Promotional products can be of one aspect of a marketing strategy for practical any organisation. If done well, they can be a great PR tool, which will raise the businesses profile to a great degree.

However your public’s perception of you can easily be blotted! Take the Conservative party for example, with their constant stream of PR stunts they hatch (watch David Cameron at home on Youtube – great), you’d think we’d all be voting blue this May.

More than a third of voters feel the Conservative Party’s reputation has been hit by recent stories about the tax s­tatus of deputy party chairman Lord Ashcroft. A PRWeek poll of 3,000 people found 51 per cent were aware of such stories. Some 37 per cent of people said the Ashcroft coverage had damaged the Tories’ reputation.

Quick, we’ll need more press released images of David Cameron in a polo shirt before we can forgive them for Lord Ashcroft’s antics!

The NHS rolled out a £25,000 ‘Cocktales’ campaign designed to highlight the dangers of drink to young people specifically in Derbyshire, only to see it taken off YouTube.

The video shows a young woman who urinates in the street, falls over and is then jeered at by a group of passing young men. When I saw this clip, I just presumed it was a fly on the wall documentary about Preston, and didn’t think anything of it. However ‘Bloody Mary’ received 15,000 hits in the eight days it was on YouTube and was also distributed to local media.

Alison Pritchard, from Derbyshire Primary Care Trust said: ‘This video does have a dark humour in it designed to capture the imagination and show what can happen if you overstep the mark on a night out. ‘It has been banned from YouTube because of its content which we realise some people may find controversial. We want people to think about the main messages of safe drinking and use the information to make informed choices on their nights out, particularly around the Christmas period.’

If you’re the kind of person who likes to go out of their way to be offended, just to confirm they will be offended, it can still be viewed at the campaign website. The second instalment tantalizingly involves a man dressed as a turkey, who unfortunately gets run over.

One of the brains behind the launch of MySpace in the UK has developed a social media course for secondary schools.

Andrew Davis has entitled it ‘Social Media Fundamentals’, which aims to explain the rise and relevance of social media, while at the same time integrating it with traditional subjects like maths and English. This thoroughly modern idea, will be the first time a formal social media course is to be taught in UK secondary schools.

Mr Davis inspiration for this came from when in 2007 he was diagnosed with repetitive strain injury, which sadly made simple day-to-day tasks a real challenge. After surgery on his hands and weekly physiotherapy sessions, his doctor’s have told him typing is completely out of the question. Due to this radical change of lifestyle forced upon him, he drew up this course, as it’s something he can deliver verbally.

London’s Bishop Challoner Catholic School is the first school to take part in the course. James Chinery, head of boys’ English at Bishop Challoner Catholic Collegiate School said: “Social networking is one of the major media phenomena of our time and could be a key factor in helping us to equip our pupils with the skills they’ll need for the real world. Andrew, with his experience from MySpace, is well placed to explain how the internet and social networking sites can be used positively in their future careers.”

Social Media Fundamentals will cover six elements: blogging, microblogging services (such as Twitter), how to use social networking sites to launch a career, using content communities such as video sharing site YouTube effectively, creating and editing web pages and social bookmarking services like ‘Digg’.

If you’re interested in contacting Mr Davis, then to market his services as a consultant, he has a series of digital video podcasts (vlogs) and an amusing blog site here.

According to recent study by the KPMG Foundation, as a nation our math skills are letting us down to the tune of £2.4 billion pounds a year. Rather worryingly they estimate that around seven million adults in the UK have at best the maths ability of a nine-year-old. The report also made the point of women needing more help with their maths then men - although this is very likely just down to the fairer sex being more honest.

If you’re reading this and you can see your staff sat at their desks scratching their heads, then it’s probably a wise idea to invest in some promotional calculators. Or you could follow the advice of the government and take your staff down to your local…

No I’m not joking-  as we are being encouraged to improve our maths skills by playing darts, in a government campaign launched at the recent World Professional Darts Championships. Bobby George, the literal golden boy of darts said the game is a great way for children to understand maths; “I’ve been going into schools for 20 years. And they love it. They pick it up so fast. On a blackboard they don’t pick it up so quick.”

Maybe some promotional dart shirts, rather then calculators is the order of the day then.