September Session — Chris Vary of Weber Shandwick

Come join us for the relaunch meet­ing of the Social Media Club Dal­las. We are excited to bring folks together to hear best prac­tices from agen­cies, cor­po­rate mar­keters, and pro­fes­sional consultants.

Agenda:

• Kick­off
• Lead­er­ship Intros
• Mis­sion of the Club
• What it takes to be a good Social Media Club member
• Guest Speaker : Chris Vary @chrisvary

About our Speaker

Chris Vary
Vice Pres­i­dent
Weber Shand­wick Dig­i­tal Group
Dal­las, Texas

Chris pos­sesses over 16 years of expe­ri­ence in the cre­ative and inter­ac­tive space. Cur­rently, Chris leads the Weber Shand­wick Dal­las dig­i­tal and social media prac­tice, over­see­ing pro­grams that lever­age new media tech­nolo­gies. Clients cur­rently include Amer­i­can Air­lines, Gen­eral Motors, Ver­i­zon, Pep­sico and Honeywell.

Chris leads teams that have cre­ated and syn­di­cated  over 300 dig­i­tal sto­ries for brands like Amer­i­can Air­lines, GM-brand, Pre­stone, Auto­lite, Chevro­let, Sat­urn, Cadil­lac, and Saab. Many of these videos have earned tens, and in some cases hun­dreds, of thou­sands of views on video-sharing plat­forms like YouTube. 

With Gen­eral Motors, Chris cre­ated GM’s first iPhone appli­ca­tion and car­ried a lead­er­ship role in the devel­op­ment and cre­ative exe­cu­tion of the IGot­Shot­gun Video Enter­tain­ment site and Chevy Aveo5 Livin’ Large Col­lege Cab social media pro­mo­tion. For Pre­stone,  he devel­oped a social media pro­gram to engage blog­gers and gen­er­ate aware­ness in the social media space for the brand’s “Get Road Ready” campaign.

Chris cur­rently over­sees lead­er­ship direc­tion for Amer­i­can Air­lines’ social media pro­grams, includ­ing Face­book, YouTube, Twit­ter and LinkedIn. He leads a team of both Amer­i­can Air­lines and Weber Shand­wick employ­ees that make up Amer­i­can Air­lines Social Media.

Prior to join­ing Weber Shand­wick, Chris was the direc­tor of the Ford account at Chan­nel­Net where he man­aged Dealer Con­nec­tion Web sites for 6,500 Ford deal­ers. Before join­ing Chan­nel Net, Chris worked at RouteOne where he over­saw design of the company’s appli­ca­tion systems. 

Prior to join­ing Chan­nel­Net, Chris was an inter­ac­tive strat­egy man­ager at Young & Rubi­cam where he over­saw the devel­op­ment of Web sites for clients, includ­ing Ford Motor Com­pany, Vis­teon and MGM Grand. Chris made his ini­tial foray into mar­ket­ing as a print designer at BBDO where his design and tech­ni­cal exper­tise was in high demand as the field of inter­ac­tive mar­ket­ing first emerged. 

Chris’ client exper­tise is vast, hav­ing served the dig­i­tal needs of com­pa­nies like Chrysler, Kmart and Heineken. His work has been rec­og­nized through national and regional com­mu­ni­ca­tions awards pre­sented by PR Week, the Pub­lic Rela­tions Soci­ety of Amer­ica, the Holmes Report, and the Detroit Chap­ter of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Busi­ness Communicators. 

Chris con­sid­ers him­self a “vid­iot,” some­one with an obses­sion for all things video gam­ing. He is proud to note that he owns just about every con­sole system—even hark­ing back to the days of the Commodore64—and many PC rigs to sup­port his love for gam­ing. Chris also main­tains a per­sonal blog at varycreative.com. He earned his bachelor’s degree in graphic design and mar­ket­ing from the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. GO BLUE!

After work, you’re most likely to find me …

… design­ing Web sites

… play­ing video games and explor­ing web technologies

… spend­ing time with my wife and two children

Years in PR: 16

Years with Weber Shand­wick: 4

Reg­is­tra­tion