Sophie Vershbow: Social Media Strategy and Brand Outreach
What is the most critical skill for any social media manager? In our latest Art of Sway episode, we dug into this burning question and much more with our expert guest, Sophie Vershbow.
Sophie Vershbow is a freelance journalist and social media manager based in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Vulture, Esquire, and more. Following a decade-long career in book publishing, she now leads social media strategy at Eventbrite.
Listen along as podcast host Danielle Wiley and Sophie break down the most important elements in meaningful brand outreach on social media, including:
- How brands can bring more personality to their outreach game
- How curated brand personalities on social media can foster meaningful, targeted outreach
- Why too many time-sucking approvals can ruin a brand’s social content
- The two most important social media engagement metrics to watch in 2023
- The frustrating privilege of “just quit Twitter”
A few standout moments to be listening for:
- (10:39, Sophie): I have hired a few social media managers to work with me now over the years and I often get asked what’s the biggest thing you look for? I always say, impeccable judgment.
- (11:27, Sophie): I cannot think of anything more detrimental to quality social media content than 10 rounds of approval from people who are not on these platforms all day.
- (11:59, Sophie): When you’re trying to sound relatable and you spend two weeks workshopping a meme, just don’t do it.
- (16:49, Sophie): I’m currently putting a lot of thought into what I want to really pay attention to for 2023 and I want to be paying a lot more attention specifically to shares and saves, really that stickiness of the content.
Episode 13: Sophie Vershbow Transcript
Danielle Wiley: Welcome to The Art of Sway. This is a podcast that brings you inside the world of marketing through the lens of influence. I’m your host, Danielle Wiley. Each week through candid conversations with industry insiders, we will uncover how influencer marketing is making an impact across all consumer buying habits and is changing the way we talk to each other. Let’s dive in.
Danielle Wiley: Sophie Vershbow is a freelance journalist and social media marketer based in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, vulture, Esquire and more. Following a decade-long career in book publishing, she now leads social media strategy at Eventbrite. I’m so excited for folks to listen to this episode. I met Sophie on Twitter first as just an admirer of her social media work for Random House and then as her own human. She is a hugely successful social media manager. We talked a lot about the ins and outs of that profession. We also spent a good bit of time talking about the current Twitter situation and what Twitter going away would mean for freelance journalists and others who rely on the platform for networking and promotion. It’s a terrific conversation, and I hope y’all enjoy it.
Danielle Wiley: Hi, welcome. I’m so glad we could do this and that you are willing to come on. I’m very excited for this conversation.
Sophie Vershbow: Thanks so much for having me.
Danielle Wiley: Why don’t we start with your journey, because I think it’s a really interesting one. I just would love to hear how you are, I’m not trying to make you embarrassed, kind of legendary in the social media manager space. You’re so famous. To just hear how all of that came about and how your career arc developed.
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, well I’m a little too old for social media to have been my intended career. It wasn’t really a career path, so I actually started as a book publicist out of college at Simon and Schuster and kind of did a very traditional assistant associate publicist role. Figured it out, it wasn’t for me, and then freaked out that I didn’t have any 21st century skills because I worked in book publishing. I actually went and I worked at two really, really small agencies for just a year, not even worth mentioning.
Sophie Vershbow: They were strange positions I had, but I really did get that digital marketing crash course and started managing platforms, figuring out how agencies work with different brands. Then I was able to take that when I decided to return to publishing. I went back to Penguin Random House where I ran social media strategy for six and a half years, and then I just actually made a big career change this spring. I left book publishing and I now run social media strategy at Eventbrite, so that’s really how my social media career, it really sort of just rolled into each other when that sort of work was starting to happen on the agency level around that time.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah, it’s very funny because my first job was doing book publicity.
Sophie Vershbow: I love it.
Danielle Wiley: It’s not even on my LinkedIn because it was just so weird, but it was an agoraphobic with a literary PR agency in Park Slope in her basement of her mansion. We had gone to the same college and so that’s how I got the job and literally the day I interviewed someone was like, “Don’t take this.” She had a crew of young people working there and someone said, “Don’t take this job.” She would take on all the publicity work for books that didn’t feel like they were getting enough publicity from their publisher. It was mostly business books.
Danielle Wiley: If she had an event that she had to go to that evening, she’d have to spend the whole day working herself. I was actually kind of sad, working herself up to it. So she’d get to work in the morning and she’d have on fish nets and a robe and her hair all done up and then throughout the day she’d slowly get ready. We all chain smoke. This is 1995, we all chain smoked …
Sophie Vershbow: Oh my God.
