Be Social and Get Found: An Interview with Cheryl Lawson

By Steve Goldstein, PR News

Cheryl Lawson’s roots are in event marketing—not a bad place to be for someone with such a warm, outgoing personality. Her early interest in social media, though, led her on an expected path. A few years back, while based in Southern California, she immersed herself in the local social media community, and when she moved back home to Tulsa, Okla., in 2010, she hoped to find a similar close-knit group. It so happened that Mashable was about to launch its first Social Media Day.

On Meetup.com she saw a request for someone to organize a local Social Media Day group in Tulsa, and she jumped at the opportunity. Her goals were to establish herself professionally in Tulsa and to meet some other social media “geeks” like herself. With the help of PRWeb she sent out a press release announcing the event; 26 people showed up at a local restaurant in an emerging redevelopment district. She sent out another release, telling that story. The Meetups became a monthly event, spawning the organization Social Media Tulsa—more stories, more releases and more positive PR for Lawson herself, whose own social marketing firm, Party Aficionado, began picking up small businesses as clients.

In that first year, Lawson was approached by the Salvation Army to help the organization connect with the public via social media. That led to the ongoing Tweet4Toys social good campaign. Social Media Tulsa was now a central hub of learning. The next step for Lawson was the launch of the annual Social Media Tulsa Conference in 2011. So Lawson has stayed true to her roots—she’s still an event planner. But she’s much more than that now—she’s an educator, a marketer, a PR professional and a personal guide to small businesses looking to join the online social world.

Lawson says she “kind of fell into” the PR aspect of her work. “People saw me using PRWeb to promote my clients’ events and my own business, and they started asking me to do similar things for them.” In the following Q&A, the CEO of Party Aficionado offers practical advice to small businesses that harbor fears about going social.

PR News: For a small business with no staff dedicated solely to PR, what should be the one PR tactic it should put to use on daily basis?

Cheryl Lawson: I would say it would have to be some social media tool, perhaps a blog that you can update daily. But not a lot of people have the wherewithal to write something every day in a blog, so the microblogging sites like Twitter and Tumblr are really good tools that you can go in and quickly update and use to repurpose content on a daily basis to keep your name out there. For a small business, regardless of whether you do business locally or whether you sell a product to anybody who goes to your site, the key is being found. Most of the people now are looking for your business using Google and other search engines. So the goal isn’t which platform you’re using, but that you’re using a platform so when somebody is looking for you, you can be found.

PR News: Do you sense much resistance from small businesses to using social media?

Lawson: I do. I think the resistance is more that they’re afraid of putting their voice out there. The common thing I hear from a social media standpoint is, “What do I say?” You hear a lot of “be authentic” and “engage” and “have conversations,” but the associations aren’t connecting. I always tell people to approach social media—particularly the microblogging sites like Twitter and Tumblr—as you would approach a cocktail party. You wouldn’t walk up to a conversation already in progress at a cocktail party and stop it and start handing out your business card. You would hear a conversation about something happening, whether it was business related or news related or society related, and you would provide your own point of view on the subject. You have to think about business from a social aspect, because now that’s where our customers live. Instead of thinking about marketing, think how to be social first. And most people have social skills. They just need to apply common sense and social skills to these new tools.

PR News: For a small business, how would you recommend breaking down responsibilities for PR and social media?

Lawson: The deal is that everybody has a role in connecting with a consumer. Everybody in the organization is the face of your brand. If you can’t trust employees to answer your phone, then I wouldn’t trust them to be on social media. But if you do trust them with your brand to answer the phone or greet consumers when they walk in the door or take a client out to lunch, you should have no problem letting them talk about and share who they are personally and that they just so happen to work for the most awesome company in the world. That is one of the hardest parts for any business—trusting their employees with their brand message.

PR News: How can a small business determine which social network is the most appropriate to focus its messaging on?

Lawson: What I would advise businesses to do is first find out where the majority of your customers are. All you have to do is go into the search fields of Twitter or Facebook or YouTube and just search for your industry and your buzzwords; 99% of the time somebody is talking about your brand, your product, your industry. Once you find where the majority of your people are, start there. And set a plan. Start with a goal in mind. Is it that you want your Facebook fans to download a coupon so you can track how many people use the coupon? So if you can rock at Facebook for the first six months, then go to Twitter or YouTube or Google+. Just because the social network is there doesn’t mean you have a strategy in place to handle it.

PR News: What can be learned from checking out what one’s competitors are doing on social networks?

Lawson: What some traditional marketers try to do is go to see what their competition is doing and then compete. But in the social space you’re able to say if this guy owns the Facebook Tuesday night trivia thing, you’re not going to try to steal his trivia night. Find a way that they’re not excelling, find the gaps, and do that. The likelihood that they’re not mastering Facebook or Twitter is huge because of all those things we said earlier—the fear. But if your competitor is producing high-quality videos and putting them on YouTube, the precedent has been set. So you’ve got to decide to either use grainy Garageband or do at least what your competitor is doing. Studying what your competitors are doing online can give you both the “we need to step up our game” option or the “we can go in a completely different direction” option, and help you excel.

Follow Steve Goldstein: @SGoldsteinAI