Google’s Blog Strategist and Manager, Karen Wickre, Departs After Nine Years

In an announcement fittingly posted on her own blog, Karen Wickre, Google’s senior manager of global communications & public affairs, says she has left the company. Wickre launched and masterminded the company’s blog strategy during her nine-year tenure at the company.

Her farewell was something of a love letter to Google and the experiences she’s had there. While she didn’t say what her next step would be, she said it would be a “plunge into an exciting new realm.”

“If you know me you know ‘starry-eyed’ isn’t the first descriptor that comes to mind,” she wrote. “But trust me: Google is an astonishing, life-changing place to be.”

Wickre (along with Googler Nate Tyler) was behind Google’s move into blogging, beginning with the Official Google Blog in 2004. Now, the company communicates via more than 70 blogs — some centered on products [Inside AdWords Blog], others on audiences [developers], others on countries [Google Australia], and some on vertical interest topics [Google Public Policy Blog]. (Our own Vanessa Fox worked with Wickre on launching what’s now the Google Webmaster Central Blog.) Everything published gets read by others — people on the immediate team as well as a PR person — before it’s posted, but Wickre says the team tries not to “wordsmith [a post] to death.”

She was instrumental in establishing these policies behind Google’s blogging, and generally in pushing for more openness and communication — including the sponsorship of conferences like BlogHer, a gathering of thousands of largely female bloggers.

Wickre’s last day at Google was last Thursday.

As beneficiaries of Google’s Wickre-led blog communications, the team at Search Engine Land want to congratulate Karen on her accomplishments at Google and wish her the best in her new endeavours.