This is a guest post by Patrick Ward, CEO and founder of PR firm 104 West.

I feel like I have this same argument at least twice a year when a disgruntled entrepreneur lambastes PR agencies. And I am invariably bemused when I dig deeper only to find the complainer has poured a bunch of negative experiences into a collective bucket and thrown the PR industry baby out with his or her personal bathwater.

So, following Kevin Leu’s recent post on “5 reasons you’ll regret hiring a PR firm for your startup,” here I go again, but this time I’ll mirror his points with my own five reasons you won’t regret hiring a good PR firm for your startup.

1. They will keep your story honest

I have always been a PR agency guy and have been working deeply with startups for almost my whole career — starting with companies like Sun and Autodesk in the late 1980s through launching Digital Chocolate and Webroot 10 years ago to companies like Evolv today. I have never met a CEO or founder who thought his or her product was anything but newsworthy.

Good PR agencies temper that enthusiasm and ingest some realism. No one wants to hear their company isn’t newsworthy, but some companies just aren’t. Good PR agencies keep it real and really good ones find other creative ways to communicate the company’s brand value. Bad PR people feed egos and apologize later — that serve’s no one’s interest. You want unfettered praise about your product or your company, it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday, ask her. The more sober and honest you are about your story and your media goals, the more strategic you can be.

By the way, anyone who thinks a press release is anything more than search engine fodder isn’t paying attention. Releases have value, but no reporter worth his or her salt gleans stories from press releases. Press releases are for your web site and other, let us call them, receptive audiences (again Mother’s Day is Sunday). You want to tell a story? Write three good lines in an email to a reporter whom you know covers your company or industry. If you can’t hook them in three lines, you’ll never hook them. And if you don’t know who to send the email to, well then let’s move on to Point #2.

2. Their past experience means they know the right reporters and outlets

I have worked with Pulitzer Prize winners. I’ve worked with arrogant sloths. Some of my best friends are reporters. I’ve hung around them since my days drinking with the staff of Electronic News in 1986. That means my experiences color, influence, and inform every client engagement I take. My past successes don’t mean I can always make a future client successful, but they do mean I have access. If the story is good, it will get a hearing — and that’s a valuable thing in this competitive world. If it’s bad or even mediocre, all the contacts in the world won’t help. But if the story is good, then they can help immensely (see Point #1).

3. They may not know everything, but just might know more than you

There is something in the coffee at many PR agencies that makes junior and mid-level staff think they know much more than they sometimes do — but I’ll take a confident staffer over a tentative one any day. And remember one thing: they do this everyday, all day. So when an entrepreneur is dealing with QA or buying Aeron chairs, or in a board meeting, your PR agency is doing PR. So when they say it’s uncool to send a gift to a reporter after a story has hit, don’t send it. When they say is TA-reese, not TA-rez-A, listen to them. And when they say that your enterprise software story won’t work in TIME Magazine, they’re right. Oh, and don’t always assume they don’t understand sometimes arcane technology — like what a software abstraction layer is. Sure, some PR people are, shall we say, over-extended, but others are brilliant. Again: babies and bath water.

4. They’re thinking beyond publicity

The more brilliant ones are starting to think beyond publicity. Clients complain about inflated clip reports because that’s the only measure some smaller-minded clients can think of. Here’s a fun fact: According to a Pew study a few years ago (and it’s absolutely trending this way even more now), about 10 companies represent more than 40 percent of all tech press coverage. You know which companies they are; there in the press every day.

So guess what, your media chances just got sliced almost in half. Moral of the story: you had better find another way to communicate with your audiences. The good PR agencies are doing just that. But if a client insists on making buggy whips, well guess what, we’re going to show them how many horses there are on the street. And I can guarantee you, the most carefully crafted ideas — at this time when communications are undergoing such rapid change – are not going to come from the PR manager at your new startup.

5. They’re a better value than an internal employee

That brings me to my final point. Anyone who thinks a PR manager can do the work of a PR agency is either cheap, has never had a good PR firm, doesn’t really care, or some combination of all of the above. And don’t give me some financial analysis that shows an internal hire is cheaper. If that were true, you’d have formidable accounting and law departments at every company in the US and fewer accounting and law firms. And the fallacy that a $100,000 PR contract is better spent on one or two employees is especially ill-conceived. With payroll taxes and benefits, any employee actually costs about 20 percent more than a service contract.

But, here’s the real kicker: When you hire an employee, you only get that individual’s personal experience. When you hire an agency, you get the whole team’s perspective and background.

Finally, what do you think happens to that PR manager after six months? He or she realizes that the growth path inside the company is outside PR and he or she starts to attend a bunch of meetings to demonstrate their other skills and assess where they might contribute to the organization in a larger, more lucrative role. Then, they turn to you and say, “You know, with all the other stuff I’m doing beyond PR, I’m really not getting to my core function and I think we should consider hiring an agency.”

There are business reasons to hire or not hire a PR firm. Many reasons are valid. But to dismiss any option categorically or to blithely substitute one’s own poor experiences as a reflection on an industry is questionable advice.

Patrick Ward is the CEO and founder of 104 West. He started 104 West thinking of the slogan of the fictional California senate candidate, Bill McKay, “There’s got to be a better way.” He started his career in New York, moved to Silicon Valley and finally settled in Denver. The logos of Canon, Panasonic, HP, Webroot, Digital Chocolate, and Mapquest, among others, appear on his personal experience slide.

Man yelling through bullhorn image via sparkstudio/Shutterstock

We receive a lot of odd, unsolicited mail at the VentureBeat offices. But this piece of art, pictured above in the hands of a VentureBeat reporter, might take the cake.

It’s an image by Wieslaw Walkuski, who apparently is a famous poster designer, illustrator, and painter. According to the blurb on the back of this poster, he won 3rd prize in the III-rd International Theater Poster Competition in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1997. Congratulations, Wieslaw!

However, this is one horrifying image. When I pulled it out of the mailer, my first reaction was “What the hell is this thing?”

Everyone in the office who has seen it has said something like “Eeew,” “That’s disturbing,” or “Get it away from me!”

The poster was sent to me not by Walkuski but by a startup that’s printing posters from a variety of artists.

If the main goal of a public relations campaign is to get the attention of the media, this mailing succeeded. I have now heard of this company!

And now I’m getting rid of this poster as fast as I can. I was thinking of trying to give it to someone who is a fan of eyeless jesters and green tongues. The problem is, if I find that person, I am not sure I want to get close enough to them to hand them this thing.

