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When This CEO Did Her Own PR, Here's What Happened

This article is more than 8 years old.

This is the first in a series of posts on the experiences of entrepreneurs in PR. Last week I put out an invitation for the best, the worst and the most creative PR stories from companies and agencies. The response has buried me with more than a hundred submittals so far. At the top of the list I was impressed by the messages I received from NYC entrepreneur Lori Cheek, who moved away from a 15-year career in architecture to become a technology founder of the mobile dating site Cheekd in 2010.

“I’m no longer building structures; I’m building relationships,” she said in an email interview.

Cheek hired a PR firm several months before launch and paid nearly $10,000. The firm claimed to have reached out to more than 300 bloggers, resulting in a couple of articles of little consequence. But the founder soon realized she had more passion for her company than any agency could and decided to take on the task of PR on her own. On a startup budget so tight she rented out her apartment and lived from a suitcase for a time,  she is pleased to note that the growth of her company to date is entirely due to her relentless drive for PR.

For example, at a Dublin Web Summit where the 800 exhibitors were “90% men” Cheek stood out by wearing angel wings to the show. She felt the idea had been a good one, but it got better still as she was leaving the hotel and spotted herself on the cover of Irish Times alongside a picture of Dame Judy Dench and found a quarter-page story about her company inside.

She also scored a story in the New York Times by simply sending one of her black Cheekd cards to a prominent NYT editor in a plain black envelope. A few weeks later, her company was featured on the cover of the Styles section. Cheekd was called "the next generation of online dating,” which led to customer enrollment “in almost every state in America,” and requests from all over the world. The company quickly set up an international shopping cart and gained instant presence in 28 countries.

Beginner's luck? Hardly. Cheekd has now been covered in the Wall Street Journal. Inc. TechCrunch. She received a phone call from Oprah. Dating Website Review said, "… if a dating site were judged by its ability to get press, Lori Cheek may just have the next Match.com.”

Said Lexington Business, "Lori Cheek works New York City as if she were the secret love child of Carrie Bradshaw and guerilla marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson... [Lori has demonstrated] that many times an entrepreneur has to think outside the box when taking a product/technology/idea to market." When sign-ups seemingly leveled out at 1,000 customers she signed up for ABC’s Shark Tank, with her eye on Mark Cuban as an ideal partner. But it was not to be. The experience was brutal, but Cheek was undeterred, saying after the taping to the on-set therapist, “I don’t care how bad it was…Do you think it was bad enough that I’ll get on? I just want to tell people about what I’m trying to build.”

Angel wings at a developers' summit? Of course. (Image courtesy of Lori Cheek)

The segment aired. Eight million viewers watched as Kevin O’Leary, Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Robert Herjavec and Lori Greiner turned her idea down cold in early 2014. Cheek used the negative feedback to reinvent her product and came back in February 2015 with Bluetooth connectivity for her app that bills itself as a way to eliminate missed connections by showing registrants when other compatible matches are available nearby. Here are a few of her favorite tactics:

  • “I carry around fun-tak (a sticky adhesive) and attach Cheekd promotional cards and now even images of the app to the inside of the subway cars, movie ads on the platforms, the back of bathroom stalls and I even tag noticeable existing street art. I’ve even slid a few into dating books at Barnes and Noble to see what kind of traffic they’d drive.”
  • “I often sidewalk chalk ‘have you been Cheek’d?’ outside large events and parties and even have a Cheek’d stamp (with a code that leads to my profile) that I stamp on cocktail napkins at bars. I’ve had people send me messages (via my marketing code) that say things like, ‘I found your card riding uptown on the 9 train’ or ‘I don’t know how this card ended up in my pocket, but I’m intrigued.’”
  • “My favorite story to date would be the personal Lori Cheek’ng of Hip Hop Mogul Russell Simmons.”
  • “I took the opportunity to Cheek Rapper Flo Rida on Stage at a Samsung Smart TV Launch Party sponsored by Klout (sporting my startup t-shirt) and stayed on stage with him until I managed to get a card in his back pocket.”
  • “For Valentine’s Day one year I dressed up like Cupid and went to Union Square handing out promotional cards for two hours. I was alone. It was mortifying but I did it.”
  • “For Halloween we dressed up like life sized Cheek’d cards and marched in the Halloween Parade.”
  • “I did a terrifying TEDx talk last April to keep spreading knowledge of my brand.”
  • “When I travel, I call the news channels to see if they’d like to feature me— I can’t remember a city I’ve ever been turned down in. I speak at Universities and mentor, pitch and/ or present at every single tech/ dating/ networking/ business event possible. Also, when I travel, I host events and then I get press around those events. I’m traveling to Vegas next month with my parents and have found another drink sharing app (based in Vegas) and we’re going to host our Cheekd Vegas Launch Party there on September 14th.”

Says Cheek, “PR is expensive and it’s almost always very vague what kind of return you’ll get. But when you do it yourself, there’s no pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes. I’ve been collecting a list of intriguing tech/ dating/ lifestyle reporters for almost five years that I never touched until our recent re-launch. I’ve gotten a few articles written about us by simply cold emailing some of those reporters.”

“When we got covered in the Wall Street Journal, I’d gone to a WSJ Startups Meet the Press networking event,” she recalls. “I’d scouted out all the name tags and stood in line behind the one reporter I’d wanted to talk to… I waited for nearly 45 minutes while all the men at the event had pitched her. She told me, when I finally made her presence, that she’d take the article if I gave her an exclusive. It was a no-brainer.”

Her biggest advice? “I’ve never done anything halfway," she acknowledges. " If you’re an entrepreneur wanting to get press, it’s hard work. It’s a lot of risk… It’s taken a lot of cojones.”

In short, says Lori, "Don't just think outside the box; Get rid of the box. Be creative.  Think guerrilla.  And if that doesn't work, sometimes it doesn't hurt to just ask. I've ended up on the news many times by just calling up the news channels and asking them if they'd be interested in featuring my business.  It's sometimes that simple.”

Would she ever consider hiring a PR agency again? She doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, no. I’d hire people and train them in the Lori Cheek way of doing PR. It works. Google me.”

I did. Several dozen articles and segments appeared. As a PR lead, my cautions would be that companies who do their own PR can be less than strategic about their approach to publicity. Press messages can become random or muddled (or even contradictory). Interviews tend to occur off the cuff and be less thorough. Articles that result from an enthusiastic employee pitch sometimes point to a website that’s not yet complete or tell a story that isn’t yet formulated. And an entrepreneur doing her own PR may not consider that her presence on the cover of Inc. and on CNN will likely not matter a whit, for example, in determining the brand of mulch a customer walks into Costco to buy. In the case of Lori Cheek, however, the level of press she’s achieved is more than impressive and seems to have supported her company's strategy well.

If her business doesn’t make it, I predict she has a solid future ahead in the field of PR.

Do you have a great entrepreneurial story that others could learn from? If you do, reach out to Cheryl Conner via Forbes with your thoughts. Cheryl Snapp Conner is author of the Forbes eBook Beyond PR: Communicate Like a Champ In The Digital World.

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