We recently connected with Alex Shebar and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Alex, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Influencer marketing has become incredibly important in today’s marketplace – it’s a surefire way to attract and audience who’s interested in what you’re doing, promoted by someone real that they trust.
It’s also incredibly easy to do it badly.
And this is what I kept seeing. I grew my own Instagram to about 50k followers and was being invited to work with businesses, but they didn’t know what they wanted or how to get it done and so they kept making mistakes and frustrating both sides – myself and themselves.
So I started NYC Social Club (NYCSocialClub.com) to help these small businesses create campaigns or run events that promote what they’re doing through specifically targeted influencers, and it’s been great. We’ve grown large enough now that we’ve worked with brands like HBO, Disney, Dunkin Donuts, Brooks Brothers and more but our bread and butter – our heart – is still with small businesses. We want to help them be promoted and grow in all the right and interested ways.
Now, no stress, no frustration, and easy enough to make it all work!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m Alex, I’m the former Senior Director of Community for Yelp and I’ve also worked for brands like Bumble, Product Hunt, Alamo Drafthouse and more.
I know that everything in this life has a cost – and if it’s not a financial cost, it’s a time cost or an energy cost. I know that most businesses want to do things like influencer marketing – they know it’s important and it has a great return on investment – they just don’t have the time or the mental headspace to make it happen.
This is what I can do for you! I love connecting your amazing businesses with the right content creators to help promote it.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When I was growing up, I wanted to be a journalist. I knew it was what I was going to be. I went to school for it, I trained, I got a job at a newspaper and then I realized… I hated it.
I was covering three to midnight breaking news, so I stood in front of a police scanner waiting until someone was shot, stabbed, something burned down or someone was murdered, and then I would go to those crime scenes, by myself, and I was 22 and I hated everything about it.
So I changed.
I didn’t have any training in community building and specific marketing but I loved doing it, so I threw my passion and dedication into things like planning city wide movie nights or working with small businesses to help them grow in whatever way I could. And Yelp found me and asked if I wanted to be one of their first ever community managers and how could I say no? And it’s only been focused like that since then.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I love the motto that: the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
I was so headstrong and thought for so long that if I hadn’t put it into action – if I hadn’t trained, if I didn’t have the background, if I didn’t have the skills – then I couldn’t do it. Why even try. But trying is the only way to do anything! Even if you just dip your toe into something to see how it feels, hey, what’s the issue?
None. None issues!
So that’s how I’ve been doing it since then.
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If you’d like to work together to run an influencer campaign for your brand, email us at [email protected]!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://NYCSocialClub.com
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/Alexshebar
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/EatPlayPixels
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-shebar
- Twitter: https://Twitter.com/Alexshebar
- Youtube: https://Youtube.com/Alexshebar
- Other: https://alexshebar.my.canva.site/
Image Credits
Just me