Instead, I’ve decided to turn this into a caption contest. So have at it, VentureBeat readers!

What caption should we put on this photo?

Put your suggestions in the comments below. We’ll pick a winner at the end of the day Friday — and if you live in the U.S., I’ll send you the poster, if you want it!

Kevin Leu is the founder of GirlsOnAMap.com.

There are lots of dumb things you could do as a startup entrepreneur — like base your company out of Bakersfield, allow yourself to be acquired by Groupon in an all-stock transition, or pitch your growing U.S.-based startup to the Samwer brothers — but nothing could be more dumb than throwing your hard-earned venture capital money at a public relations firm.

Sure, many startup founders out there don’t have the first clue about how to “do” public relations for their startup. They’ll think long and hard before finally plopping down that $12,000 retainer fee — with a required six month commitment — out of their precious Series A investment.

Don’t do it.

As a former journalist who entered PR for a few years (working in-house, managing PR firms, working with them on joint announcements, and consulting with other startups) I can tell you that most PR firms I worked with are full of sh*t. I’m not saying there isn’t some value, but the value is nowhere near enough to justify the cost, given your limited resources.

Here are five reasons PR firms are crap:

1. They don’t know how to tell a story

I’ll be honest, working in “professional” news and reading press releases every morning really honed my sense of what does and does not make a story. I was able to sift through all the hyperbole from clichéd PR specialists and figure out a way to tell an interesting story. (At least I hope it was interesting!)

So when I joined the ranks of PR, I always thought backwards: from the point of view of the specific trade journalist, to writing the press release so that the journalist would see those points.  Unfortunately, most PR people don’t know how to do this.

I’m not saying that someone who studied “Public Relations” in college can’t tell a good story, but they’re immediately limited by the conformity of a non-innovative industry.

2. They rest on their laurels

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with PR firms who tout their “previous clients” — which are indeed impressive — but who are no longer clients. Or the executives who handled those high-profile clients are not the ones who will be working on your account. Sure, those executives will show up for the first few meetings, then they’ll pass off the duties to a couple of underlings: one mid-level manager (6 – 8 years experience), and the other just a few years out of school. It’s also called Bait-and-Switch, which I learned about from Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. It was a good episode.

3. They act like they know everything

Well, it’s probably mandatory they speak like they know everything, which is how they convince many a startup that their services are needed and the commitment will be rewarded. I have found this bravado to be annoying. Maybe it’s because in Silicon Valley we value humility over braggadocio.

I would be much more impressed with a PR person who showed curiosity and asked a lot of questions about my team and product. There is no one who knows the product as well as you, but if a PR person is any good, he/she’s going to try and get as close to your knowledge as possible.

4. They take more credit than they deserve

During every press campaign, PR firms mark down every publication and online newspaper that “picks up” the story, which for them means whomever re-prints the press release word-for-word. This is an automatic thing that is triggered from release sites like PR Newswire, Business Wire, and PR Web, and does not require the services of a PR firm. Startup entrepreneurs are always impressed by these links when they shouldn’t be. How many people go to the Jacksonville Business Journal and read the re-printed press releases from that day?

Entrepreneurs should be putting a premium on original stories that are being written, not these automatic pick-ups.

I’ve also seen PR firms take credit for stories that were facilitated by me or someone else within the startup, even when they had nothing to do with it.

5. They’re a rip-off

At a market-rate of $12,000 a month, which is pretty standard, they supply you with about 20 hours a week, total, of two junior employees, who they pay anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a year.

If you’d like me to do the math for you, they’re charging you $144,000 a year for a half-assed job that costs them maybe $50,000. Did you also know that those employees have other clients? So, even if they do get through to a reporter, their interest does not lie squarely with you. It’s kind of like a taxi driver who gets paid commission to bring a customer to several different places. Wouldn’t you like that taxi driver to have the singular purpose of delivering that customer to you?

Now, PR firms aren’t all bad, and PR is important. This brings me to my key recommendation. Hire an in-house PR specialist, manager, director, whatever you want to call this person. You can pay them much less than $144,000 a year, and get triple the value. Heck, if you hire a journalist (they’re losing their jobs everywhere you look), you could probably pay them $80,000 a year, have them working 60 hours a week alongside the rest of your team, doing much more than crafting the occasional press release and conducting a launch. They can work on the site’s overall message, the outbound emails to clients, a company blog (which builds organic SEO), business development, press contacts, and they can write those press releases – full-time!

If you do want to go with someone trained in PR, put out a listing for a PR Manager with several years experience. I’m sure you’ll have more than enough quality candidates coming from within several of the PR firms you’re considering anyway.

Don’t get me wrong; PR firms do some things really well. Their presentations are always beautiful and concise. And, as people, they’re always very presentable and well-spoken. Okay, okay, okay.  They also know how to coordinate a launch. Whether that’s a website or a product launch, they do it very succinctly and efficiently. They are excellent at scheduling briefings with journalists and getting everyone to agree to a certain embargo for maximum coverage. Still, you can accomplish this with someone in-house.

If you’re going to bring on a PR firm — against all my recommendations — make sure you insist on having one of the senior-level executives working directly with you and that all communication does not go through the recently-hired college grad. It also wouldn’t hurt to know that this executive came from the ranks of journalism (I’m biased! Sorry!).

For an additional test, during the pitch and courtship period, send them an email during non-office hours and see how quickly they respond. Too many times I’ve dealt with PR professionals who didn’t respond to emails for hours, sometimes days, which baffles me. If I had been a journalist on a deadline, an hour’s delay would’ve meant me finding another contact and writing the story without your company.

Remember one final thing: PR firms are like cell phone companies. Once they lock you into a contract, you’re not getting out of it unless you pay them a penalty, even if their service is spotty and you’re unsatisfied with their work. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

[Editor's note: Since publishing this story, we've had a number of people from the PR field contest its conclusions. Be sure to check out the rebuttal story -- "Here we go again: 5 reasons hiring a PR firm is good business" by long-time PR exec Patrick Ward.]

Kevin Leu is a former television reporter and PR specialist who has worked with various venture-backed startups. He recently launched his own startup, GirlsOnAMap.com, which is a combination of Hot or Not and Tripadvisor that relies on user submitted content to provide travel advice for singles. You can follow him @SVBachelor.

Top photo credit: Mark Z. via photopin cc

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Google Ventures has a penchant for talent. The firm-within-a-company already has a stable of machine learning experts, “big data” Ph.Ds, entrepreneurial gurus, and Internet cool kids advising its quickly growing portfolio.

