building the product itself, but we’ve always felt that Hashable can help serve as glue to bring communities closer together by making constituents more visible to each other. These could be regional communities like ‘NYC Tech’ or niche/vertical communities like ‘academics active in social media.’ So in many ways, community actually is the product.

When we first launched and our user base was largely in NYC, we were able to engage with the community as a  ‘side job’ for various members of our team. We now have fledgling user communities popping up in over 126 countries – with energized, passionate users emailing in on a daily basis to get our support in pulling together user groups in their hometown.

Enter Katie Felten!

Katie came onto our radar a few months ago as an emerging power user from the Midwest (w00t!). She is a LinkedIn Trainer and Evangelist who actively speaks on social media at conferences and hosts a ‘Tech TV’ YouTube show. She immediately ‘got’ Hashable – and we were impressed from the start with her natural evangelism and innate-social-media-extroversion. We selected her to be one of our SXSW Evangelists and subsequently invited her to NYC for some working sessions. By the end of the trip it was clear we needed to team up, and the question to Katie was ‘when can you start?!’

Katie will be starting as our Evangelist Program Manager this Monday, April 25th. She will be based out of the Midwest but will be making steady appearances in NYC and various other user hubs.

Job 1 for Katie will be to act as a point of contact for all our awesome power users out there. Whether you just want a more direct way to give us feedback and get in the loop on our product roadmap – or whether you want to get more actively involved in leading your local or vertical Hashable community – Katie’s your gal! If you are a power user, you will probably be hearing from Katie. She also will have her hand on the t-shirt lever, so on that front she’ll probably be hearing from lots of you!

We are extremely excited to welcome Katie to the team. Not only is she completely terrific and a great addition to Hashable, but we are so thrilled to finally have the capacity to engage with users everywhere.

We invite you all to help us in welcoming Katie at @katiefelten – and if you’ve already got ideas for her – bring it on – she’s ready to roll!