Yammer executive Dee Anna McPherson jumps on the HootSuite bus as VP of Marketing

Social media management dashboard HootSuite announced a significant hire this morning: former Yammer vice president of marketing Dee Anna McPherson.

McPherson, whose LinkedIn profile still shows her at Yammer, led marketing at that company for the past three years. Prior to that she was a partner at the Horn Group, a PR firm, and a senior vice president at Ogilvy PR. She also spent three years as a director of public relations at PeopleSoft.

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“Dee Anna is a dream fit — she put enterprise social networking on the map at Yammer and will help HootSuite continue to expand its penetration into social enterprises,” HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes said in a statement.

Among her accomplishments at Yammer were the acquisition of the company by Microsoft for $1.2 billion and a healthy 300 percent annual growth rate.

HootSuite, which recently became one of only a handful of Twitter Ad API partners, took some steps closer to inside-the-company Yammer territory last year with its Conversations feature. This hire, however, is almost certainly not about HootSuite becoming more Yammer-like but about HootSuite continuing its growth inside large enterprises. Seventy-nine of the Fortune 100 already use HootSuite, but there’s a lot of room to grow deeper and broader.

“I’m thrilled to join HootSuite during a period of such incredible growth,” said McPherson in a rather predictable PR-speak quote. “There’s no position I’d rather be in than heading up a talented team working to cement an innovative product at the head of the pack for enterprise social media management.”

One question: Where will she work?

McPherson is San Francisco-based, while HootSuite is Vancouver-based. HootSuite does have a San Francisco office but has indicated in the past that it has no intention of moving senior staff. That said, all of its top people spend time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley regularly, and it would not be unusual for McPherson to simply reverse that trend, working in San Francisco while occasionally visiting Vancouver.

One quick tip for the long-time PR pro: How about a LinkedIn photo sans redeye?

HootSuite continues to grow both users and headcount, with over six million users and now 250 employees, up from just 70 at the start of last year.

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