Joe Wiggins has joined WorldBlu as a member, the first PR in the UK to do so. WorldBlu inspires freedom by championing the growth of democratic organisations.
We aim to build the WorldBlu principles into the foundations of Perfect Circle PR as it grows. If you would like to know more about WorldBlu and its mission, here’s a video from the founder. WorldBlu founder Traci Fenton
Joe said: “I believe that people do their best work when they feel empowered and when they know that what they do makes a difference. That’s why I joined WorldBlu, to formalise some of my instinctive thinking about how I wanted to build a quality team at Perfect Circle. A PR agency, more than most businesses, relies on the people that work within it and their intellectual capital, experience and creativity to deliver valuable outputs. That’s why freedom, democracy and a happy workforce are so important.”
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We’re very proud to announce that we have been shortlisted for a PRCA award for our media relations work for client, ALLOW. The category we have been shortlisted in is the ‘Evaluation Award’ alongside three other agencies, Journalista, threepipe and Weber Shandwick. The awards are announced on 15th November. 
This, and the CIPR shortlisting a few weeks ago, is a fantastic way to celebrate our inaugural year!
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We’re proud to say that we have just been shortlisted for a CIPR PRide award in the ‘Best Use of Media Relations’ category, for our client ALLOW. This is a fantastic way to celebrate our first anniversary of being in business! The entry that we submitted was for the work that we have done launching ALLOW to the world and the coverage that we have gained in publications such as the Wall St Journal, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Times, Financial Times and Daily Express, to name a few. The submission showed how all of this was done on a very modest budget through the use of creative story ideas.
The awards take place in Brighton on the 11th November, so fingers crossed!
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Perfect Circle PR has been appointed to handle the launch and ongoing PR for new protection insurance portal, The Life Dept. We have been working with The Life Dept for a few months now behind the scenes on its brand proposition and messaging. We briefed trade press journalists and key industry figures this week and the site launches fully to consumers next week.
As part of the overall remit, Perfect Circle PR is providing strategic and hands-on input into the social media activity as well as obviously aiming to get as much media coverage as possible!
The Life Dept is an exciting new entrant into the protection intermediary space and has an innovative slider tool which consumers can use to generate near-instantaneous quotes for a bundle of protection products, across life insurance, critical illness cover and income protection. This has never been done before in the protection market and we think that this tool will really help the overall take up of protection products and particularly customers taking out multiple policies. The Life Dept also differentiates itself from other brokers in that its site is a portal for health and well-being news.
Keep an eye on our results page for coverage that we generate for The Life Dept!
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Perfect Circle PR has been appointed by Bluerock Consulting to raise its profile. Bluerock Consulting is a management consultancy specialising in the financial services industry. It has four practice areas: Banking, Cards, Life & Pensions and Wealth/ Asset Management. Its areas of expertise are primarily the RDR, financial planning tools, simplified advice, distribution channels and direct-to-consumer, as well as cheque replacement and alternative payment methods.
Perfect Circle PR will be positioning Bluerock Consulting as thought leaders by generating media coverage in national and trade press on their chosen areas.
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I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how financial services companies in the UK could use location-based services to enhance their brand. (Note, I’m going to focus on foursquare here, rather than Facebook places or Gowalla, as this is the one that I have most experience with.)
The key thing to remember is that you don’t actually need to have geographically diverse locations, such as branches, in order to use location-based services effectively.
Here’s an example – AmEx teamed up with foursquare this month for a trial to offer its card users cashback when they paid using AmEx at participating merchants. All you do is sign up your card via the AmEx foursquare page, check in to the location as normal, ‘load’ the deal to your card via your smartphone, then pay as normal. The money gets credited to your statement within a few days. It’s easy, straightforward, fun, creates a bit of buzz and you get a special badge too. The added bonus is that AmEx donates some money to charity when you complete your first transaction – probably not the main reason why you would do all this, but a nice touch all the same.
What a fantastic example of a financial services brand engaging with consumers in an innovative way!
