Like any major brand or communications team, strategy often takes a back seat when dealing with daily emerging “crisis” issues and fires which need putting out. The Premier League faced a daily barrage of “off pitch” issues, including:
But what picture did the social data paint? For four months we just listened to the discussions.
From left to right the spikes were driven by racism, racism, money, money, racism, money, money, money. So, of all the issues above, only two were impacting heavily on the brand: racism and money (or greed as they called it).
Not only did Impact Social show what issues were affecting the brand and how those topics were having an affect on sentiment towards it, they showed who was driving the discussions. The results were surprising. It was not being led by mainstream media (although they did have a role), but emerging disruptive media organisations:
Armed with this information the Premier League was able to prioritise its communications around the two issues they now understood were attacking their brand and target the influencers having the biggest impact, some of whom were completely unknown before the analysis was undertaken.