Chris Perkins
Qld Manager, Essential Media Communications
Written by James Parker on 2009-10-09
Chris Perkins is the Queensland manager of public relations company, EMC. Previously he has worked as a media advisor to the NSW Police Minister, an Executive Director for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, established his own PR firm based in Brisbane and was the State Secretary of the Queensland Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance
Why did you decide to pursue a career in the media and communications industry?
I think most journalists – and this includes me –actually go into journalism for altruistic reasons: the cliché “make the world a better place” idea through things like investigative reporting or uncovering the ills in society or bringing the public’s attention to marginalised people or systemic failure. Also just to keep the public informed of issues that impact on their lives. I got into the media because I thought it would be an interesting lifestyle – you’re talking to different people every day.
What has been your most memorable achievement or experience working as a part of Brisbane’s media landscape?
Setting up EMC in Brisbane as public affairs company that wins campaigns. We’re quite different to the average public relations company. We work for progressive causes and issues. We would not, for example, work for a tobacco company. We do a lot of work for good causes – workers’ rights, Aboriginal organisations, environmental, not-for-profits and government work. We’re doing work with a big corporate company at the moment, but it’s in their corporate social responsibility section, doing really good work. We also do research-based work as well as the media-relations and creative advertising type work in our strategic campaigns. We’re quite unique in that regard. We’re committed to providing more creative and strongly research based approaches to progressive causes. They deserve the leading edge and the best service.
EMC also completed the “Your Rights at Work” campaign. It was one of the main reasons the Howard government was voted out in the previous federal election. There were two big issues and EMC has worked on both of them: “Your Rights at Work” and climate change.
What are the most important/valuable skills that graduates can bring to your industry?
I’m a bit of a traditionalist in the sense that I think a questioning, open mind is the most important thing. But you need to have good core skills. You need to be able to write well and be able to get your head around some complex things fairly quickly. When I’m employing people, even if they’ve been in the industry for 20 years, I’m looking for people who can reflect on their mistakes and learn from them. Nobody’s perfect, of course we all make mistakes, the important thing is being able to learn from that and improve. You need to have an open mind, to work with creative ideas, new ideas and challenging ideas.
What features, both positive and negative, differentiate Brisbane-based media organisations to other national and international media hubs?
There’s a big difference. When I was working in Sydney, as a media adviser to the Police Minister and then as the Executive Director for National Parks, both were in the frontline of the media for different reasons. With the police it was gang warfare and crime out of control, at the time it was the big issue – 1999-2001. Then I went to national parks – in 2002 and 2003 there were two of the worst bushfires New South Wales had seen in around 100 years.
The difference between Brisbane and Sydney, or Melbourne for that matter is the number of active media outlets that have resources for news and current affairs. In Sydney you have two main newspapers that can take quite a different approach. The public, and people in public relations who are trying to get their message out, have two different options. Similarly with news and talkback radio, there are realistically only two in Brisbane, but in Sydney there are at least three big ones and a few more on the side. There are pluses and minuses in that. Alternative voices are good for public relations, but in the middle of an emergency, it makes life difficult. We did around 300 interviews or more in 10 days during one of the bushfires.
In your opinion, what is the most prominent trend in the public relations industry at the moment?
A few years ago people used websites as an efficient form of a library. Organisations simply stored information. Now we use it as a campaign tool. We tell our clients they should have a website for their campaign as well as their company and to make it interactive, allow comments, upload videos and link it to Facebook and Twitter to make it easy for people to support your campaign. It’s so much more effective than direct mail, which usually ends up in the bin. Through the website you can build up databases of information on the people who support your campaign, so when you’re sending your messages out, you’re sending it to people who are already interested. It’s also a lot cheaper and you’re not as dependent on traditional media. You don’t have to rely on your story being covered by journalists, you can directly send your three-minute news-style video to your audience.
Earlier you mentioned the concentration of traditional media in Brisbane. Obviously the Internet has opened up a whole range of new distribution channels and in the age of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, everyone thinks they’re a publicist. Does this present any new challenges for public relations practitioners trying to get their message out there?
No doubt about that. Media Watch will every now and then do a story on how journalists are hoaxed by fake claims. That’s simply because journalists don’t have the resources to research sufficiently. There’s a reason for that – and it comes down to the Internet – but they don’t have the time or money to put into research. It’s also a challenge because there’s just so much information out there.
That’s why around a campaign you’ve still got to do the hard work of getting other organisations onboard to support your campaign. Then you can increase your audience by tapping into their databases and get those people to forward messages and links so your audience grows that way.
However, I’m not sure it’s harder to get through. Many still go to traditional news providers – even if they’re not reading the paper or seeing the show – they logging on to a credible news provider. Where it does blur, though, is on shows like The Chaser, Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, The 7pm Project or The Panel that merge public issues and comedy. There’s research to show that people are increasingly turning to shows like these.
EMC specialise in dealing with sensitive and controversial matters. How difficult is the process of constantly adapting to new regulatory environments and other constraints on information sharing?
We haven’t had too much of a problem with adapting to regulatory environments. Sometimes when we’re dealing with Government clients we have to be mindful of what particular people can and can’t be seen doing or saying. We deal with a lot of confidential client information, but it’s usually pretty easy to deal with. We advise without fear or failure, but we need to know all the information. One of the challenges is to get the client to tell us everything and that’s why relationships are so important in this job. We have to earn the client’s trust.