Interview with Sharma, manages marketing efforts for Gravity4.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Nik Sharma, an 18-year-old Indian American entrepreneur based out of San Francisco, manages all marketing efforts for Gravity4, “the world’s first high-frequency marketing OS,” and leads corporate development efforts as well.
On the way to fulfilling his role at Gravity4, Sharma became a social media guru by managing social media accounts for artists such as Pitbull, Frankie J, Danny Mercer, and Priyanka Chopra.
Born in New York City to a mother and father who emigrated from Delhi and Punjab respectively as teenagers, Sharma moved to San Diego when he was three-year-old, and now resides in San Francisco, where Gravity4 is headquartered.
After coming to the United States, Sharma’s mother, who is now the family’s matriarchal homemaker, attended Ohio State, while his father finished two years of high school before going on to Manhattan College. He now works in medical insurance.
While his parents immigrated and followed the classical “American Dream,” including higher education, Sharma is not sure whether the traditional route is right for him.
Regardless, the young mover-and-shaker seems to be inherently busy. He also founded and is a contributor to publication platform, #BeLimitless, which brings back “good content”, spreading motivation, inspiration, and happiness.”
The American Bazaar interviewed Sharma over the phone. Excerpts from the interview:
What is your role with Gravity4?
I run the corporate side of the marketing and branding, and product marketing as well. I’m pretty heavily involved in all aspects of the marketing here as well as the introductory stages of corporate development.
Can you describe your career path up until your role with Gravity4? How did you come on board?
In high school I wasn’t interested necessarily in the content that was being offered — like history and all that stuff. One thing I did my junior year was I started the company called SocialVu Media and the idea behind that was to go to small businesses and local mom and pops to help them with their social marketing tactics and how they can better their marketing, whether it’s in-store or online. From there it went to getting kind of bored with the restricted boundaries of each little mom and pop shop wanting everything done a certain way, so I went to the entertainment vertical. In the entertainment vertical I met a female by the name of Anjula Acharia. She’s been involved in the entertainment industry for years. She was [one of] Billboard’s Top 40 Women in Music, she was an international power player last year; so I connected with her and she saw my background with social marketing and how I saw where social marketing was going and eventually distributed my contact info to a couple of different talent agencies and artists’ managers. Out of that came clients such as Pitbull, Frankie J, Danny Mercer, I worked a little bit with Priyanka Chopra. Jay Sean, and then MAGIC! I was on the team that brought them to the market as well.
You’re primarily working with their social media accounts?
Yeah, social media and then different tactics. If they go to a show, what they should do to increase their engagement after the show, stuff like that.
How do you determine what voice and style to use for each account?
It’s always been different just depending on what they had going and how I thought the engagement could turn around. With Pitbull when I first came in he had about 13 million followers on Twitter. There was one night when I was in San Diego and I just told his manager at the time, “Why don’t you go ahead and start replying to some of the fans.” He did that for a week and after one week they had an increase of a million followers just on Twitter. It’s small things here and there that make a huge difference.
Frankie J was more taking the route of becoming friends with his audience, because this audience is a little smaller — just under a 100k.
With MAGIC! it was all about establishing a brand behind the song “rude” and then branching out from there, kind of creating the reggae-pop brand behind it. So it depends on each one.
Are there any considerations that go into managing a celebrity’s social media account that might surprise readers?
I think the funny thing that a lot of people don’t know is that a lot of times it’s the celebrities themselves who Tweet out stuff. People usually don’t assume that. The other one is probably that a lot of people read through every single one of the tweets about them.
What are some challenges you run into as a relatively young entrepreneur bursting onto the scene with momentum and big ideas?
Initially it was kind of hard to get contacts just because I was 16, still had the baby face and peach fuzz and all that, but after that, once you got in with the right contacts they kind of had your back as you went along. Age didn’t really factor in with that.
Would you say the industry is truly more merit-based than people seeing your age?
Yeah, definitely. Especially in the last couple of years. After all the entertainment stuff, that’s when Gravity4 was being launched. I immediately messaged our CEO on his Facebook account and from there he asked me to send him a resume, I sent it in and two days later he phoned me up from San Francisco. I had an internship for a month and then that ended up turning into a full-time career.
Do you have any plans to attend college, or do you think it’s superfluous at this point?
That’s a tough one, I’m actually not sure. I don’t think I will, I think my parents definitely want me to. I honestly don’t know if I will in the future.
For me, this entire experience at Gravity4 is kind of my education. I’ve learned a lot about corporate development and marketing — whatever it may be, there’s something new to learn every day.
Social media has burgeoned into a force that has influenced the dissemination of news, geopolitics, and activism to a degree hardly imagined possible a decade ago. Where do you think social media will be most crucial next, be it a specific region or a school of thought?
I’m not sure as far as that goes, but it’s not just going to be social media in the future, it’s going to be “the media.” I think five to ten years down the road we won’t be seeing CNN.com or Fox.com, it’ll all be one stream of combined sources as far as getting the news.
With people’s personal accounts and brands it becomes, how can you stay three months ahead of the game rather than three behind.
What are your aspirations for the future?
You know, I haven’t thought about what I might want to do or pursue after after Gravity4. It’ll probably be in the media space — maybe advertising or marketing. I guess I’ve been so focused on Gravity4 and doing my best here that I haven’t take a second to think about after Gravity4 yet.