Why Your Start-Up Needs a PR Person

I watched the bitchmeme today float over the blogs and Techmeme with a wry grin and a shake of my head. Twitter has had a horrible week: the downtime and missing features continue. The users are revolting, posting blog posts and FriendFeed items threatening defection at every new development. The first complaints were that the folks at Twitter didn't communicate enough, and now the problem is that the communication is that of developers on the defensive, with a different reason given every day for the issues. The bitchmeme today centered on Robert Scoble, formerly one of Twitter's most vocal supporters and certainly its most active user, taking Alex Payne's remarks personally, and everyone else lined up on one side or the other of the argument.

I found myself in the very strange position of supporting Scoble, but not for the reasons that it seemed others did. Yes, those with huge lists of contacts and insane amounts of activity are a huge suck on an overtaxed system, and that would be true of any application, not just Twitter. Payne was simply stating a fact, one of many issues that they are currently facing right now. Any developer would have said the same thing when queried.

The problem, however, is that developers will tell you exactly what they are thinking about what's wrong, and what could be fixed, and it's a rare developer who thinks about how users would react to their responses. Generally, that's why there is someone else who steps in to face the customer in a software company, or in this case, the user.

Web 2.0 companies are so often bootstrapped that marking and public relations seem like a frivolous expense. Programmers and servers are the necessities, so it's tempting to view everything else as something you just can't afford. But Twitter is learning the hard way that it's simply not the case.

Public relations isn't just about the launch and the press releases and getting bloggers to pay attention to your app. It's about giving you a unified message that goes out to your userbase. It's about vetting comments that often go from brain to mouth with no filter. The developers are frustrated, and that's apparent. The users are frustrated as well. But a simple message accepting responsibility and promising a fix is the only thing that consistently helps companies to save face and win back customer loyalty. "We're sorry. We screwed up. We'll make it right." It's the reason that there are people who specialize in damage control in the non-tech business world. And companies may want to rethink prioritizing in boot-strapping, because sometimes you just need the help of someone whose profession is being tactful and playing nice with the users. They may save more than you spend on them.