Danielle Wiley: … In this basement. That’s where I watched the OJ verdict. We all sat on the floor of her office smoking and watching the verdict.
Sophie Vershbow: I was just going to say honestly, those entry level publishing jobs, it’s like you are in it together. I’m still really good friends with one of the assistants who I was an assistant with back in 2011. You have worse stories together and my experience was nothing like that. I worked for Simon and Schuster. It was just being a publicist is not the job for me. But yeah, you deal with a lot being on a publicity end.
Danielle Wiley: Oh, it’s a lot, but the first book I worked on was the Women’s Guide to Online Services. This is totally dating me, but it was a book. I’m like, “This is AOL, this is Compuserve, this the Well,” I’m not even remembering some of these weird ones that don’t exist anymore and that’s how I learned mean, who knew anything about anything in 1995, but I learned about it from the author.
Sophie Vershbow: I love that, and I honestly think, I mean if you talk to most people who work in social, I think it’s really interesting to talk to these younger kids, is probably the wrong thing to call them, but these younger folks coming into the industry who have social media degrees or go and get some sort of graduate degree. I’ve been asked to speak at some graduate courses like guest speak and I’m like, this is a thing that we do now because I feel like most people, like anyone our age or older and probably younger than me too were self-taught, we figured it out. We explored. I still find myself Googling what does Instagram do for this new feature every single day.
Danielle Wiley: To me, so much of social media is intuitive and you learn … Anyone I’ve ever mentored or if I have interns, the first thing I say is you have to be a user and you have to just live in this space where you are being, I mean I majored in sociology so I probably see it through that cultural study lens. You’re just watching how people are interacting and what they’re doing and if you have a marketing brain and are observant, you’re going to start making connections and figure out how you can do that better or the same or different or you just got to do it.
Sophie Vershbow: It is. So much of social and I think TikTok is really highlighting this is call and response. How can I take what you did and make it my own? I remember this was a big thing when I first got into social was trying to get people we worked with in more traditional offices to understand that if we’re heads down on our phone, we’re working. Because I will make the argument that me scrolling Twitter all day, even in a personal capacity is my actual job because that is where I get the ideas for half the content that I suggest we put out is just by being on the platforms in a personal capacity.
Danielle Wiley: Absolutely. Part of what you’re really good at is giving a personality to brands. I again, dating myself back in the day, that wasn’t a thing. A person has a personality and a brand is a brand and they can’t talk like they’re a person unless … I remember having conversations at [inaudible 00:07:00] forever ago. Well, maybe if they have a mascot and the mascot … I mean, I guess it’s still it like with Duo Lingo, they kind of do that. How do you figure out what the POV of a brand should be? Especially when we’re talking about a brand that’s been around forever and was never thought of as really having an anthropomorphized personality?
Sophie Vershbow: Totally, so when I came into Random House, it was very much we are a brand and we are talking to you. We are up here, we are explaining things to you. That was the full dynamic. I really don’t think that most brands to be clear, every exception to every rule, but I think in a lot of cases just talking as a capital B brand is not really a successful way of reaching actual consumers. I always say we have actual social media advertising, like things that go through Ad Manager for a reason. That is where you reach people with your things that look like ads often. What we’re putting out on social needs to mimic actual content on the platform. Because of that I always really think about who is the customer for this? What is that key persona? At Random House, of course, we’re publishing, we were publishing every kind of book.
Sophie Vershbow: I worked for the biggest division, the biggest adult division, so nonfiction, fiction, commercial, literary, diet books, cookbooks, everything every which way is you have to talk to everyone in a specific way. This is what I think is really hard is when you think of it as a brand that you’re just trying to talk to everyone with everything instead of saying, this post is talking to this kind of person. How can we be specific to this person in this moment? I think part of doing that is putting a personality to it. At Random House we said, okay, we have all these different personalities, but what’s the number one? What’s the one who’s going to be following us on social? Especially a platform like Instagram, which is really what we built up the biggest while I was there. It was okay, our main persona is the bookworm.
Sophie Vershbow: She’s your best friend who leads book club, who always has great recommendations. She’s not pretentious or overly thoughtful about, I only read this kind of book. She’s all for discovery, she’s all for encouraging reading and how much it makes her life better. Then we sort of grounded our strategy in that. You can make it more specific, but I think when you ground your social on these more individualized personas, it makes it a lot more human. It makes it seem less like a brand without having to be like Wendy’s and just start cursing or they always change the model people always bring up Wendy’s, but I do think there’s a line you can hit between sounding like a person and having to … God, who just tweeted a really … Was it Tampax who just did a really weird one?
