Frankie Greek is a Snapchat journalist, host and social media manager working and living in New York city. You may recognize her from the Fuse TV Snapchat or as the previous host for the Shorty Awards weekly Snapchat show. She was also responsible for launching the Times Square Ball's own Snapchat account. With a background in broadcast journalism and live TV/radio, Frankie shares her path to working in cutting-edge media formats. She shares her authentic and honest insights into social media and influencer marketing and the awareness she has of her own career path is inspiring. For those of us navigating and often crafting our own careers, this interview is full of insight and inspiration.
Special thanks to Igloo and InVision for sponsoring Ways We Work for the month of September and making these interviews possible!
Tell me a little bit more about what work looks like for you right now.
I’m a freelancer, and I focus on social media consulting. Fuse TV is my main gig right now, so I’m there most of the week. That typically looks like four days in their office but I’ve also been lucky to cover events for them. For example, I covered Coachella, EDC New York and Gov Ball.
I've worked in social media for just over two years, and this is the first time I’ve worked on accounts that are really heavily into media publishing and music, which is great. I work alongside our video team, using Snapchat to connect with artists in a fun and more digestible way. There’s an audience there that cares about it and will watch, which is really cool. Previously, I was also working freelance for the Shorty Awards, which is an award show that honors the best in social media.
How did you end up getting into a role like that?
My background is in radio and television, so before I moved to New York I co-hosted and produced a morning talk show for radio. When I moved to New York I met my roommate Nik on Craigslist and she happened to be one of the producers for the Shorty Awards. They were looking for someone to take over their Snapchat for the awards show in 2015 and they asked me to do it. I’d never really done anything like that before, but I had lots of experience with live TV and radio, so I wanted to see what could be done. I did quick 10-second interviews with talent as they came down the red carpet and people seemed to love it. It was really successful because we were interviewing people that the younger audience on Snapchat cares about, like Tyler Oakley and Brendon Urie from Panic at the Disco. People were screenshotting the snaps and sharing them on Twitter and Instagram saying, “this is on the Shorty Awards Snapchat right now!”
After that mini viral moment, they asked me to stay on and run their social part-time. Part of that involved hosting a weekly Snapchat talk show on their account that was all about social media and technology. I’d talk about what was trending, new app updates, and who my new favourite person to follow on Snapchat and Instagram was, etc. It was something I put a ton of time into and over the year and a half that I did that is when I really started to build a following. The show was something people could rally around, it was this consistent once a week thing. The audience got really invested, they started pitching me on topics, what they wanted me to talk about and caring about who was on the show with me and what co-host they wanted me to have.
One day people who watched the show decided they wanted me to co-host with Gary Vaynerchuk. I thought, “Yeah, sure. That’s a pipe dream.” People were tweeting and Snapchatting me, and it grew into something big. I started talking about it more and people got really excited. They were making Twitter graphics and Instagram flyers and photoshopping pictures of me and Gary using the hashtag I’d created #shortysnapwithgary.
It turned out that a handful of people who worked at VaynerMedia watched the show, so there were some people working on it from that end and he finally agreed to do it. It took three months and the hashtag #shortysnapwithgary had over 25,000 impressions on it. That experience was awesome because it reminded me that I wasn’t just talking into the abyss, it was more than me having this app on my phone talking to myself all day - people were really into it.