Twitter Rivalry: Goodby's Geiger vs. Wieden's Gleeson

Long-time rivals Wieden + Kennedy and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners are creative powerhouses with solid digital cred. Both have the talent base and industry awards to prove it.

So how creative are their top digital executives — Mike Geiger at Goodby and Renny Gleeson at Wieden — when it comes to the world outside their office doors? On Twitter, for example.

Both tweet regularly, about 7 to 12 times a week, but similarities stop there: Geiger, GSP’s chief digital officer, mostly uses Twitter as a formal broadcast medium, passing along links on a range of topics with scant personal input. Gleeson, W+K’s global director of interactive strategy, is more casual. He often addresses followers directly and is quick to insert his viewpoint.

Here’s the way they stack up:

Geiger has more followers (4,704) than Gleeson (2,645) but only about a quarter as many total tweets. When it comes to lists following each of them, Geiger is on 347 Twitter lists, while Gleeson lags, being included on “only” 193 lists.

How about listening? Renny is way ahead, following 805 people, compared to the 273 that Geiger follows.

To get flavor of their Twitter personalities, we compiled a sample of posts from Nov. 7-Nov. 20.

First Geiger:

Next up Gleeson, who tapped Twitter for his work with W+K-backed Portland Incubator Experiment, PIE.

Finally, both execs link their Twitter account to their blogs. Here again they differ. At presstime, the latest post on Gleeson’s blog was Nov. 2. For Geiger, it was August 26.