Today, it’s adding two more: Cyndi Reseburg, a comms pro who’s promoted the likes of Facebook and Path; and Graham Hancock, a video mastermind who most recently held down the fort at Revision3.

The duo will be part of Google Ventures’ already large marketing team, which not only helps to market the firm but also helps its young companies with some of their earliest PR and marketing decisions — when and how to launch, how to attract users, and how to hire the right talent in an industry that’s very good at self-promotion.

And they won’t be simply completing these tasks for the companies; they’ll be teaching them in very hands-on ways how to do it for themselves — an approach that’s part of Google Ventures’ firm-slash-incubator DNA.

In-house marketing at VC firms is becoming a trend in our world, said Google Ventures partner and longtime Googler David Krane during a recent visit to VentureBeat’s San Francisco office. “If you look up and down Sand Hill, it’s becoming fashionable.”

But he thinks GV’s newest hires are of a unique caliber.

“Cyndi … she has a miraculous ability to instantly build rapport with technical founders,” he said, noting that with younger companies, you’ll often have at least one developer on the founding team. If you can’t understand their nascent idea and product, they can’t trust you to help promote it. So trust by way of technical expertise is very important.

“This is someone who can establish immediate credibility with our technical founders,” said Krane. “Her style is not aggressive, it’s not invasive. She’s very supportive, and she’s an excellent teacher.”

Reseburg, who used to work at OutCast and The Hatch Agency, will be evaluating the portfolio’s and the fund’s needs, new launches, new funding deals, and speaking engagements as well as anticipating incoming deals and, as Krane said, “how to help companies with their ‘hello, world’ moment.”

As for Hancock, Krane said, “He came to us through the wondrous network of Kevin Rose.” He’s actually the second of Rose’s comrades hired by the firm.

Rose is one of the firm’s newer partners. A young entrepreneur best known for Digg, he actually got his start in media. After he took his new job at Google, he brought on Daniel Burka, a designer and longtime co-conspirator on web projects.

Hancock also worked with Rose, who was a Revision3 founder back in 2005. Hancock has also been working with Rose on his ongoing Foundation video interview series.

“So,” I half-jokingly asked Krane, “will Google Ventures eventually hire all of Kevin Rose’s friends?”

“Trust me, I have a great window into Kevin’s network, and the majority of his friends are ungettable,” the partner replied with a broad smile.

“Graham was unexpected, but you work with him once, and you realize how much one individual can do. … Video may be off-putting or intimidating at first, but with the right skill, you can do it very inexpensively to reach a very large audience. … Video is an extremely authentic, cost-efficient, and powerful tool to convey a story.”

That could be a demo video to show off how a product looks and is supposed to work. It could be an office tour, a founder interview, or even a recruitment reel.

“The tools to capture, edit, and produce it, and the tools to produce it have never been more pervasive and easy to you,” said Krane. “To bring someone on full time at a venture fund who does video is a triple-down bet, for sure.”

Ultimately, he said, marketing and PR will continue to be a huge part of Google Ventures’ offerings to its portfolio. After all, the technical founders the firm attracts already know how to code and, more importantly, how to learn how to code. They’re smart enough to figure out how to file their incorporation documents. They get how big data analytics work. But communications can still be an intimidating mystery for them.

“Our marketing team has worked with 98 percent of the GV portfolio, nearly 200 companies in four years,” Krane concluded. “Once legal documents are done and the investment courtship is over, the next step [for a portfolio company] is down the hall to the GV marketing team.

“We lift a lot more in the early stage, but we are coaching and always available through the lifecycle of the company.”

It’s one thing to be a company man. Or to toe the company line, parrot the company’s talking points, and be a staunch defender of your team. It’s another to be a bloody idiot and refuse even to acknowledge the rest of the world exists.

Like BlackBerry exec Stephen Bates in a chat with the BBC today.

But the BBC interviewer pursues him doggedly, magnificently, patiently, and wonderfully — at least for us. It’s embarrassing, to say the least, for BlackBerry corporately, and for Bates personally. Here’s the interview (transcript below):

BBC interviewer: What have you learned from Apple?

So BlackBerry is a unique proposition. We’ve got round about 17-18 million customers who love the BlackBerry experience, so we’re taking the essence of that BlackBerry experience and moving it forward.”

BBC interviewer: Have you learned anything from the iPhone?

And … this … market is a great market. There’s a, there’s a change …

BBC interviewer: I’m just wondering, technologically, it’s a pretty straight question, have you?

So, so, so, we … BlackBerry was one of the inventors of the smartphone market. You know, we’ve helped shape what the smartphone market is today, and we’re at the bridge of a new transformation where we see it going from mobile communications to this mobile computing world. And we saw that with our existing BlackBerrys that that would not give us the power to drive this new market.

BBC interviewer: OK, but obviously the iPhone is your main competitor. You all learn from each other. What have you learned from the iPhone?

So, so, the key focus around BlackBerry 10 that we’ve really driven to is to deliver a new unique user experience.

BBC interviewer: So you haven’t learned anything from the iPhone, you’re saying?

So, fun-fundamentally…

BBC interviewer: The new user experience? Sounds a little like you’re reading from a press release. I’m just wondering, you all learn from each other, you say ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’ And one of the things about the iPhone, which has its faults — they all have their faults — is that it’s very incredibly user-friendly and you can bounce around it and it’s, it’s … so what have you learned from it?

So, so, so, we’ve spent the last few months with BlackBerry 10 engaging our customers, our consumer customers, our business customers, the developers, our partners, and we’ve been interacting about what the new BlackBerry 10 will deliver …

BBC interviewer: OK, you’re clearly not answering that question …

. . .

At this point the Beeb journalist basically gives up trying to get Bates to answer that question and goes on to other topics. You have to love the British, who seem to know how to do mean better, and more politely, than anyone else. Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan come to mind.

It’s a massive fail for BlackBerry, as this has made the news on multiple sites on the same day of BlackBerry’s big new launch. I don’t blame the exec — he was almost certainly coached by PR reps to not mention competitors and keep the focus on BlackBerry — but memo to PR agencies: People do better when they speak naturally.

Let the man have a conversation.

His points — and BlackBerry’s — are much stronger when he acknowledges that maybe, just maybe, there are good mobile products in the universe that did not originate with a company formerly known as Research in Motion.

photo credit: Peter Werkman (www.peterwerkman.nl) via photopin cc

Launch.it, a New York City-based startup that has built a platform for managing and distributing news, has been tapped to power the onslaught of news coming from startups at the Consumer Electronics Show next month.

