Doing taxes is no fun. Scott Gulbransen knows that, and he tries make things a little bit easier in his role as Senior Manager of Public Relations & Social Media, Consumer Group, Intuit. The company is home to such brands as TurboTax, Quicken and now Mint.com.

We spoke to Gulbransen about the PR challenges of incorporating the recently acquired Mint.com brand while phasing out Quicken, how he built the brand's Twitter presence by engaging, and what his team does to go into "high gear" each tax season.

Intuit is phasing out Quicken with the acquisition of Mint.com, where in the communications process, does that stand?

We're happy to say that the deal to acquire Mint.com closed on November 2nd, so it's finally official and we can welcome all the Mint folks into the family.

Brooke Hammerling, the well connected tech publicist and founder of Brew Media Relations, is working out of the agency's Santa Monica office today. She had a little mishap with the phone system. We'll give her a pass on this one, since it seems from her Twitter feed that she's been in about 18 different time zones in the last few weeks.

RELATED: Brooke Hammerling on NYT Story: Reporter Did an "Excellent Job"

Cision, makers of CisionPoint PR software, among other media list and monitoring offerings, has announced several upgrades including search, geo-targeting, video editing tools and automatic email news alerts.

The search function could be appealing to PR pros as it offers "a 90-day archive of radio and TV broadcast coverage from all 210 designated marketing areas (DMAs) in the U.S.; more than five thousand top U.S. newspapers, magazines and trade journals; more than 20,000 news websites; and hundreds of thousands of blogs." The 90-day archive makes it impossible for PR pros to compare coverage year over year or quarter by quarter, but could be helpful for digging up past coverage by reporters or news outlets that one is pitching.

In addition, the company announced CisionPoint has reached 5,000 customers and 20,000 users.

PR people will soon be able to pitch their clients' op-eds to AOL News, a site with 26 million monthly uniques. Opinion Editor John Merline tells PRNewser that though an official launch date is TBD, he's looking for pieces "across the political spectrum as well as corporate and industry-related op-eds, on top news of the day." One such op-ed from an American Enterprise Institute Fellow recently ran on AOL's Sphere site.

This PR opportunity comes at a point of major shifts at AOL as the company is expected to be spun off from Time-Warner by the end of the year (with layoffs), and as is rebranding and shifting the news URL to Sphere.com. The original Sphere will relaunch as Surphace. Sphere was a blog engine in its original incarnation when it was acquired by AOL in 2008.

If you traffic in opinion, you'll want Merline in your rolodex. His email is John dot Merline at Corp dot AOL dot com.

Furniture retailer Raymour & Flanigan hired MWW Group, the agency announced today. This is the first time R&F hired an agency for PR and marketing communications work. Alissa Blate, executive vice president and global consumer marketing practice leader at MWW Group, confirmed the agency has been hired on a monthly retainer basis but would not comment on budget.

"It was a situation where Raymour & Flanigan knew that an integrated campaign was going to be very successful for them," Blate told PRNewser. "As such, we were brought in to take a look at their business and develop a strategy as to what are the critical communications aspects that would work within an overall campaign - including social media, creating advocates through influencer relationship's, media relations, and then using their spokespeople as third party endorsers."

"MWW Group brings a number of critical skills that made them a natural choice to handle this assignment," said Lisa King, senior vice president of marketing at Raymour & Flanigan in a statement.

Tension and trepidation over social media and the corresponding tools is alway palpable at PR conferences, though much has changed since PRNewser launched in 2007 in time to cover PRSA Philadelphia. According to PitchEngine founder Jason Kintzler, "I think it's been very telling. The people we've met are past, 'what is social media' - now, they're asking for what's next."

Still the big trade organization for the industry has some learning to do itself. We're told that nowhere within the conference is the Twitter stream displayed, and wi-fi isn't readily available.

Sarah Evans--Kintzler's TweetUp co-host tonight--reported that wireless access in the exhibitor area is a whopping $250.

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington addressed the PRSA International Conference in San Diego yesterday. Speaking to a variety of topics, Huffington took the time to call out PRSA for not having wi-fi on site. "Make sure people can interact next time," she said.

Delving into PR tactics, Huffington made a bit of a contradiction in regards to press releases.

The Dowd Agency, recently acquired by Middleberg Communications, does work with multiple AETN programs, and a source at AETN tells PRNewser that the agency "definitely still works with them," and added there is "no reason that they'd be eliminated." Dowd is hired mostly for project work, the source said. The agency declined to comment to PRNewser and directed media requests to internal PR at AETN. AETN is jointly owned by Disney-ABC and Hearst, who both own a 42.5% stake, and NBC Universal which controls 15.5%.

