GM Mike Gillis Joins Twitter

If you’re not following Vancouver Canucks’ GM Mike Gillis on Twitter yet – he’s at http://twitter.com/GMMikeGillis – you’re one of the few. Only a couple of hours since joining Twitter, Gillis already has more than 2,700 followers.

Being the first NHL team executive to join the millions of tweeps out there, I hope he quickly gets a good grasp of things and tweets interesting insights on the what it takes to run a Stanley Cup contending team in a hockey-mad market. Or at least I hope he tweets more interesting things than what he ate to power up for his latest bike ride.

This should be an interesting social media experiment for the team. After initially being reluctant to embrace blogs and social media, the Canucks now host several blogs on their official site, engage other bloggers – us included – in their initiatives, and are fairly active on Twitter. That said, Twitter is a different beast and each of Gillis’ tweets will be broadcast and re-tweeted over and over again. Anything he says on Twitter will be praised, criticized and dissected instantaneously by Canucks fans.

Of course, these sorts of discussions already go on daily among Canucks fans, but we’ll have to wait and see to what level Gillis participates in them. Obviously, there are a lot of areas he can’t talk about publicly or in 140 characters (e.g. personnel decisions, etc.), but there are definitely some opportunities for a higher level of engagement (e.g. ticket prices, etc.).

When Gillis first talked about joining Twitter, he stated that it was his intention to connect more closely to Canucks fans. Now that he’s on it, it’ll be interesting to see how much he actually does.

For now though, we await his first tweet.