The company will serve as a news platform for exhibitors at Eureka Park, the startup innovation portion of CES, as part of its partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association. Launch.it will provide a central spot for startups to publish their news and contact information at CES, as well as provide detailed analytics about visitors.

In short, it’s a far better alternative to throwing flash drives and PDFs at journalists and prospective investors. For startups, Launch.it gives them one place to send anyone interested in their company. And for journalists and everyone else, they’ll know exactly where to go to learn more about an intriguing startup.

“Our big vision is a free self-publishing platform to unlock the news,” said Trace Cohen, president and co-founder of Launch.it. “We want to be the biggest searchable database [of news] … almost to disintermediate Google.”

For its customers, Launch.it offers a bunch of useful features, including: a Wiki-like environment to allow customers to easily update their news, Facebook comments, the ability to buy and test out services, and the ability to let media and investors “follow” companies for instant news updates.

While Launch.it is starting with Eureka Park for now, its goal is to eventually offer a centralized spot for the thousands of companies exhibiting at CES, Cohen tells me. The father and son company (chief executive Brian Cohen is Trace’s father) has also partnered with Ultralight Startups and ShowStoppers, which runs product showcase events at popular conferences. So far, Launch.it powers news sites for around 300 to 400 companies.

You’d think by now that someone would have come up with a solution to modernizing the news distribution process, but Cohen tells me he was just as surprised at the lack of innovation in the market when he kicked off Launch.it at the New York Tech Meetup in May. One potential competitor is Virtual Press Office, which was acquired by PRNewswire in 2009, but Cohen notes that’s less appealing than his company since it resells wire services and isn’t consumer-facing. (Also, Virtual Press Office looks like it was made a decade ago.)

Launch.it is completely bootstrapped and only has three employees (along with an “off-shore” tech team in Long Island), but Cohen says the company is looking for strategic partnerships.

Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

But to others, it’s just a PR stunt with limited real value.

One of them is SumOfUs, a corporate watchdog group that describes itself as “fighting for people over profits.”

“Apple has a track record of announcing changes in its supply chain as PR stunts,” the organization’s founder and executive director Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said. “Apple has spent $650 million just on advertising for the iPhone alone since it launched. They’re talking about spending less than 20% of that on this shift. They’re talking about moving 1/10th of 1 percent of their global production costs.”

There’s no question that $100 million worth of manufacturing investment locally is a drop in the bucket. And there’s also no question but that Apple is starting with some of the least profitable segments of its product line-up. iPhone, iPad, and iPod, after all, account for some 76 percent of Apple’s total sales.

But Cook’s statement mentioned that iPhone and iPad processors are manufactured in the U.S. as well. That the glass is made in Kentucky, and that all research and design is done in California.

Still, Stinebrickner-Kauffman isn’t mollified.

“They’re making a small token offering to appease consumers here in the US. Is it a coincidence that Tim Cook is announcing this move just before the holiday shopping season? I think this is a really savvy PR stunt by a corporation that has no actual intentions of cleaning up its supply chain. And I hope consumers aren’t taken in by it, but instead demand evidence of actual change from Apple.”

I don’t buy it.

Manufacturing has moved to Asia for a lot of reasons, many having to do with people like you and me wanting manufactured goods for cheaper and cheaper prices. Taking it back will not and cannot happen immediately, or even quickly. As more automation enters the manufacturing process and wages are less of a factor, more manufacturing can return.

This is at least a start … and one that Apple had no need to do at all.

And, in the spirit of pots, kettles, and people living in glass houses … it wouldn’t be a PR stunt to publicly attack the most valuable corporation in the world for doing something good, would it?

photo credit: Tc Morgan via photopin cc

Although we like to be optimistic and think nothing bad will happen, it’s best to prepare for disaster. You should be able to anticipate likely scenarios of things that might go wrong.

Imagine you’re running a startup that allows people to rent out their homes or spare rooms to others. Once you reach a certain level of success, every one of these things will happen:

• Someone will get evicted because renting out their spare room violated their lease agreement.
• Someone will get sued after a guest trips and falls in their room. Because they were renting out their place for money, their insurance company will deny the claim.
• A guest will be raped by their host.
• Some pervert will install a camera in the shower and post pictures of a guest online.

These things aren’t unforeseeable. (I just foresaw them.) This isn’t fearmongering or anything unique to startups. Sadly, such things happen in our society when you reach a certain scale. Even Starbucks was sued after a man’s five-year-old daughter allegedly found a camera hidden in a bathroom.

But Starbucks has three key advantages that most startups don’t: It’s well versed in public relations, it has a strong brand, and it isn’t subject to media fears of the Internet bogeyman.

Too often, startup execs make rash statements after a disaster. Most executives at big companies have been trained on how to speak with the media. Given the strength of the Starbucks brand, few people would think Starbucks would endorse putting cameras in bathrooms. But as a startup, post-disaster may be the first time most people hear of your brand.

The mainstream media still have a fear of the Internet, despite it’s having been a key part of our lives for more than a decade now. Anything bad that happens on the Internet instantly gets more attention. Credit card fraud happens all of the time — we give our credit cards to waiters who walk away with them — but an equivalent amount of fraud online will get much more attention.

You can’t do anything about the Internet bogeyman. But you can avoid some of the most common mistakes I see startups make:

• Not having a single person (preferably the CEO) responsible for making all comments. Yes, we’re all flat organizations and we believe in equality. But now is not the time to have random staffers tweeting their thoughts.
• Blaming the victim. It’s possible that the victim really played a role in what happened. But blaming the victim in the immediate aftermath, before an investigation has taken place, is a bad idea.
• Trying to intimidate the complainant. Don’t ask people to remove blog posts or photos they’ve posted. Once something is out there, it’s out there. Asking someone to take down a blog post will likely lead to more attention to it.
• Explaining economic theory or contractual relationships. Our hypothetical room rental startup might have legalese to protect it as purely a marketplace if the case ever goes to trial and the judge buys the argument. But this argument is guaranteed to be a loser in the court of public opinion.
• Not engaging a crisis PR firm as soon as they know things are bad. Crisis PR is very different from the typical “please, please write about us” PR. My view is that VCs should have warm relationships with such firms and be able to call up in a hurry on behalf of their portfolio companies. If your VCs can’t help, maybe your attorney or regular PR firm knows someone.

The most important thing you can do is plan in advance. By identifying likely scenarios, you can figure out what to do when something happens.

