How we can learn a lesson in crisis management from a certain England footballer

I struggled to keep my marmalade and toast down on Sunday morning as I read all about England’s favourite potato-faced striker indulging (allegedly) in the scoring of a different kind of goal during the season break last summer.

Apart from making me wish he would stop scoring these type of ‘own goals’ and get on with smashing them into oppositions’ nets instead, it also got me thinking about the difficulty of keeping a story like this under wraps for so long. With interest in celebrity being at an all time high and the fact that anybody with an internet connection has the ability to be a journalist these days, surely some details of the dirty deed would appear from somewhere even if there was an injunction in place?

So I pondered: Can an injunction truly have the desired affect as we –collectively – leave a greater trail of data in our wake?

Despite there being an injunction on Rooney’s alleged indulgences with ladies of the night (meaning that until this past week there was no coverage of the alleged events online) there is still a foot print of people searching for ‘Wayne Rooney’ and ‘prostitute’ on Google Insights – peaking during the World Cup.

This suggests that whilst the story might have circulated in emails and ‘down the pub’, nothing much was seen online save a few tentative questions on Twitter. This makes sense since those who are in the know are generally from journalism and media circles and (probably) would have known better than to say anything libellous online.

As a result, the spike in searches about this story was probably down to the small number of people ‘in the know’ searching for further information on the story – to see if anyone had actually published anything about Rooney’s rumoured indiscretions.

What does this say about injunctions in the future? Well, whilst people are still unlikely to talk openly online about subjects with a gagging order, might we be able to track buzz volumes around certain issues to get a sense of when an issue  becomes widely known – or more likely rumoured – publicly?

Of course one area this will increasingly be of significance in is matters of crisis management. As more and more data is created not just by what we say online, but what we do online, individuals and brands trying to keep a lid on a delicate issues can now use tools such as Google Insight to see what people are trying to find out about, even if a gagging order means the results won’t tell them anything.

One to think about, for sure.