One of the best ways for your business to get exposure and credibility is through public relations. Yet, hiring a PR firm can be expensive, easily running $5,000 to $10,000 per month.

Despite this, it's possible to do PR on your own. Keep in mind that a key to success is having an active and passionate founder or CEO who makes media relations a priority. This has been the case with many great leaders, such as Howard Schultz at Starbucks (NYSE: SBUX) and Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM).

So, let's take a look at some of the steps you can take to improve your PR.

Former Google, Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) engineers recently launched a new-fangled search engine, called Cuil. The goal was pretty ambitious; that is, to be the next Google.

Well, the debut was shaky, as the online reviews were mostly negative. Basically, the quality of the search results were lackluster -- and the overall performance was erratic.

No doubt, in the social media world, things can get brutal. Yet, it's something that many businesses need to think about.

So, how do you deal with negative reviews?

For companies, PR is one of the best ways to get customers and build a brand. But, it can be expensive – as well as unpredictable.

Well, Vocus (NASDAQ: VOCS) has been making things easier. That is, the company has a suite of web-based products that help manage the PR process, such as with media relations, monitoring, and news distribution. What's more, the services are fairly affordable.

Investors are also getting interested in Vocus. On news of its Q1 results, the shares shot up 8% to $27. Then again, revenues spiked 42% to $17.87 million, which was the 35th consecutive quarter of revenue growth. Cash flow from operation came to $5.94 million, which was a 58% increase.

In the quarter, Vocus added 219 net new subscribers (the total is 2,646). Some of the customers include British Antarctic Survey, China Foreign Trade Centre, Clemson University, Department of Justice, Merck & Company (NYSE: MRK) and so on.

Going into Q2, Vocus sees revenues of $18.6 million to $18.8 million. Full-year guidance is for $75.9 million to $76.7 million.

All in all, Vocus is yet another company that is leveraging the on-demand model, which allows for a nice recurring revenue model. What's more, it helps that the company doesn't have major competitive forces – yet has a fairly large market opportunity.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.

The Wall Street Journal [subscription required] reports that Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), hoping to bolster its legal challenge, is now paying a PR firm to drum up public opposition to Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) $3.1 billion deal to acquire online advertising firm, DoubleClick. Microsoft hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to drum up opposition to Google's DoubleClick deal. In Europe, Burson urged Internet companies to sign an online petition for a more "transparent and competitive Internet," according to the pitches.

Why does Microsoft oppose the deal and why is it hiding behind Burson? Microsoft does not want Google to strengthen its competitive position in the online advertising industry -- and DoubleClick, which serves online display advertisements, would surely help Google expand its online advertising dominance. Microsoft has been hiding behind Burson in Europe because it has just lost a European Court upheld a ruling that found Microsoft had abused its near-monopoly position in PC computer software.

The irony of Microsoft's efforts to block competition through the courts and the media was not lost on the Journal. In the 1990s, Bill Gates enjoyed tweaking competitors which similar tactics by rivals as it cemented its own power in personal-computer software, and those efforts factored into its run-ins with antitrust regulators.

But current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer lacks Gates' competitive chops, so he's struggling to use the means of a second rate competitor against the market leader, Google. Those clumsy means will only make Microsoft look bad.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates,. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in Google or Microsoft securities.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT) has retained PR operation Edelman [subscription required] in another sign that the retailer is focusing on form over substance. The public relations firm is using employees who have helped in political campaigns to run something called "Candidate Wal-Mart."

Wal-Mart is guessing that if it improves its image with the public then sales might go up. Bad feelings about putting small retailers out of business and pushing around employees must be the fall guy for the company's dropping same-store sales.

The PR operation even helped turn the Wal-Mart launch of $4 prescriptions into a campaign claiming the retailer is a force behind promoting health-care changes and, of course, lowering health-care costs.

Today, The Wall Street Journal has"outed" Wal-Mart's fancy campaign to win over the press and consumers. Now the troubling question arises as to whether people don't shop at Wal-Mart because they don't like the company or because they don't think the stores have the products they want at the price they want.

Maybe if Wal-Mart would put the kind of effort that it appears to be putting into burnishing its image into merchandising instead, the financial health of the company might actually improve. The disclosure in the Wall Street Journal article probably offsets any progress from the PR work.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

It's been an interesting week for me; that is, two global tech companies -- International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) and SAP AG (ADR) (NYSE:SAP) -- are concerned about my abilities.

OK, first I got an email from one of SAP's communications vice presidents, regarding a column I wrote titled, "SAP Still Not Serious About M & A."

He wrote: "You know, with a little research, the readers of the Motley Fool might have had a more clear picture about SAP's strategy on acquisitions, and how that successful strategy has differentiated itself from the so-called pressure you seem to think that Oracle is putting on SAP. The number of assumptions (many wrong) about SAP and Oracle in your column deserve some balance so that your readers are getting an accurate assessment of the market, and the relative performance of SAP (16 quarters of organic growth) and Oracle (questionable).... Your readers deserve some balance and some accuracy about SAP and Oracle, lest folks wonder who really is "the fool."

Ouch! Yes, it is true that I've been bullish on Oracle and bearish on SAP. For the year, Oracle is up nearly 50% and SAP is up about 11%. I responded to him and emailed: "Thanks for calling me a fool."

His response:

Skype, eBay's VoIP service, has always been free -- for computer-to-computer calls. But this afternoon, in what some are calling "brilliant," others are calling a "stunt," and still others name the "voice-over-loss-leader protocol," Skype announced via email and on the company blog that SkypeOut calls from your computer to mobile and land lines throughout the U.S. and Canada would be free. (And, to be clear, calls must both originate and end in the U.S.; and this deal is only good through the end of the year.)

Skype, you see, was born in the U.K. and most of its users are European (lots of Finns, evidently, among other Northern Europeans). So although this will certainly cost the company something, the theory is that the users will get hooked on using Skype to order pizza and call friends when they're not in WiFi land and, well, just use Skype, and then create "mindshare."

Om Malik at GigaOm has lots of interesting things to say, like that it's "a nifty stunt to bring the focus back on Skype," that for AIMphone it's not necessarily a negative (after all, he points out, AOL will have an easier time getting their users to call on their existing client than Skype will have getting users to download a whole new client), and, most importantly: this is "only part of an ongoing trend - vanishing voice revenues." At neoMarketing.TV, the prediction for the phone companies is more dire: "The future for traditional telecom operators is very dark." And everywhere the question: will the internet be able to handle all this bandwidth?

Interestingly, the announcement was made after market close and eBay's stock bounced back a bit from the 26-cent tumble it took today. It's now at $31.32 in after-hours trading.