Identifying likely scenarios also gives you the opportunity to figure out ways to make sure they won’t happen or at least take steps to mitigate the risk. Our room rental startup, for example, could find an insurance company that will cover liability claims from guests. Because this is a low-frequency event, it’s a risk that should be insurable at low rates.

That could be a much better approach than dealing with the aftermath of a PR disaster.

[Top image credit: Dirk Ercken/Shutterstock]

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news gathering and public relations companies, has purchased Mark Monitor for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced yesterday.

Mark Monitor is a service that helps brands track what’s said about them in public and offers trademark and copyright protection, domain management, and more. The company has more than 400 employees across five countries, and its clients include about half of the top Fortune 100 brands.

Thomson Reuters said it will add Mark Monitor’s services to its own to enhance the quality of protection offered to its vast number of clients. As part of the deal, the Mark Monitor team, including president and CEO Irfan Salim, will join Thomson Reuters.

Founded in 2006, the San Francisco-based company raised $12 million in total funding to date from Cargill Ventures, Focus Ventures, Foundation Capital, and Institutional Venture Partners. Completion of the acquisition by Thomson Reuters is subject to standard regulatory approvals.

Image via IKO /Shutterstock

One product that Apple does exceptionally well is the press conference. This week’s Worldwide Developers Conference was no exception, with a two-hour presentation that, while on the long side, was perfectly orchestrated, beautifully presented, and full of real news.

It’s that last item that, for some reason, many companies overlook.

Sure, it’s easy to focus on the razzle-dazzle, and when Steve Jobs was alive, his curiously mesmerizing personality was one of the main reasons Apple keynotes were so thrilling. Also, there’s no doubt that Jobs’ persnickety nature contributed much to Apple’s press event skills: He was famously obsessive about getting every detail of an event just right.

But now that Apple is led by a series of corporate wonks who have about as much collective charisma as an IRS audit team, do its presentations still have the same magic? The answer: Yes, pretty much so. The crowd still oohs and aahs over every new detail. They cheer wildly for Retina displays and — go figure — Apple’s homegrown maps application. They laugh at Siri’s lame jokes, and they chuckle at Apple’s worldwide marketing head, Phil Schiller, too.

The only conclusion I can draw is that Apple just knows how to do a press conference.

Many other companies don’t. That’s too bad, because press conferences are one of the most efficient ways for delivering news to a large public.

The biggest mistake many companies make is in leaking the news before the press event. Sometimes these leaks are unavoidable failures of corporate secrecy, as when some third-rate Chinese manufacturer of plastic iPhone cases puts a new product on its web catalog, inadvertently revealing the dimensions and a few trivial details of the next Apple product. Or, more seriously, when some retail partner accidentally posts a product description to its e-commerce site. These mistakes happen, even with Apple, and they diminish the impact of the press conference. But they’re not the most frequent type of leak.

More often “leaks” are deliberately given to select members of the press. Sometimes those select journalists get early access to a product and the executive team, so they can publish full-blown interviews and product reviews at the very moment the press conference begins.

The problem with that strategy is that, as soon as those interviews and reviews appear, nothing that happens at the press conference is news any longer. It’s all been published somewhere else, making it dated.

As a result, everyone who bothered to come to the press conference is sitting there, staring at their competitors’ websites instead of paying attention to what’s happening onstage. This engenders resentment among everyone else in the press corps, sure. But it also diminishes the impact of the news, because most publications aren’t going to devote as much effort to covering stories if they don’t have a shot at publishing them while they’re still relevant. That means your “news” reaches a smaller public than it would if you just dropped a huge pile of new stuff, Apple-style, on everyone at once.

Another mistake many companies make is in demonstrating products that aren’t ready for prime time. I think the public understands that demos are imperfect and that things often go wrong at the worst possible time. The trouble is when your product is so half-baked that you can barely get it to run. That does nothing but generate skepticism and mockery, instead of good press, for the tech product you’ve worked so hard on.

A final bit of advice: If you’re going to have a press conference, make sure there’s ample Wi-Fi and that there are power outlets. Apple can get away with putting all of the press into a dark room without either of those necessities. You probably can’t. Inviting a blogger to cover your event and then cutting her off from the internet is like asking someone to help you move into a new apartment and then not telling them the address. What’s the point?

Press conferences went through a period of unpopularity for awhile, with most tech companies preferring to make their announcements through a careful series of embargoed pre-briefings and over the news wires. Now they seem to be making a comeback. Unfortunately, many recent press conferences (including some recent, high-profile launches) have been poorly organized and poorly handled. It’s time for tech companies to get their acts together again.

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Please join me for an upcoming conversation with Fab.com cofounder Jason Goldberg. VentureBeat and the Commonwealth Club/Inforum are co-sponsoring this event in San Francisco on Thursday evening, June 14. Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy will be the interviewer. For tickets and more information, visit: http://bit.ly/FABinforum. I hope to see you there!

Photo: Racer OS X and Apple’s Craig Federighi onstage at WWDC 2012. Photo by Heather Kelly/VentureBeat.

I sit in a weird spot: although many consider me to be press, I also talk to a lot of other media outlets. I’m often quoted in national newspapers and magazines and regularly appear on TV. This happens partly because I have something interesting to stay; it’s also partly because I treat people how I like to be treated.

Here are my top tips for dealing with the press (including me):

