Facebook PR director departs for the startup world

Brandee Barker, who has been Facebook’s director of corporate communications for the past four years, revealed that Wednesday will be her last day at the company. AllThingsDigital broke the news, and Barker also announced her departure on Twitter.

If you don’t write about Facebook for a living, I suspect you may not have heard of Barker, since Mark Zuckerberg and other executives tend to take the company spotlight. The big joke in the AllThingsDigital article is that this corporate communications exec has been a constant source of “no comment”s, and a quick search of the VentureBeat archives shows that we’ve only mentioned her six times, all in 2007.

Still, it’s a significant departure, since Barker led the company’s PR team through a number of crises, starting with one of Facebook’s first big controversies, the launch of its news feed. Despite constant user complaints and criticism, Facebook has continued its rapid growth, and its reputation appears relatively unscathed by the release of The Social Network, a largely unflattering film about the company’s founding. (I suppose that last point is debatable, but at least Zuckerberg doesn’t appear to be worried about the movie anymore.)

Barker just returned from maternity leave and she said she will be forming her own communications firm for early-stage startups. Which startups? One possibility is Asana, co-founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early employee Justin Rosenstein.

[image via Flickr/Brian Solis]