LA Fitness Twitterstorm: It was the Guardian wot won it

If you've been on Twitter over the past 24-hours you may well be familiar with the case of an Essex couple whose story, covered by The Guardian, has caused a well deserved headache for gym chain LA Fitness who were refusing to let the couple out of a 24-month contract despite some very extenuating circumstances.

In the end LA Fitness caved in and waived the couple's fees but only in the face of overwhelming criticism on Twitter. That was enough for many observers to call it a victory for Twitter, though The Guardian understandably clung to the idea that it was a victory for the paper's Consumer Champions, not least because the vast majority of the most influential tweets linked to the original Guardian article.

The truth of course was somewhere in between. It's impossible to separate the source of the story and the scale of its distribution. But there is also no ignoring the fact that LA Fitness comfortably withstood four days of the Guardian's article being live, but only withstood four hours of it trending on Twitter.

But what got it trending?

The Guardian article appeared online at 22:58 on 20 January. It also appeared in the newspaper on Saturday. The journalist who wrote it, Lisa Bachelor, then tweeted about it on Saturday. It was retweeted just three times:

Then it seems to have gone quiet again. The majority of accounts tweeting about it on 21 January appear to have been exercise and fitness spambots picking up on the headline.

In fact, by the time LA Fitness head office staff returned to work on Monday they could be forgiven for thinking they'd got away with this. No doubt that was the result they were hoping for when they declined to cave in to The Guardian's initial pressure, preferring instead to take their chances and ride out the relatively short shelf life such articles often have. 

But then on Tuesday things began to change. The Guardian's article began getting more interest. The first major mention which really began to reverberate - the tipping point of the Twitterstorm - appears to be this tweet from Kath Viner, deputy editor of The Guardian, posted at 16:47 on the afternoon of 24 January:

That tweet began to connect with a series of similarly well-connected people, each in turn seeing high volumes of retweets, until in one 10 minute period, between 18:00 and 18:10 on 24 January there was an overwhelming flurry of tweets and retweets (forgive me for rather self-indulgently including the tweet from The Media Blog's own @TheMediaTweets feed which I admit was by far the least eloquent of the bunch):

Heavyweight tweeters such as Caitlin Moran and Ben Goldacre wading in within two minutes of one another set a ball rolling that became impossible for LA Fitness to ignore - not least because its brand began trending on Twitter and hundreds of angry tweets were being directed at its own account.

By 21:37 the company had tellingly deleted an earlier tweet of its own claiming "We do not comment on individual cases" and began commenting quite a lot on this particular case, including the announcement that it would be waiving the fees (a decision it claims to have made earlier in the day).

So a happy ending, then.

And a victory for The Guardian.

Granted, the paper's article failed to land a meaningful blow before Twitter got involved. But those tweets - including, importantly that 'tipping point' tweet from its own deputy editor - needed a source. And in turn that source, needed scale to have impact.

It's this relationship between source and scale which perhaps best sums up the way the 'traditional' media stand to benefit from the conversations on Twitter, but not as much as the conversations on Twitter still stand to benefit from 'traditional' media.   

Comments

[Alix]

Agreed. Also, I'd say Viner's skill in writing a suitably high-stakes, emotively worded tweet was important here. Interesting how twitter enables broadsheets to be a bit more tabloidy in how they attract readers, without changing style of their actual content.

[Louisebolotin]

Shame you missed out what was happening on Facebook too - LA Fitness's page was also under fire and as fast as people left critical comments, LA Fitness deleted them, which only angered people even further at being censored. This could never happened on Twitter, where companies have absolutely zero control over people's comments - their actions on Facebook were probably even more damaging to LA Fitness long-term, as people don't take kindly to having their comments erased. I've seen quite a few screenshots by friends on Facebook, who were furious at having remarks taken down and cancelled their gym contracts as a result.