1. Learn about the news outlet and the specific person you’re approaching. Every outlet has a specific feel and each person with an outlet has their own coverage area, interests, and motivations. Read their stuff and figure it out. Nothing will fall flatter than a bulk email sent to every “tips@” account that begins “Dear reporter.” Learn what each person values. In my case, I don’t really care that much about being first on a story. I add the most value when I do deep analysis. I’m a data and numbers guy; if you have those, I’m more likely to dig in.
2. Build relationships before you need them. This is similar to the career advice people get for networking. Follow the people you’re interested in on Twitter. If they tweet something where you can help, offer it. Even if it doesn’t relate to what you do. Offer them access to your network if you know someone who can answer a question.
3. Maintain relationships after you have them. Keep in touch with people on an ongoing basis. I don’t mean daily or weekly, but keep in touch as appropriate.
4. Be fast. Reporters are often on tight deadlines. And in the blog world, a lot of people value being first. The faster you return a call or email, the more likely it is that you’ll be included in the story.
5. Be brief. Get to the point. Your pitch shouldn’t ramble on for pages.
6. Be interesting. If you speak in PRese, it’s a lot less interesting. Avoid cliches like “We’re the leading…” Everyone claims to be the leader — except the real leaders. When I’m preparing for an interview, I’ll come up with two or three lines that are interesting, sharp, and brief to make it easier to quote.
7. Be patient. Depending on the story, somebody might run a piece weeks or months after they talk to you. (I often do this.) In the meantime, it’s OK to follow up periodically if there were updates to what you said or things that the reporter should be aware of. I once did a taped segment for Bloomberg that didn’t air until weeks later. Better reporters will let you know after they use something if there’s been a long delay. (Emily did.)
8. Don’t expect too much. Just because you spent 30 minutes on the phone with a reporter doesn’t mean they’ll use what you said. Sometimes the news changes and the story isn’t relevant anymore; in other cases, they found other people to quote. That’s just part of the news business. I do quite a few interviews where I don’t get quoted — but it goes back to building relationships. I genuinely want to help people tell better stories.
9. Realize that journalists talk to each other. Although we compete, we also chat with each other. If you’re an ass to someone, it will get around.
10. Engage with your critics. This is a controversial one, but I wholeheartedly believe this. I regularly write about two companies in the same space and I’m extremely critical of both. One refuses to talk to me; the other responds within minutes. The second one gets to tell its side of the story and influence my opinion. Both the company and the reading public are better served by having the conversation. The company gets better coverage — not because there is a quid pro quo, but because the dialogue leads to better analysis. And because most of the people who cover the space talk to me (see #9), it helps their overall coverage.
11. Never, ever lie. In order of preference, I want: True, technically true, or no comment. The best PR folks never lie. (And the best management teams don’t lie to their PR folks.) If you lie to me and I find out, it creates another story. It also means I won’t ever trust anything you say again. See also, #9.

A journalist’s job is to bring interesting and informative stories to readers, not to promote your company. If you help them do their job, you’ll do much better at your job.

This post originally appeared on Rocky Agrawal’s blog. It is republished here with his permission.

Top photo: Picsfive/Shutterstock

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social, and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

What happens when a public relations firm sobers up and realizes it actually has limits? When it realizes clients could benefit from content it doesn’t have the bandwidth to provide? This is a serious question that plagued the founders of San Francisco-based PR firm LaunchSquad, and instead of trying to create a new content division, it decided to make a new company instead.

Enter Original9 Media, a new venture that will focus entirely on content creation and occasionally hook up with LaunchSquad on projects. Original9 will be focused on managing blogs, writing blog posts, creating videos, making infographics, and developing mobile apps.

LaunchSquad co-founder and Original9 adviser Jesse Odell (pictured) told us that the current structure of his PR firm didn’t allow for enough content to be made. He said, in many cases, providing content like viral videos and engaging blog posts will work much better for some clients than the traditional PR approach of pitching news and hoping journalists bite.

“To do this well, you have to create high-quality content and do it at a high frequency,” Odell told VentureBeat. “LaunchSquad will do its own content for clients, but it may bring in Original9 to work on other kinds of content.”

Original9 will be led by Jeffrey Davis, a former journalist who worked at Business 2.0, BNET, and Bizmore. Davis has been senior VP and editorial director at LaunchSquad since August 2010, but he will now run Original9 with his instincts for how media thinks.

“This is an amazing time in the world of online media and we see an opportunity to build a company dedicated to providing high-quality content married with distribution and analysis,” Davis said in a statement. “Our goal is to help our clients connect and engage with specific target audiences through great content no matter where that audience is living online.”

At VentureBeat, we’ve been pitched by LaunchSquad many times on behalf of great companies like Evernote, Marketo, and Dolphin. But in those dealings, it’s easy to see where the pitch could fall short. Sometimes it takes a funny video, a well-worded blog post, or striking infographic to grab our attention when so many amazing companies are pitching us news every day. This is a reality that LaunchSquad has woken up to, and from what we’ve seen, this seems like a good move from a marketing perspective.

Even if VentureBeat or other tech blogs don’t cover a deserving company, it now might grab attention from consumers through social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. And sometimes, when a company begins gaining traction like that, then the journalists start paying attention too. And then the circle is complete.

Jesse Odell photo courtesy of Launchsquad

Mike Daisey, monologist and Apple critic

Apple released a statement to the press this morning about new labor condition audits it had asked for at Foxconn, the Cupertino company’s most infamous Chinese manufacturer.

Mike Daisey, an actor and monologist whose reporting and theatrical work has brought increased scrutiny to Apple’s labor practices, says the timing of the announcement is big news in and of itself.

“This isn’t new information,” Daisy told VentureBeat. “They talked about this work with the Fair Labor Association almost a month ago. But they buried it in a small note on a Friday before a holiday weekend. Doing this on a Monday morning with a big press release means they are reacting, because they see that their brand is in real danger.”

The specifics of the announcement are encouraging to Daisey. “They have gone from five percent of their supply chain being audited and the results being private to the entire supply chain and public reports, so that is progress,” he said.

But there is still a lot he would like to see improved. “These are announced inspections and, as I learned during my time in Chinese factories, those don’t work very well. They simply pull underage and overworked employees off the line when they know inspectors are coming.”

Apple’s rapidly expanding market cap, says Daisey, may be the key to progress on labor reform. “They have the resources right now to transform their supply chain. I know because I spent the last few years studying it. If Apple leads, other brands will follow. The pressure is clearly effecting them, so we just have to keep pushing.”

He is also waiting to see what these new reports look like before deciding how effective the additional audits might be. “Apple was lauded in the press for releasing their entire supply chain along with violations. But when you looked closely, that report didn’t show which suppliers were connected with which violation,” Daisey noted. “Apple is very good at PR, so I have learned to take everything they say with a healthy chunk of salt.”

Photo of Mike Daisey courtesy Mike Daisey.

Microsoft, of course, sees it as an opportunity.

This week, the company is placing a series of ads in newspapers across the U.S. to remind consumers that it still offers popular and secure web services for search, email, document management, and more.

In short, the company is making a bid for disgruntled Google users. For those among us who won’t like the idea of having a unified Google identity and privacy policy — a big part of the company’s Google+ strategy — Microsoft has Bing, Hotmail, Office 365 just waiting in the wings.

“When we read the coverage last week, it was clear people were honestly wrestling with the choices that had been made for them and were looking for options or alternatives,” wrote Microsoft communications VP Frank Shaw on the company’s official blog.

In some sense, we have to call BS on the whole dialog. It’s the clash of the PR titans. Neither company is really changing much of anything, including its actual practices when it comes to handling user data.