Danielle Wiley: Yes, like the, “We’re in you.”
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, okay. We don’t need to do that to not feel like a brand is my feeling.
Danielle Wiley: You don’t need to make me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
Sophie Vershbow: I almost respected it for how insane it was. We talked about it, but the idea of trying to get that, the idea of the emails I would receive if I had published that tweet, just kept me up at night.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah. Well, speaking of that, I mean, this doesn’t have to be specific to the work that you’ve done, but in general, what do you think are best practices? I mean, a social media manager has to have a certain degree of autonomy and be able to, I mean stuff moves quickly. You have to be able to run with stuff. Is it, what’s that saying? Do now apologize late? I can’t think of what the saying is, but that just make it happen.
Sophie Vershbow: Ask for forgiveness later.
Danielle Wiley: Yes, ask for forgiveness. Is that the best policy? I mean, presuming you have some kind of guardrail set forth at the beginning, right? Some places you for sure won’t go?
Sophie Vershbow: I have hired a few social media managers to work with me now over the years and I often get asked what’s the biggest thing you look for? I always say, impeccable judgment. I need you to understand who we are and I need to be able to trust you to put out a one-off tweet that’s a good idea that it might not be our top performing post. We’re not talking about a campaign tweet that we’re sending around because it’s like has some big like ROI or something. We’re talking about a one-off tweet. I need to know that you can do that without me having to make sure you didn’t get us in trouble. That is baseline. At Random House, we did not really have a content overview policy. I was the Random House account. If I had an idea, I posted it.
Sophie Vershbow: For the most part, that was very successful. At Eventbrite we have a much more formal content approval policy, but it really is right now just me and my social media manager, we’re not leveling up all of that content like evergreen content to everyone, and I think that’s really important. I cannot think of anything more detrimental to quality social media content than 10 rounds of approval from people who are not on these platforms all day. If you talk, I was going to say, if you talk to social media people, that’s your whole job.
Sophie Vershbow: I am sure you have heard that is a number one source of frustration for people in this job function is when they end up in situations like that. Because I think it’s pretty universal knowledge among social media professionals that that is the worst thing you can do is too many rounds of approvals. It’s not going to get up on time, it’s not going to be relevant anymore and it’s going to sound overworked. Like individual people don’t put that much time into their social media content. When you’re trying to sound relatable and you spend two weeks workshopping a meme, just don’t do it. It’s not then applicable to your brand is how I feel.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a different paradigm than brand marketing of old where everything is scripted and everything goes through all these layers of approval. I mean, it’s just for kind of old school people who have been around forever on that side of the table, it has to be a big shift, a big shift in how they approach everything.
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, and I think that there are exceptions to that. I always say there’s a really big difference between evergreen community-building content that we’re driving and content we’re making to fit into a larger campaign. If Eventbrite is launching a major new product for their organizers, that’s not my responsibility as a social media person to say, “Oh, I’m going to reinvent every keyword you’ve already selected for this.” There’s probably existing assets and copies for a larger campaign that we are fitting our style into. That to me, is where those approvals and revisions come in. It’s not just about us, it’s not about just community-building. It really is more cross-functional where we have other people’s interests much higher on our hierarchy of needs for what we’re trying to accomplish.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah, and what do you think, what’s that percentage? I mean, we talk about it a lot here just with the social media posts and engagement we do on my personal Twitter and LinkedIn and then also for the company and we kind of go back and forth and are always playing around with it, but I’m always curious to hear what other people think. That ideal percentage between promotional stuff that does fit in with a campaign or is pre-scheduled and then that Oreo Super Bowl moment just being on call to chime in with the brilliance.
Sophie Vershbow:Percentage, that was always quoted to me was it’s supposed to be 20 to 25%.
Danielle Wiley: 20 to 25% of the spur of the moment?
Sophie Vershbow: Oh no, sorry, 20 to 25% super promotional. That’s like the percentage I always remember hearing back in the day, which is not possible when you work for a brand and you have stuff to promote. I don’t know what an actual percentage is, but what I will say is I am really trying, when I work with companies to work at how we can shift our thinking around this, where there’s going to be the blatantly promotional stuff. We have a new product out, we want you to go to this link, but the line between evergreen and promotional content when it comes to general brand marketing and top of funnel awareness is a lot grayer. That’s where I think really creative social media teams make the difference. Because we all talk about the Duo Lingo account. I brought it up when asked about an example in my interview. Who hasn’t? It’s all on our radar, but I would do anything to see a chart about what kind of actual sales effect that has had.