So, with that in mind, here are some things that could be done in this country right now. The first, and most obvious one, would be a high street bank because of the physical presence that they have around the UK. If such a bank were to set up a foursquare presence, then it could create a range of badges for customers such as ‘SuperSaver’ (for when you make 10 deposits into an ISA); ‘First-time buyer’ (for when you take out a mortgage); ‘KidsFund’ (for when you open a CTF; or ‘Chequing In’ for when you have to deposit a pesky cheque.
As we all move more towards a scenario where purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by your online networks, by social media sites and by online reviews, wouldn’t this be fantastic PR for a bank to have a certain section of its customers talking about its products and services via foursquare. The big benefit comes when these users’ foursquare accounts are linked to their twitter and facebook profiles, which I’m assuming most are.
You could make more of this, of course, by introducing discounts or special offers for whichever user is the ‘mayor’ of a branch, although I suspect that this would be a logistical nightmare for the product development and administration teams. So, why not invite all the mayors of all your locations to take part in feedback sessions to help improve customer service and develop new products or propositions? This could be a virtual or real-world event, but it would be a really valuable focus group.
Extending this example further, if this bank was a sponsor in the sporting or musical world, as many are, then you could leverage that sponsorship even more through foursquare. Santander sponsors the McLaren Mercedes Formula 1 team, of course. What if you could check in to a Grand Prix circuit and then get a discount off your purchase of Team McLaren Mercedes merchandise if you pay with your Santander card?
The idea of badges would work quite well with a company like AVIVA too, given its sponsorship of athletics. VISA could, of course, do something similar to AmEx and also has a golden opportunity (forgive the pun) to capitalise on its involvement in London 2012. The London 2012 foursquare site is well-established and looks very impressive.
So, there you’ve got banks, payments providers and insurance companies, particularly those that put money into sponsorship as part of their marketing, which can amplify their reach through the use of foursquare. I hope to see developments in this area in the not-too distant future.
[Image credit Nan Palermo.]
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Here’s a nifty little thing that I came up with while researching tools to create your own infographics for a client. It’s my website represented as a word cloud. I used Wordle for this. 
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Yesterday (10 March) I was with one of my clients, Justin Basini from ALLOW, at the BBC. We had interviews with Radio 4 on the You & Yours consumer programme and then immediately after with Radio 5 Live on the Gabby Logan programme. Doing radio is exhilarating and a lot of fun! We felt the interviews went really well and within a few hours we could already see the impact on visitors to the ALLOW website and in new membership sign-ups.
BBC Broadcasting House visitor pass
Justin Basini, ALLOW
Read all about it!
Well, it’s not every day that you get a splash (on the front cover) in a national newspaper, so I thought that I would write a post about it. This week, Perfect Circle PR generated a story for ALLOW which made the front page of the Wall St Journal in the US and Asia and a double-page spread in the Europe edition. The story was about how data is now a currency, of sorts, in that all companies want data on consumers in order to work out how to market to them more effectively. ALLOW helps people regain control over their privacy and their personal information, making it ideally placed to comment on the web’s increasing threat to individual privacy and the value of data.
The story included many quotes from Justin Basini, co-founder of ALLOW, and a case study of an ALLOW member.
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Gaining media coverage is what the PR business is all about. Whether the objective is to drive traffic, grow a membership base, increase new business inquiries, raise awareness, improve SEO etc. However, it’s important to leverage that media coverage in as many ways as possible. If you glance at your media coverage, get a good feeling about it and then just file it away, then you aren’t doing it justice. You should promote your PR.
Here are some ways that smaller companies can leverage their media coverage to maximum effect:
- Circulate to employees to show that the company has a high profile
- Send to clients/ prospective clients
- Share via social media, such as posting on your facebook page
- Put it on display in office – perhaps in reception, if you have one
- Post on website, in your online media centre
- Use on proposals/ presentations
- Write a blog about it – how the story happened or who the case studies are in the piece
After all, you worked hard to earn that media coverage, so why not show it off!
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