Unfortunately, average users have a hazy understanding of the changes Google is making; most of what they know is that change has the potential to disrupt their online lives, and they don’t want that.

Microsoft, which has been cloaked in (somewhat undeserved) big-bad-corporation vibes since the 1990s, is making “come to papa” gestures toward these users, even though nothing has changed in that company’s online products. There’s no new launch to announce, just a new angle to pitch — and the angle is “We’re not Google.”

Google, on the other hand, has to feed its users a similarly ambiguous line: “We’re changing, but nothing’s changing. Don’t worry; we’re all going to be fine.”

When it comes to your privacy, both companies are saying exactly the same thing, making highly subjective statements with no qualifying data.

Both claim to keep your data safe, to not share it around without your permission, to give you “choices” and operate with “transparency” when it comes to how data is used. But PR pitches aside, both companies are handling a complex issue — users storing massive amounts of data in online accounts — in roughly the same way.

So on which side is the grass truly greener? Whose privacy policies actually allow for more privacy?

The answer is… well, there is no answer. Both corporations are making company-friendly choices to improve their services and enhance their bottom lines, but not at the risk of scaring off the users they rely on to fund their operations. It’s a fine line, and both Microsoft and Google are toeing it carefully. Both will likely make some mistakes along the way; it’s inevitable.

As we don our trusty tin foil hats, we recommend that those truly obsessed with personal privacy shouldn’t be working “in the cloud” or putting most of their lives and work online. But if you have to live in an web-connected reality, as do we, decentralizing your activities will make for more privacy, because it will disperse small aspects of your information, habits, and behaviors among a range of companies rather than siloing your entire online life in just one mega-corporation. Between that and an app like 1Password, you should be just fine.

Christoforo (pictured) was apparently holding the e-mail and social media accounts for the N-Control game controller hostage, according to Moisés Chiullan, who took over PR for the company after Christoforo was ousted. Chiullan went on to detail the situation in a Reddit AMA discussion (where people answer questions submitted by Reddit readers), which eventually drove Christoforo to cooperate.

Chiullan wrote on Reddit:

I’ve been trying to get him to give up the access to these things he’s been holding hostage (email accounts, Twitter, etc) by asking nicely for a couple of days. The gloves are off now.

Paul told me on the phone two hours ago that “Eight months ago, I locked down all this stuff so they wouldn’t be able to fuck with me. If they don’t give me what I want, it’s war.” His demands include a contract written on his terms and substantial compensation, both immediate and for as long as the company continues to exist. He flaunted the PR debacle he created as proof that he “made the company a success”, citing all the media and public attention as the “best thing that ever happened to Avenger”.

He didn’t count on the fact that I anticipated all of this and have been a computer hardware and web tech since I was 14.

Several hours after the Reddit AMA began, Chiullan tweeted on the Avenger Controller’s Twitter account: “Happy to report that Mr. Christoforo has abruptly become very forthcoming regarding digital assets that he was previously withholding.”

I’m sure we’ll see more details about this latest drama soon, but for now I’m just flabbergasted by Christoforo’s complete lack of self-awareness.

Christoforo’s Ocean Marketing (he’s the only employee) rose to Internet stardom thanks to an over-the-top e-mail to an N-Control customer. VentureBeat’s Dylan Tweney bravely re-enacted the fiasco in our latest VB Weekly segment.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you’re one of the millions of players who purchased Skyrim in the past week, upon loading up the game for the first time you probably noticed an update was already available. Now Bethesda has announced that another patch is in the works, though the company has yet to detail exactly what issues it will be addressing.

With a game as ambitious as Skyrim and from a company as notorious for releasing unfinished, buggy games as Bethesda, it would be no surprise if Skyrim keeps up with a steady stream of patches across all three platforms. Given its unprecedented scope and the fact that previous Bethesda titles suffering similar technical issues have gone on to sell remarkably well, the publisher’s bottomline is unlikely to be impacted by the multitude of defects in Skyrim.

More interesting, however, is the way that Pete Hines, Bethesda’s VP of PR and marketing, has taken to Twitter to address frustrated players. “Patches/updates take a little time,” writes Hines. “We can’t turn it around quite that fast. It’s been three days. Calm down. We’re working on it.”

This is in response to a Twitter user named GhostLiz, who was part of a public back-and-forth with Hines. Hines eventually goes on to tell her, ”Thank for you for explaining my job to me,” to which she replies, “Someone has to since you’re not doing it. Less suing Notch for a word the dictionary had first, More addressing your customers.”

I’m seriously beginning to wonder if no one explains to PR how Twitter works. Yes, the world can read what you’re saying, so perhaps you should think before firing off some needlessly disparaging remark at the people who buy your games and ultimately pay your checks, especially when “public relations” is in your job title.

As for the incoming update, although Skyrim has a host of issues, some humorous, some not so much, GhostLiz and many others seem to be primarily concerned with the widely-reported slowdown that’s impacting the PlayStation 3 version of the game. VentureBeat reached out to Bethesda for official word on what fixes would be in the next update, and they gave us two links, one to a forum post regarding the previous update, and another regarding a workaround for the texture issue fans have been encountering on the 360. Note that both of these posts are locked to prevent any community members from commenting on them.

If you have any technical issues with the game you’d like to report yourself, you can use the generic Bethesda submission form. Or just tweet Pete Hines.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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RE: IMPORTANT CORRECTION (URGENT.)

I sigh. I’m frustrated. I didn’t do my job the best I could and something must have slipped. I kick myself for thinking that I might have missed something important or misspelled a name. Even in the era of fantastic spell-checking, that still happens. All that happens before I even open the message from Company X’s public relations team.

Then I realize it’s not a correction. It’s a “clarification” or an “important distinction.” It’s some kind of sick play to get the company represented in a more positive light. But every single time it’s labeled a “factual error” by either the company that is trying to get a little bit of more positive play or the public relations person trying to get me to change the story.

“I must stress that I am not talking about just language used (I take [former VentureBeat executive editor] Owen’s point — you’re not our PR agency!) but describing us as an online service is incorrect — we are a mobile platform,” one public relations representative said in an email.

I then had to take a few minutes to explain that an operating system like OS X or something like Facebook — not his client’s video sharing application — was a platform. That’s, of course, going off the definition of being able to build smaller pieces of software within the framework of a larger piece of software that runs all of them.

