Mike Isaac

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More Moves Abroad for Twitter’s Top Brass as Three Execs Head Overseas

Twitter VP Katie Jacobs Stanton

Three of Twitter’s top execs are moving away from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, charged with overseeing international offices across multiple countries.

The changes, noted in the three executives’ Twitter profiles on Thursday, are likely an effort to continue building out the company’s international presence and leadership, while potentially grooming Twitter’s U.S.-based executives for eventual expanded roles within the organization.

While Twitter has obviously seen significant traction in the United States over the past seven years, the company still needs to beef up its user base and advertising accounts overseas, areas that have the largest potential for growth — and, conversely, areas rich with competition from non-U.S.-based social networks.

Katie Jacobs Stanton, vice president of international growth, will move to one of Twitter’s European offices — perhaps the Paris office, as Stanton’s recent tweets suggest she’s spent quite a bit of time there.

Twitter VP Shailesh Rao

Stanton, who joined Twitter three years ago, already spends much of her time outside the U.S., having opened offices in places like Japan, Brazil and Europe. She works more on the consumer side, speaking to high-profile folks of the region and explaining why they should be all over Twitter (which, in theory, leads to trickle-down growth from fans and followers of a particular influential person). Once Twitter establishes a foothold on the consumer end, that’s when the sales teams can come in and start pushing Twitter’s promoted products.

Chloe Sladden continues to be vice president of media based in Twitter’s San Francisco office. While Stanton heads up overseas development and is aligned with Twitter’s media org, Sladden handles all the media partnerships, including TV, sports, politics and journalism — a big job for a company which makes its bread and butter on advertising.

On the sales side, VP of international sales Shailesh Rao will move from San Francisco to Singapore, heading up direct sales for the Asia Pacific, Latin America and emerging markets regions. It’s a pretty obvious fit for Rao, who was poached from his Google gig a little more than a year ago, where he was head of display ads for Asia. Rao joins ex-Googler and now head of mid-market sales Aliza Knox in Twitter’s Singapore office.

Twitter VP Ali Jafari

Ali Jafari, a director of sales at Twitter for the past two and a half years, will move to the company’s Dublin office, where he’ll be vice president of direct sales for Europe. Jafari comes from previous positions at Shutterfly and Ask.com, as well as a sales director position at Excite@Home. Jafari will join Director of Mid-Market Sales Stephen McIntyre — also a former Googler — in Ireland.

It’s worth noting that all three VPs are former Googlers — not to mention Xoogler CEO Dick Costolo — and it’s quite a Googley bit of corporate maneuvering to move top executives around outside the U.S. and see if they succeed, then perhaps eventually elevate them inside the organization to larger roles (c.f. Dennis Woodside and his move from leading Google EMEA to eventually landing the Motorola CEO spot). Keep your eyes peeled to see if it works out.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus