1. Introduction: This paper will present a historical figure in strategic communication. It will tell a story about the public relation expert Brandee Barker. First, the paper will A) present some background information about Barker and her personal life, then B) her career within Facebook, C) her own business Pramana Collective and finally D) some other highlights from her career. 2. Method: I have used the search engines Google and EbscoHost to find and read articles about Barker. I narrowed it down to the most informative, and wrote the paper based on those. The reference list consists of newspaper articles and blogs. 3. Results: A) Barker grew up in Southern California. She took a degree in journalism at the University of Colorado at …show more content…
She had a job as vice president at Zeno Group. On her way to the office of managing accounts for Gap and Oracle she had to walk by a young co-worker. She usually had the same website open on her computer screen. After getting to know that the page her co-worker was so found of was Facebook, Barker called them to get them to post a survey about …show more content…
(Marikar, 2014). Actually, she was the first communication executive in the history of Facebook. This was when Facebook only had 5 million users (college students) and 100 employees. During her time there, the communication team evolved to consist of 10 people. She oversaw a multi-million dollar budget and was in charge of the PR strategy for companies like Microsoft and DST investments. She also launched the now well-known features of Facebook News Feed, Pages, “Share” and “Like” among others. Barker had to handle various challenges like government investigations, users protest around privacy issues and rumors of buyouts. (Fast Company, n.d.) While five months pregnant she co-hosted the live webcast of the 2009 Golden Globes and American Music Awards. (Barker, n.d.). According to Fast Company (n.d.) Barker built Facebook into a global phenomenon. She made sure to get stories posted in influential blogs such as AllThingsD, TechCrunch and VentureBeat. She also got cover stories in among others New York Times, Wall St. Journal and Financial Times, and she coordinated appearances in big shows like 60 minutes, Oprah and Today Show. When she left Facebook about four years later, the company had grown to 2000 employees and more than 500 million users from all over the world. (Fast Company,