Three levels of abstraction away, said video sharing application is a platform. Except that is incredibly confusing because it also throws it into the same category as other “platforms” like Facebook. And it’s also insanely confusing for readers, who odds are also aren’t quite sure what actually codifies a “platform.”

So here I am, trying to correct your correction. During this time — which is usually during typical office hours — I spend trying to spar with you, I could have been writing additional stories. But I’m operating under the false assumption that I might need you to pitch me additional stories and I opened your message under the false assumption that I had apparently written something that was factually incorrect.

Here’s the thing, guys. You are not the gatekeepers of information. There are other ways to get the story. If it’s important enough, I and every other reporter out there in the world will find a way to get the story. It’s our job to be scrappy and it’s our job to be relentless when trying to figure out the best story.

You can either help us by pitching us stories with useful information and facilitating the communication. Or you can insult every one of us for the sake of getting a single word changed to something that is an even worse buzzword and run the risk of sabotaging an otherwise useful relationship. We here at VentureBeat already put up with your insipid demands for embargoes over new cloud computing software model number 771.

I’m personally going to ask you guys to stick to your guns and help us do our job. It make things much easier for all of us.

Lynley out.

(Also, everyone is banned from using the word “platform” from here on out.)

The move was a clumsy attempt by Facebook to convince reporters that Google’s Social Circle feature (now part of its Social Search) is a gross privacy violation against users. But now that it’s been caught red-handed, Facebook ends up looking far slimier in the process. In Internet speak, we would call this a major “PR fail.”

Facebook hired Burson-Marsteller to seed the anti-Google stories, but clearly the company wasn’t being very delicate about its dealings. Blogger Chris Soghoian ended up publishing his email exchange with the firm, in which Burson offered to help write an anti-Google opinion piece. Then USA Today outed the firm’s campaign two days ago, pointing out that it and other outlets were being pushed to write stories about Social Circle’s privacy concerns. Two Burson PR reps, Jim Goldman and John Mercurio, both former reporters, appeared to be the brains behind the campaign (or at least, the ones doing all the work).

A Facebook spokesman later revealed to the Daily Beast that it was behind the campaign, saying that the company was concerned about the privacy concerns raised by Google’s social networking push, and also that the company resents Google using Facebook data in Social Circle.

It’s strange that Facebook would go after Social Circle, a fairly obscure feature that launched back in 2009. The feature let Gmail users see publicly available social networking information from their friends, as well as friends of friends. Burson characterized the feature in its pitch as something “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users — in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google's] agreement with the FTC.”

However you look at this situation, it ends up being a disaster for Facebook. At best, the company may have had no idea what sort of campaign Burson was pursuing — but that seems unlikely. The comments from the Facebook spokesman indicate that the company wanted some sort of retribution, so it’s going to have a hard time explaining otherwise. It’s also worth noting that the move comes only a month after returning Google CEO Larry Page began a major push to make Google a social networking titan.

It was great sitting down with you on stage at the DEMO conference this week. We talked a bit about the challenges of your runaway growth and the difficulties of applying your innovative collective-buying model to small, local businesses. It was a friendly chat, I admit — you even joked about offering me a PR job. (Seriously, would you tech mogul dudes please stop poaching VentureBeat talent?)

As flattering as the offer was, I don’t think I’m the man for the job. Like you, I love great writing, but I want to tell the story of technology and innovation, and there’s no better place to do that than at VentureBeat. You do need a great communicator in your camp, however.

I like how you’ve handled your PR crises to date. Responding to a particularly comedic class-action lawsuit by suing yourself was a funny move. And your recent blog post reacting to questions raised about an offer by an Atlanta-area photo studio, Dana Dawes Photography was deftly written. You also have a great, scrappy, and likely understaffed PR operation under Julie Mossler right now. But as the volume of critical stories and problem deals rise, you’re going to need someone more experienced to handle them.

You need more than just a PR veteran, though. You need someone who can rethink your operations with protecting Groupon’s public image in mind. You recently told me that you stand by the way you vet companies. Seven people at Groupon touch each offer before it goes live. And yet you also have plans to rapidly ramp up the deals you have on offer. Roughly 35,000 companies are waiting in queue to offer a Groupon.

As you grow the business and work through that backlog, problem deals will become more and more visible. And as you’ve noted, when a business can’t handle the volume Groupon directs to it or customers have other complaints, Groupon loses, too. As the company introducing customers to a business, you’re going to get bad PR on all sides.

Yelp and PayPal dealt with similar issues in the early stages of their business — not successfully, I might add. PayPal was besieged by lawsuits from angry merchants and customers whose accounts were frozen for fraud investigations. And Yelp got serious bad buzz for the less-than-transparent way it displayed — or didn’t display — business reviews. Both companies have recovered, but it’s hard to know how much more successful they might have been if they’d dealt with their image problems more expeditiously.

Now’s the time to get ahead of the curve. It feels obnoxious to point out a problem without offering a solution. And it’s clear that you think the secret to Groupon’s success has more to do with people than technology.

So I have the fix: Hire Julie Anderson Ankenbrandt. Who’s that, you say? Ankenbrandt was an executive at PayPal. She started out running public relations. But as PayPal’s operational snafus mounted, causing more and more PR crises, she realized that the best way to address them was to fix the underlying business problem. So she moved out to Omaha, Nebraska temporarily to set up PayPal’s first customer-service center, a move that arguably saved the business from imploding under the weight of fraud investigations and customer complaints. She went on to help lead PayPal through its IPO — a move that many have speculated is next up for your company — and its acquisition by eBay, a company we’ve cited as a model for your international growth.

I haven’t talked to Ankenbrandt in years. She moved from Silicon Valley to Denver several years ago and got a degree in public administration at the University of Colorado at Denver — a nice fit with your own degree in public policy. And, as it happens, her LinkedIn profile describes her as “emerging from hiatus.”

The fit seems perfect. You could hire any number of PR executives, but someone with Ankenbrandt’s operational experience, strategic perspective, and experience with a business that caters to small merchants seems perfect for Groupon. I don’t know if you’ll be able to get Ankenbrandt to pick up and move to Chicago. At the very least, you should talk about your common experiences — and think about how to get someone with her kind of resume in your camp.

So I hope that helps, Andrew. You seem sincere in your commitment to avoid bad experiences by customers and merchants who use Groupon. And you’ve done pretty well setting up shop outside Silicon Valley. But I think there’s a lot you can learn from tech’s battle-scarred veterans. Drop Ankenbrandt a line. And let me know how it goes.

[photo by Stephen Brasher for DEMO]