UPDATE: AETN SVP of Corporate Communications Michael Feeney would not comment on specific executives laid off, but did confirm that there were 100 laid off in total. PRNewser has learned that the "two senior PR executives" mentioned in The Hollywood Reporter story are Cindy Ronzoni, Director of Corporate Communications and Online Media Relations and Josh Sabarra, Senior VP, Corporate Communications and Publicity, both at Lifetime.

In just his second month on the job, dna13 vice chairman Dave Armon is already making some big moves. Today, the "reputation management and media monitoring" company announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters.

Thomson Reuters is already developing what Armon calls, "innovative workflow and communications solutions for PR professionals," and dna13 will be contributing "television, print, internet and social media monitoring expertise and workflow functionality," to these new services in development.

The deal opens up dna13 to a large audience, as the division of Thomson Reuters developing the new services already has more than 6,000 corporate customers.

New York Times: Sports Illustrated's Scoop on Agassi Is Scooped on Twitter

San Diego Metropolitan Magazine: Public Relations Society of America Convention Comes to San Diego

New York Times: Refining the Twitter Explosion

The New York Yankees celebrated their 27th World Series today with a parade through downtown Manhattan's "Canyon of Heroes." Rubenstein Associates, the team's PR agency of record, issued the following statement to media on behalf of team owner George Steinbrenner, sent by agency president Howard Rubenstein.

It seems Ogilvy PR should be thanking California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration for mismanagement. It helped Ogilvy pick up a $9 million contract with the California High-Speed Rail Authority. The bidding process for the contract was re-opened after Mercury Public Affairs - who was about to win the account - was deemed to have too many close ties to the Schwarzenegger administration. Government board members called the original bidding process, "insufficient."

"Under a new bidding process, a staff selection panel that included three representatives from outside transit agencies chose Ogilvy over six other applicants. Mercury did not rebid, saying it lacked confidence in the new process," reports the Fresno Bee. O'Dwyer's says Ogilvy beat out Porter Novelli for the contract.

Does the U.S. have a perception problem? Not so, according to one survey. FutureBrand, in conjunction with Weber Shandwick's Global Travel & Lifestyle Practice, released their fifth annual Country Brand Index (CBI) today.

The U.S. came in first, followed by Canada and Australia. New Zealand and France round out the top five. In terms of methodology, the survey, "incorporates global quantitative research, expert opinions, and relevant secondary sources for statistics that link brand equity to assets, growth and expansion."

"It's logical to assume that the shift in the political climate and renewed optimism surrounding the election of President Obama was a key influencer in the U.S. topping the list," said Rene A. Mack, president, Weber Shandwick's Travel & Lifestyle Global Practice.

In a recent PRNewser poll, we asked, "Which Tactic Did You Employ the Last Time You Released Big News?" The results: "Posted on a wire and pitched the release," and "Exclusive with one publication" both came in dead even at 32% each.

21% said "News embargo" and 15% said "Posted on company blog/website and pitched the link." Judging from these results, we have to ask: Are embargoes on the decline?

Just last week agency Waggener Edstrom assembled a panel to discuss the topic of emgargoes, and reporters in attendance were split down the middle between those who defended them and those who hate them. The panel came on the heals of another declaration that embargoes are dead, this time from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who has been publicly battling with PR for quite some time.

Skip forward to this week. Waggener Edstrom, the aforementioned agency who set up last week's panel on embargoes had an embargo broken in regards to one of their clients: Microsoft's MSN.com re-design. This led to another uproar and Arrington said he "banned" Waggener from communicating with TechCrunch. What did the agency learn from the experience? "Will we abandon embargos all together: nope. Will we have an even higher bar for use of the tool: you bet," said Jen Houston, global lead of Wag Ed's digital division, Studio D, in a blog post today.

First on PRNewser: Bite PR Manager of Business Development & Account Planning Kelly McCarthy is leaving the agency to join Ruder Finn as Director of Business Development. "I love Bite, always have and continue to wish them well, but it's a new chapter for me and a new opportunity. [Ruder Finn] is an agency that is growing and has fantastic credentials," said McCarthy.

Bite will "definitely" be hiring, said Vice President Sean Mills. "We're taking this as an opportunity to evaluate our new business structure across North America and make sure we have the right resources in the right places. As we get that sorted out you'll see us actively recruiting to fill her position." McCarthy's first day at Ruder Finn is November 16th. Bite PR's New York team had a bash to send her off last night.