Twitter hires Natalie Kerris as its Head of Communications

Steven Loeb · February 22, 2016 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/437e

Kerris had previously spent 14 years at Apple, working to help reshape that company's image

Twitter has been struggling lately, and that seems to have made it hard for the company to hold onto top talent. It has seen many executives leave in the last few months. 

So it's nice to see Twitter bringing new people on, and filling roles that have remained vacant for quite a while, and one that could mean a turnaround for the company.

CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Twitter on Monday that the company has hired Natalie Kerris as its new VP of Global Communications.

Kerris is taking over a position that had been vacated by Gabriel Stricker, who had been vice president of marketing and communications, and was put in charge of overseeing the entire media team at Twitter when COO Ali Rowghani left in 2014.

Stricker left the company in June of last year.

Prior to this role, Kerris had spent the last 14 years as Senior Director of Worldwide Corporate Communications at Apple, until she left in April of last year, in what was labeled as her retirement. Either that was inaccurate, or Kerris was wooed back out of retirement by the prospect of turning around Twitter's image, much the same way she did with Apple.

Kerris "worked directly with Apple's visionary executive team, including Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and Jony Ive, to reshape Apple's narrative from tech underdog to industry disrupter, through the meteoric rise of the iPhone to become the world's most valuable and profitable company," she writes on her LinkedIn profile. 

If any company can be labeled an underdog right now, it would be Twitter. The company has been hit hard by stagnating user numbers and a falling stock price. Jack Dorsey has been trying to turn it around through a number of initiatives. 

That has included an update to its timeline, which gave users an opt-in way to change their timeline to display those that they are "most likely to care about," rather than just the most recent.

The company has also toyed with the idea of getting rid of the 140-character limit, perhaps all the way up to 10,000 characters, which is more than 70 times what it is currently.

Those are the bigger moves, but there are also smaller ones it has made that the company believes will make Twitter function better.

That has included getting rid of "weird rules," like the .@name syntax and @reply, which new users would not know or understand. It also introduced Moments, a feature that is designed to curate content by aggregating Tweets and photos from live events and breaking-news situations. 

So far, none of this has helped Twitter much in the user growth department. Perhaps Kerris can work her magic and give the company a new narrative.

Her hiring, funny enough, might be the first step, since it turns around some of the bad press that Twitter got last month when a bunch of its executives quit en mass. 

Katie Jacobs Stanton, the company’s VP of global media; Kevin Weil, it's SVP of product; Alex Roetter, who is and SVP of engineering; Jason Toff, general manager at Vine; and Brian “Skip” Schipper, Twitter's Vice President of Human Resources, all chose to leave Twitter at the exact same time. 

Those departures followed Mike Davidson, Twitter's Head of Design, announced he was leaving the company in December. In the two weeks prior Twitter had also lost engineer Utkarsh Srivastava, who helped the company build its ads business, and it also saw the departure of Glenn Otis Brown, who has been heading up Twitter’s video ad program. Srivastava left for Google, while Brown went to Betaworks.

Twitter could use a new narrative right now, and Kerris has the experience to give it to them.

VatorNews reached out to Twitter for comment on Kerris' new role, but a company spokesperson had nothing to add beyond Kerris and Dorsey's Tweets. 

(Image source: mactrast.com)

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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