pr-media-blog.co.uk

Maverick internet browser Firefox has just released a plug-in that simulates the great firewall of China.  Users who add the Firefox China Channel to their browser can experience what it is like to surf the internet from inside the republic. 

This is much more than a gimmick.  The web is seen as the borderless, global and free but it isn’t.  We have just seen the power of social networking in the campaign for the leadership of the so-called free world but your access to the internet depends on where you live.  States like China filter and block content that they don’t want citizens to access. 

The Firefox China Channel experience is fascinating if you are not one of the 1.3 billion people for whom it is standard pre-selected web-fare.  The so-called Golden Shield Project is policed in China by an estimated 30,000 strong task force who deny access to politically sensitive or regime critical content.   For those of us that followed and in some ways even participated in the US presidential election process via the internet it is important to remember that the net is not free for all.

There are those times - thankfully rare - when the PR practitioner looks at the day’s task and thinks “could this get any worse?”

From a cursory look at today’s news I have picked my top 5, in no particular order, of thankless PR tasks. Can anybody add to this litany of PR horror?

 1. Anything to do with the Spanish Olympic team.

2. Selling Basra as a tourist destination.

3. Explaining those pesky - and very late - kids’ test results.

4. Putting the odd caveat on press freedom in China.

5. Getting anyone to shout “come on you blues”.

As Slim Pickens says in Blazing Saddles, “what in the wide, wide world of sport is-a-goin’ on here?”

The Spanish Olympic basketball team’s involvement in an advert for a company - complete with ill-advised “Chinese face pulling” - is not only an international disgrace, but a dunder-headed PR disaster.

The Spanish want to host the Olympics at some point in the next 10 years. These antics might have set that aspiration back a tad.

How an organisation, or a country’s plaudits - in this case Nadal at Wimbledon and the Spanish national team’s victory in Euro 2008 - can be undone with one idiotic move.