Dave Linabury is Senior Vice President, Social Media Experience Director at Campbell-Ewald. He provides leadership to the Social Media Group providing insights and strategic direction for the agency’s clients. He is a nationally recognized blogger and is a frequent speaker and panelist at major social media forums.
Dave has been working digitally since 1984 when he bought his first Macintosh. By 1987, he had authored two programs and by 1994 won his first award for Web site design. Since then he has worked with a variety of companies, including the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories, IDEO and Disney. He has won over 20 web awards, including a Webby for his personal blog, Davezilla. Dave joined Campbell-Ewald in 2004, the General Motors Innovation Zone — a think tank for advanced technologies.
Dave’s background in social media began in 1999 when he became one of the first bloggers at a time when blogs were being referred to as “news filters.” In 2000, he began assisting Michel, a developer in France on one of the first PHP-MySQL based blogging applications called B2. In 2004, they turned B2 over to Matt Mullenwegg who renamed it as WordPress. It is now the most commonly used software for blogging.
In 2005, while Facebook was still an internal hobby at Harvard, Dave and another CE employee invented spidering software to track blogs for Campbell-Ewald. Others joined in as forerunners of CE’s Social Media Group to create two major initiatives for Chervolet: The Tahoe Apprentice, a build your own video tool, and HHRya, a mobile video contest. Tahoe Apprentice garnered over 22,000 consumer generated videos, and HHRya fared even better, with 54,000 mobile video entries. His later projects included NAVYForMoms, an online community nearly 30,000 supporting the mothers of our troops. The community has been featured on Oprah, in Wired and in the New York Times. It won the Silver Effie in 2009, Best Military Site of 2009 and the Gold Echo Award.
As the Director of Social Media at Campbell-Ewald, Dave has increased staff from two in 2006, to 26 in 2009. His team works on nearly all of Campbell-Ewald's clients. They currently manage communities, social networks and profiles for 16 clients.