Sophie Vershbow: A lot of the brands with the big TikTok accounts that get big numbers often have nothing to do with their brands. It’ll just be warring mascots or something where, I mean, it’s really not touching on that top of funnel awareness. I’m not saying that’s wrong, I don’t know the answers here. My point of view is that I’m always trying to find that gray area between what can we have that’s building top of funnel awareness that is promotional and selling the business but without people getting it as much, without them being so aware that this is an ad for something?
Danielle Wiley: That’s interesting question. What are your favorite metric to look at when you’re analyzing the work that your social media manager is doing or that you’ve done? I mean, it’s hard to track to sales. You can’t necessarily tie a tweet to a sale or a download.
Sophie Vershbow: Certainly not. I’m always interested in clicks out when that’s relevant. Although, all the platforms are deprioritizing things that click out from platforms. So we’re trying to do that less. It was the same at Random House. Engagement for me is so much more important than impressions. I really want to see how people are resonating with this to that extent. Engagement rate is something that we’re measuring very closely.
Sophie Vershbow: It’s December while we’re recording this, so I’m currently putting a lot of thought into what I want to really pay attention to for 2023 and I want to be paying a lot more attention specifically to shares and saves, really that stickiness of the content. I will not be the first person to say that. Organic social is really hard right now. Metrics are down, engagements are down, impressions are down. I think when looking at what’s important, I might be more interested in a post with 20 saves than a post with 10 saves, but more engagements. What is making our content really resonate with people and have that sort of viral factor of I want to share this, I want to come back to it. That’s something I really want to focus on a lot more for next year and look at how that sort of metric is affecting our content versus just views, ’cause I think it might be more valuable.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah, I love save. I mean I feel like saves have been the quiet undersung hero …
Sophie Vershbow: Totally.
Danielle Wiley: … In the background. Talking about algorithms, this is really interesting to me because the podcast team at Sway is always getting after me to record these first person video promotional reels of each episode. Really, I cannot think of very many things I dislike more than that than doing that, but the algorithm loves when someone’s talking to the camera and those just totally outperform any, pretty much any other reel that we put up there, and they love reels. As a social media manager for a brand that has to be tricky because it’s one thing to put out a tweet where it’s just this voice coming out of the ether and you don’t know exactly who’s saying it.
Sophie Vershbow: Totally. Look, I’m a Twitter girl, I don’t want my face on camera. I think there’s just a really hard switch for a lot of us who are kind of think, I don’t want to be on film. I don’t want my face as part of this. I felt when I worked at Random House, very connected to that brand in full candor, I sort of was our consumer tweeting. I very much could kind of go into myself for that a lot. My face would’ve ever been the face of Random House, why would I ever have done that? Absolutely not. I’m not interested. On this team, that was something I was actually very upfront about when looking for a new position this spring is I am not that person. You should not be hiring me to be the talent of your camera. That’s not my job. I work in strategy now.
Sophie Vershbow: When building this team, that was definitely a big priority was making sure we have an amazing social media manager who is our main on-camera persona for TikTok and reels. I think it was important for us when we hired that … That was part of the job description. That wasn’t something we were going to throw on you when you came in. I think a lot of companies are just like, “Oh, this person could be on TikTok or this person.” No, that’s a skill something we’re working towards. Yeah, that was definitely part of our job description was must be willing to be the person and the face on this.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah. You need someone who’s not … I mean, the anxiety level that I have and can I hold the camera any higher? There cannot be any three chins and I’m trying to get in a good angle and torturous, so you need someone who likes to do it.
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, I pop up every once in a while for something just to help with workload. I actually have one I have to record and I’m like dreading it just because I’m more nervous filming a 20-second TikTok than I am presenting a deck to marketing leaders. That is not something I’m super comfortable with. I will admit I am now hooked on TikTok. I have gotten bit bad by the TikTok bug and I’m utterly fascinated by the platform and just really so impressed with what some of these creators are doing. It’s a wild place, but it’s been really cool to finally take the dive in.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah, my kids send me stuff and our team is awesome and spend so much time on there and we have luckily a whole TikTok, Slack channel that’s kind of sharing curated good things, so I can try to dive in. As someone who started with Twitter forever, years ago, it’s hard to get into something new, especially saying it’s so time sucky.
