Hugh: Greetings, it’s Hugh Ballou. My guest today has been a really wonderful friend. She knows how to write the right message. The first time I met Cheryl Snapp Conner, she interviewed me. The next thing I knew, there was this article about me online on Forbes. She understood what I do. When people asked me what I did, I just sent them to that article because in one hour, she got it. We have an important topic to talk about today. Instead of wasting time telling you today about Cheryl, she is sitting in her office today in Salt Lake City, SnappConner PR. Cheryl, welcome.
Cheryl: Thank you. Happy to be here, Hugh.
Hugh: I have all kinds of people on this interview series, and I am going to ask you the same question I asked them. What makes you qualified to talk about this topic? Tell me what the topic is. How are we going to tell people what this subject is?
Cheryl: We are going to talk about communications, which is essentially everything. I am an expert in communications. It’s how I make my career. What a fortunate thing. It was only my minor in college. Most people are not aware of that. I had a different major topic. It was the minor that saved my career bacon. I thank my entire career and every gray hair I have earned in the field of communications. It matters. It is what has been essential to my career, how I have supported my family, and how we have developed our business. It is the core of every business.
I have been an advocate and proponent of what we call thought leadership communication. From the very core, it was not always known or understood. Even in the earliest days of technology, where I got my career start, it was vital. If you think about those early technology products, they did not have an audience. There were IT people who attempted to communicate to each other, but that was only so useful. In fact, the very reason I was hired by my first technology job—actually second, I was an editor for IBM—but Novell, the leader that premiered local area networking, had a concept in place called networking of PCs. People who needed it or could benefit from it didn’t know what it was. I was specifically chosen as someone who could communicate well and didn’t understand a thing about technology so I wouldn’t have lost my ability to talk about these topics in a way that the general public could grasp and understand. Press releases, not that helpful. Feeds and feeds of something people don’t care about or know about anyway is not going to help. We began by telling the stories of real businesses: law offices, medical practices, education organizations. What do you do? What was the problem? What were your choices? The kind of things you tell your best friend. As you make this decision, who did you have to convince? How much did it cost? If you did this over again, what would you do better next time? Those are meaningful discussions, and that helped. The same is true for every company since. Every entrepreneur has a topic. They have things they are experts in that others could be very pleased to know about.
Hugh: I invite people to go to Forbes and search Cheryl Snapp Conner. You have a whole series in this entrepreneur channel. Those articles are just so helpful. You really helped me understand what communication is all about, especially with words. You talk about being outside of the technology so you could talk about it differently. Our audience is social entrepreneurs. They are running a business, and we are so intimate with everything that we don’t know how to tell people about it. It seems silly, but we don’t. It’s the same thing with churches and synagogues and local charities. We do great stuff, but the world doesn’t know about it. You are sitting in SnappConner PR. Is it snappconner.com?
Cheryl: Yes, snappconner.com. But if you just Google my name, you will find it quite easily.
Hugh: You have a team of highly skilled entrepreneurs. You are strategically placed in a very nice facility, a very good, warm, friendly w