The Top Technology Communicators of 2010

Originally published September 2010.

Edited on Jun 27, 2026.

Technology has become the most covered, most scrutinized, and most politically charged sector in the country. The smartphone war is on. Antitrust regulators are circling Mountain View. Facebook just crossed 500 million users and is taking incoming on privacy every week. Steve Jobs is selling more iPhones than anyone thought possible and not answering many questions about it.

The communicators who run press, policy, and reputation inside the largest technology companies have never sat closer to the CEO. Here is the 2010 list of the operators doing the most consequential work.

How the list was built

Three things mattered. Visibility of the work — the volume and quality of coverage produced under the communicator’s leadership in the last twelve months. Strategic impact — whether the company’s position in the market shifted during the communicator’s tenure. Peer recognition — cross-references from senior people inside and outside the company who name the individual as influential.

No vote. No submission. Editorial only.

The list

Katie Cotton — Apple. The most studied communicator in the industry, and the least quoted. Cotton has run Apple’s worldwide communications since the late 1990s, and the discipline she imposes — controlled product launches, no proactive press, message rationing — is now copied across the sector. The iPhone 4 launch, the iPad launch, and the management of the Antennagate response this summer all bear her fingerprints. Operators study Apple’s communications operation because it is the only one in technology that consistently treats restraint as the entire strategy.

Frank Shaw — Microsoft. Shaw joined Microsoft as corporate vice president of communications in late 2009 after running technology practice at Waggener Edstrom for two decades. His brief is the hardest in the industry: rebuild the public story of a company that has spent ten years being narrated as the loser in mobile, search, and consumer software. The early read is favorable. Shaw has tightened executive visibility, reset the tone on Windows Phone 7, and pushed a clearer enterprise narrative around cloud — the work Steve Ballmer’s team will be judged against over the next two years.

Rachel Whetstone — Google. Whetstone runs communications and public policy at Google, and the public policy half of the job is now larger than the communications half. The company is under antitrust review on both sides of the Atlantic, took a public stand against the Chinese government earlier this year, and is fighting privacy battles in every European capital. Whetstone is the executive holding the company’s public position together while the engineering side ships product. Few communicators in any sector are running a more difficult portfolio.

Jon Iwata — IBM. Iwata, senior vice president of marketing and communications, has spent the last two years executing Smarter Planet — the most coherent corporate repositioning campaign anywhere in technology. IBM is no longer marketing itself as a hardware vendor or a services firm. It is marketing itself as the instrumentation layer of the global economy. The campaign has redefined how the company is covered in the business press and shifted analyst conversations away from the legacy narrative. Operators are taking notes.

Elliot Schrage — Facebook. Schrage runs communications and public policy at Facebook, where every quarter brings a new privacy controversy and the company is now the subject of a documentary feature film opening in theaters this fall. The work is reactive by necessity — the product moves faster than the messaging — but Schrage has built a senior team and a Washington presence that did not exist eighteen months ago. The company will need both. The privacy questions are not going away.

Bill Wohl — SAP. Wohl, chief communications officer at SAP since 2007, runs one of the most international communications operations in technology. The Co-CEO transition earlier this year was managed cleanly under his oversight, and the company’s effort to reposition around mobility and in-memory computing is the kind of multi-year story that pays off only with sustained communications discipline.

Honorable mentions

Bill Calder, Intel. Long-time Intel communications hand running a global operation with very few public mistakes.

John Earnhardt, Cisco. Earnhardt and the broader Cisco communications team have managed John Chambers’s executive visibility consistently for over a decade.

Bob Pearson, Dell. Pearson left Dell earlier this year, but the social-media-first communications operation he built there remains one of the most-copied playbooks in technology.

What this list rewards

The most influential technology communicators in 2010 are not the loudest. They are the ones whose work has produced strategic outcomes the company could not have produced without them. The bar is the work.

This is the first edition of an annual reference. Future editions will revise the list as the companies and the operators move.