Twitter Nabs Googler Gabriel Stricker As Comms VP
Back in November, we reported that Sean Garrett, Twitter's Head of Comms, would be stepping down from his post. As he tweeted at the time, for the first time in his career, he would be taking more than a two week break between jobs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has spent months without a permanent head of communications. Sean Garrett announced his departure last November, and within a week TechCrunch was asking what was going on at Twitter as another member of the comms team followed him out — a stretch that also included the March TweetDeck security incident the new hire will inherit questions about.
The answer arrives with Gabriel Stricker, poached from Google to fill the VP of comms seat roughly five months after Garrett left. The story traveled widely for a personnel item — Search Engine Land, AllThingsD and 9to5Google all picked it up, reflecting how much weight both companies' names carry in the search-and-social ecosystem.
First-order effects
- Twitter ends a five-month vacancy atop its communications function, replacing Garrett with a Google veteran at the exact moment its comms bench had been thinned by back-to-back departures.
- Google loses a senior communications executive to a direct platform rival, handing Twitter institutional knowledge of how a large-scale consumer internet company runs messaging.
Second-order effects
- With Promoted Products just opened to small businesses in late March, Stricker inherits a communications brief that now includes selling advertising — pushing Twitter's PR operation closer to its revenue engine.
- A Google-to-Twitter move raises the price of retaining comms and policy talent at the big platforms, where rivals increasingly recruit directly from each other's executive ranks.
Third-order effects
- As Twitter matures toward an advertising-driven business ahead of any eventual public listing pressure, communications shifts from a support function to a strategic one staffed by executives imported from larger incumbents.
The trend: Consumer web companies entering their monetization phase are recruiting communications leaders from established giants like Google rather than promoting from within.