Perfect Circle PR

“I cannot recommend Joe more highly. In the area of Public and Media relations, so often difficult to gauge and assess, Joe delivers real results. To get a new business onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal around the world was an incredible result and testament to Joe’s ability to work in partnership with journalists and the business to ensure value on both sides. Joe is also an incredibly nice guy to work with and has high integrity, follow through and delivery.”

Justin Basini, Founder and CEO, ALLOW

“Joe is the man behind the PR success ALLOW has had. From a flurry of PR including the Wall Street journal to over 60 mentions of ALLOW when we launched the UKs first social media insurance and more … Joe is to thank! A true maestro and consumate professional.”

Gavin Lachman, CFO, ALLOW

“Joe demonstrates a keen understanding of the financial trade press and the issues of the day affecting the Life, Pensions and Retail Asset Management sectors. His practical and pragmatic style provides us with excellent support in promoting our firm in a crowded marketplace. No hesitation in recommending Perfect Circle as a PR agent.”

Vaughan Jenkins, CEO Bluerock Consulting

“Joe took time to understand our business. He provided a professional service and always delivered what he promised”

Tom Russell, CEO, InvestSmart

“Instant, coherent comments and no flannel. Superb PR.”

Joe McGrath, Director,  Pretty Good Publishing 

“As a journalist, I have worked with Joe for the past 10 years, during which time he has occupied various roles. The important things however have stayed the same; he is a professional, reliable and amicable communicator who has never failed to deliver.”

Laura Howard,  MoneySupermarket.com

“I have found Joe to be of good assistance in developing and expanding both my business and profile within my defined market”

Simon Conn,  Overseas Property and Finance Specialist

“Joe has brought a new dimension to the PR of Legal & General’s Housing Business. He has wide experience of our market and applies this well. He makes an effort to understand all aspects of the business and thinks about these when making decisions and recommending approaches. Always approachable and willing to help and advise and acts with integrity- a credit to his profession.”

Gary Burchett, Managing Director of Housing at Legal & General

“There are very few in our industry that have the ability to fully understand all relevant and topical stories, and combine this with proper creativity, cut-through and humour”

Ben Thompson, Director, Mortgages at Legal & General

For further endorsements, please see Joe Wiggins’ LinkedIn page.

My definition of Public Relations is the art of influencing perceptions, opinions and behaviour through editorial, or ‘earned media’ as opposed to through advertising. PR used to be primarily about achieving media coverage in order to achieve the desired goals, but the media industry is changing rapidly because of advances in technology. These days the scope for PR is now much wider than ever before.

PR is now about generating content that people will use and share. That content could be a news release or story idea that journalists will write about, but this is now just one strand of modern PR. The content could equally be video, photos, audio, infographics, web apps, microsites, social media content, articles, blogs, whitepapers, or discussions in online forums.

Digital technology and social media has blown the PR toolkit wide open, so that a company can now bypass traditional media altogether if they want, and talk directly to their target audience.

Any business, whether it is B2C or B2B, needs to consider all strands of PR when creating a strategy to meet its objectives. More often than not, the objective is to generate business growth, in which case a combination of tools is required, not just media relations.

Increasingly, business growth is focussed on search engine optimisation so that people can find you easily in the online world. If SEO is important to your business, then modern PR is integral to that. The combination of tactics mentioned above, particularly generating online copy, social media activity and online coverage all contribute significantly to boosting natural search rankings.

So what is PR? Not what it used to be, that’s for sure. PR is where communication meets technology to raise awareness of your business and influence what people think of it.

My definitions of news

From a PR perspective, news used to be the only thing that would power your PR machine. These days, modern PR engines work on a variety of different ‘fuels’, including online content, social media, video and photography.

A journalist’s view of what is news and a business owner or marketer’s view of what is news can differ significantly, and it is the PR’s job in the middle to sort the wheat from the chaff. A good PR should have a very robust news filter, so that weak stories never see the light of day – if this is not the case then a company’s news output is not credible. More often than not, there is less ‘hard news’ in a company, particularly a small company, than a client would like to believe.

This is the point where the PR engine should search for alternative fuel. Just because you can’t make significant announcements to the national media every week, doesn’t mean that you stop. News is simply a form of content, so you just look for different types of content. As mentioned above, this could be written content, such as whitepapers, blogs or articles; it could be audio or video; it could be social media activity or forums; it could be photography.

There is more and more news content available now because technology is making the world a smaller place. At the same time, the traditional media industry is shrinking. All of which means that the chances of any company generating tonnes of media coverage are reducing year-on-year.

If you are a solid, successful, growing company, you need to look beyond news to generate awareness. You need to focus on content.