Sophie Vershbow: It is so addictive, and to be clear, I have no intention to put my face on it. I made one for my dog to quite literally learn how to use the platform for professional purposes. Now I just actually use his account to post videos of him and can’t stop.
Danielle Wiley: Oh, he’s very cute. One of the things I’m super excited to talk to you about is Twitter, because it’s the level I was talking to Leah Haman about this and the level of sadness I have over the fact that it’s possibly going away and changing is kind of shocking to me. I didn’t realize how important it was and that I would have this emotional reaction. One of the things, I mean, I would just love in general your thoughts on it, but one of the things that has really been sticking with me and seeing people talk about what’s going on as these people are announcing that they’re leaving and I just can’t be on there anymore. This is the last straw.
Danielle Wiley: Not to sound overly woke, but that does seem to me to be coming from a very privileged place because there are people who rely on, it’s been around for a long time and there are people who rely on Twitter to make their money, to do their networking, to promote themselves, to do all their research. I would say that you are one of those. I’m just curious what your whole perspective is. It’s very difficult for me to see all these posts, see you later whenever I decide it’s time to leave. I’ll be here on Mastodon with its servers. It’s so complicated to me.
Sophie Vershbow: I’m not joining a Mastodon server. It’s like, stop trying to make this happen. I’m not doing it.
Danielle Wiley: Why are there server … Why do I have to know about servers? The whole thing’s [inaudible 00:22:42] .
Sophie Vershbow: I know, so I have such complicated feelings. I think a tweet I sent a few weeks ago really sums it up, which is that Twitter going away would be amazing for my mental health and terrible for my career. Besides doing social media, despite the fact that my job is in social media strategy, I actually don’t care about Twitter that much for that, but as a freelance writer, it is basically how I have my entire career. I didn’t go to J School, I really started connecting with editors on Twitter. I did a lot of cold pitching and got so many non responses. One of my first big breaks was connecting with a Vogue editor on Twitter who liked a tweet I wrote and then us connecting and I wrote eight stories for him. I get contacted a lot to write stories based on tweets of mine.
Sophie Vershbow: I also use Twitter for a lot of my outreach to people. For example, I’m writing for Esquire about what Twitter going away would mean for the book community and for writers of that particular sort. Of course, all of my outreach to get those sources to talk to is through Twitter. I would genuinely need, I’m going to have to sort of relearn a little bit how to be a journalist off this platform, which I’m sure is very good from a growth standpoint, but it would absolutely make it more challenging for me to find sources. There’s a lot of services you can use. Well, you give them your call out for information. I never use those. Normally, I truly just put a-
Danielle Wiley: Like Carro or-
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, and they put you together, but I think what I really love about Twitter is that it’s just random people. I wrote an article about parallel play, which is a interaction style for the New York Times last year.
Danielle Wiley: I love that article. I sent it to my dad. I remember I hadn’t realized … It was before I knew you. And then you repro promoted it recently. I had sent it to my, I feel like my dad’s entire marriage is just sitting with my stepmom doing spelling bee together.
Sophie Vershbow: Oh, that is also my parents. I love that.
Danielle Wiley: Yes.
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, that is an example of one where how do you go out and find people who have done that? You’re just saying, do you and your partner do that? I don’t know how you go to an organization and find that person. You really need individual grassroots outreach. Twitter is essential on that for me and a lot of other people. I am someone who aspires to write a book one day. I have many drafts of things. A big part of that is I’ve been connecting with literary agents over the years and just making all these very essential connections in the book and journalism world that yes, I am furiously writing down contact information, but it’s not the same as having that individual access via DM and just sort of being on people’s radar because they’re seeing your content.
Sophie Vershbow: I just had drinks with a friend of mine who is also a full-time marketing person who has a freelance writing career like mine. We were just talking about how important it is for sharing our work. When you work at a news organization, you’re a staff writer, you’re building your name, you have more connections. You’re getting promoted by the publication itself. Sometimes I’ll work really hard on a piece and it won’t even get shared by the publication. They have a million things going on, truly, no shade to them about it. Without my own platform to circulate that, I get very worried about how far things I work on can spread. Back to what we were talking about before, I’m not getting on TikTok and making little videos about my writing. I’m just not doing it. For people who do that, more power to you. I am a words person. I don’t want to take pretty pictures of myself and somehow connect them to my career on Instagram or make cute videos on TikTok. I am a writer. I want to tell you what I wrote and put it on Twitter.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah, right. Well, and you also use it for more altruistic things. Like you do a ton with dog fostering and adoption and you were connected with Benjamin Dwyer and he got his dog. I don’t even know the whole connection there, but clearly you have connections that you have made through Twitter that are helping home dogs who need homes, which is not self-serving at all.
