Unfortunately, the ugly face of racism took all the attention away from the NRL State of Origin preparation.
The revelations followed Andrew Johns's description of Inglis as a ”black c—” in an address to NSW centre Beau Scott ahead of tonight's Origin II clash at Suncorp Stadium – a rant that prompted Timana Tahu to walk out on the the Blues training camp in protest. Sydney Morning Herald
You can still see the monitor of Johns' comments towards Storm star Greg Inglis in real time now by social media monitoring tools like socialmention.com or even Twitter Search. But these tools don't allow you to look back an analyze the impact around the event itself.
Aussie start up Tribalytic fixes that problem allowing you to research twitter reactions and responses from Australian Twitter users after the event with much more scope and flexibility.
Let's look at how tweeps viewed Andrew Johns from April 10 – June 10 2010.
More importantly look at what words were associated with Johns over that period. Standard sports related words around Johns' role as State of Origin assistant coach and media performer.
However after the racism speech news broke you can see the Twitter world reacted in the same way as Timana Tahu. Notice the spike in traffic?
Again the keywords associated with the Andrew Johns search was more damning.
Need anymore reasons to understand why social media can be a big impact on your sport or athlete's brand?
Want to a look at the Andrew Johns report from Tribalytic? Analyse the data yourself…