社交媒体崛起，公关有望翻身

    公关无法实现规模化。如果有什么能在商业中管用时，人们都希望尽可能地将其规模化。举例来说，如果正在进行一项谷歌（Google）关键词推广活动，商业人士提出的最大问题是再投入多少钱，边际效应将下降到零。另外，也不清楚如何利用公关上的成功。

    说得天花乱坠也于事无补。亚瑟·W·佩奇（1883年-1960年）是首位担任大型上市公司董事的公关人，他的原则是：“公众对一家机构的看法，90%取决于它怎么做，10%是听它怎么说。”而公关部门往往只能影响这10%。

    下面我们分析一下，为什么公关在社交媒体时代的重要性有望大幅提升：

    相比过去，公关效果能更好地得到监测。过去，汇报媒体报道效果只限于剪报，然后提交给老板。即便是在互联网1.0时代，媒体发行人也从不公布每篇文章获得了多少点击浏览量。如今，谁都可以免费查询一篇文章在Facebook和Twitter等社交平台上分享的次数。更重要的是，由于社交账户的公开性质，可以跟踪谁在分享你收到的这篇报道，以及他们是否由于这篇报道而采取了什么行动。

    社交媒体可以推进更多的人际交流。正如我在《财富》杂志（Fortune）专栏《慢公关》（Slow PR）中所写，社交媒体为公关人员与所需打交道的人之间建立良好关系提供了可能。不再是盲目地发送给几千人，然后期待能有1%的回复率。公关人可以深度调研，与最可能对他们代表的公司感兴趣的记者建立强有力的关系。这种互动只到最近才成为可能，因为使用社交媒体的记者比例非常高，我共同创立的公司Muck Rack关注的记者已超过了10,000名。

    现在可以将针对有影响力人士的公关活动规模化，还可以通过推广文章实现。1997年，史蒂夫·乔布斯重返苹果时就曾成功采用这一策略。史蒂夫只需再度说服苹果值得关注的几名记者，把他的信息发布出去。今天的媒体界已经碎片化。就算是一家已经边缘化的公司，如果它要发布这样的信息，也得接触几十名甚至几百名记者、博主和有影响人士。公司需要沟通的人员数量会越来越多，公关技能是处理这些额外关系的最佳工具。

    You can't scale PR. When something works in business you want to scale it as much as possible. For example, if a Google AdWords campaign is working the biggest question a businessperson has is how much money they can throw at it before it stops being effective. It's unclear how to leverage a PR success.

    There's no use putting lipstick on a pig. Arthur W. Page (1883-1960), the first PR man to serve on a the board of directors of a major public company, offered the principle "Public perception of an organization is determined 90 percent by what it does and 10 percent by what it says." All too often the PR department's only been able to influence the 10 percent part.

    Here's why PR has the opportunity to move center stage in the social media age:

    Effects of PR can now be measured to a greater extent than ever before in history.Reporting on the effectiveness of a press mention used to be limited to clipping it from a newspaper and showing the clip to the boss. Even in the first era of the web a publisher would never share how many pageviews an article received. Now anyone can track for free how many times an article is being shared on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter for free. More importantly, due the public nature of social profiles, you can track who is sharing press you've received and if they're taking action because of it.

    Social media can drive more human communications. As I wrote about in my Fortune column on Slow PR, social media offers hope for building better relationships between PRs and the people they need to work with. Rather than blindly pitching thousands of people hoping for a 1% response rate, public relations pros can deeply research and build strong relationships with the journalists most likely to be interested in the companies they represent. This kind of interaction is only recently possible due to the very high percentage of journalists on social media, which the company I cofounded Muck Rack has pegged at well over 10,000 journalists.

    You can now scale PR to influencers and by promoting articles. In a way Steve Jobs had it easy when he returned to Apple in 1997. Jobs only needed to convince a small handful of journalists that Apple was worth paying attention to again to get his message out. In today's fragmented media world, a sidelined company would need to reach out to dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of journalists, bloggers and influencers to tell such a story. The number of people a company needs to interact with will continue to increase overtime, and the public relations skill set is best suited to handle the additional relationships.

    PR departments are starting to be tasked with creating branded content and spending significant amounts of money on platforms that increase distribution for content such as Facebook'sPromoted Posts, Twitter's Promoted Tweets and Outbrain's Amplify.