Sophie Vershbow: I have genuinely used Twitter for so many sort of fundraising or service things over the years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I did a metro card drive because everyone had unlimited metro cards that have been sent with their WageWorks benefits like myself, and it was just sitting there while I was in my apartment quarantined. We did, I say as if it’s me and a staff, like me and the dog did this. I did, it’s from working on a team in marketing for years, I never want to say I did something alone. Then I realized I’m just-
Danielle Wiley: Oh, I still remember. I still remember the boss who was like, “You need to stop saying I,” and so every time I say it, I hear it her.
Sophie Vershbow: Me too. I’m incapable of saying it even for a solo project, but just to say a metro car drive to get those two essential workers or campaign donations for embroidered masks I was making. I’m usually up to something, but yeah, just to raise money for Simon’s rescue, the foster dog I have right now, I know that there’s approved applications in from Twitter. Little things, even helping to elevate other dog rescue things.
Danielle Wiley: It’s very weird. I always joke that there’s nothing more different than a person with a lot of Instagram followers versus a lot of Twitter followers that I don’t even think … someone recently referred to me as an influencer and I was like, “If you ever say that again, I will jump out the window.” None of this was intentional or that, but I really do value the supportive people in my network who share these causes and who genuinely do good acts. Even buying a calendar with Simon’s picture on it where proceeds go to benefit the rescue. Little things like that where without Twitter, I mean, quite literally wouldn’t do it because no one would buy it. It wouldn’t even happen. Really all that mobilization is on the platform. It would be a huge bummer to lose it.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m sticking around as long as I can. I don’t know what it’s doing for my mental health, but it does bring me joy and allows me to make connections and right now, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, I’ve always said it’s a net positive. I’ve had some really rough times on Twitter. I got doxxed once. It was really bad. People tried to get me fired for my job for just tweeting that I didn’t like Brett Kavanaugh. I’ve had some really dark moments on the platform and I always say I stay because it’s a net benefit. It really is. The good that it’s done, the ways I have real friends from the platform, I’ve been to their weddings. I have very, very close relationships both professionally and personally. I get very frustrated when people sort of knock internet relationships, people who aren’t perpetually online like us. I in no way think it replaces in-person connection, but to disqualify it from being significant and beneficial is really foolish and I think quite shortsighted.
Danielle Wiley: Yeah, no, I totally agree. Many of my close friends are internet derived, I guess you could say.
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, yeah.
Danielle Wiley: Okay, so I can’t talk to you for, well I could talk to you forever, but probably shouldn’t because of my day job, but we close out every episode asking our guests what TV commercial from their childhood sticks with them to this day. Looking forward to hearing what yours is.
Sophie Vershbow: This was so challenging because I am a child of the early 90s, which was really a peak time in commercials I’d like to say. Ultimately, my answer is the Mentos commercial where the man rolls on the bench or sits on the bench and accidentally gets paint on his suit so then he eats a Mentos, gets a creative idea and decides to roll more on the bench to make it a pint stripe suit, and then he gives a thumbs up to the painter, and it’s so stupid, and yet it has been stuck in my head for all these years.
Danielle Wiley: It kind of ties to your career if you think about it. You see this moment and then you take advantage of it and you turn it into something. I mean, not to get too poetic about social media management, but I see the connection.
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, we’re creative problem solvers that’s for sure but yeah, something about that Mentos commercial. It’s like the creative problem solving and the thumbs up really get me.
Danielle Wiley: I can picture the thumbs up. That’s a good one. That’s a good one. Well, this was awesome. Thank you so much and I will continue to see you on Twitter at least for the near …
Sophie Vershbow: Yeah, you too
Danielle Wiley: … Future and we’ll not see you on Mastodon, but we’ll figure something else out should we need to cut ties.
Sophie Vershbow: Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.
Danielle Wiley: Sophie can be found at Instagram @SVershbow, on Twitter @SVershbow and on LinkedIn @SophieVershbow. That is S-O-P-H-I-E V-E-R-S-H-B-O-W.
Danielle Wiley: Thank you for listening. Don’t forget to share and subscribe.
Please check back next Monday for a new episode featuring marketing conversations through the lens of influence. I am your host, Danielle Wiley, and this is the Art of Sway.
