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...

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...

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...

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...