Pinterest. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you will soon (well now actually seen as you’re reading this…but you get my point).

Users of Pinterest can ‘organise’ the things they ‘love’ and ‘share all the beautiful things they find on the web’. A virtual pinboard.

Par exemple, I have a ‘Memories’ board on my Pinterest presence, my first memory is being in a lift on the Eiffel Tower, so I’ve pinned a picture of it to that board. One of my favourite albums of all time is Hotel California, so I might find a picture of the album cover, or find a youtube video of the title song and pin that to my ‘Music I love’…

In English… metonymic merging of grammatical number means when writers change the rules of grammar when referring to a group of individuals.

Grammar rules are a nightmare as a writer (not that they keep me up at night or anything). I find them harassing the ebb and flow of my writing and generally getting in the way. Sadly, they are there for a reason – they drive some sense into the nonsensical ramblings us humans often spout off without switching our brain into gear.

Anyway, back to the collective noun. Nouns are ‘naming words’ (a bit of Key Stage 2 for you there); they tell the reader/listener what “thing” is being referred to as part of a sentence. “The reader doesn’t even care about English, so why is he reading this?”…

It’s a widely accepted notion that journalists and PRs have a love/hate relationship. In the main, PRs love journalists who use their press releases, and journalists hate PRs who send them irrelevant spam.

I find the key to breaking down the barrier some journos put up to PRs is to be entirely confident that the press release I’m sending will be of value to the journalist’s readership. If it isn’t I should step away from the mouse and go back to the drawing board, because otherwise I’m just wasting everyone’s precious time. This consideration could be the difference between a successful PR strategy and an epic waste of resources.

So, what are the rules on what is valuable to a particular readership? Well, common sense should prevail here. If you were…

One of the latest crusades in our marketing mission was appearing in Lancashire Business View’s marketing feature, where I attempted to educate readers on rumble and spike – intrigued – read on…

Gone are the days where there is the need, or the budget, for businesses to deal with a handful of creative agencies to look after their various marketing activities.

Increasingly agencies are bolstering their range of services to incorporate more than one of the disciplines, offering PR alongside web, or copywriting with design.

Account Manager at Blackburn based Slater, Catherine Prest, thinks this move is necessary and more importantly makes sense for all parties involved.

“By combining our traditional service of PR with wider marketing tactics including newsletters, direct marketing, video and events we can get better results for…