Certain dates stick out in the mind. November the 5th perhaps or the 4^th of July.  But until yesterday, 5 July 2010 wasn’t on the list for many people.

Until, that is, some bright spark on Twitter published the following:

Attracting hundreds of status updates, retweets and (in our case) emails, the little mote of trivia took the internet by storm.

Except, some bright spark soon pulled the rug out from under the furore by identifying that the date they travelled to would actually have been 26 October 2010. What’s more, Marty ends up going to the day Doc invented the Flux capacitor instead, thanks to a pickup truck full of angry terrorists.

If this wasn’t already complicated enough, Total Film then released a mockup of what the DeLorean’s time travel panel would have looked like if they had travelled to 5 July 2010 (below).

Predictably, this produced a second wave of misunderstanding, buffeted by an irate backlash from those who were angry enough at its inaccuracy the first time round.  What’s interesting is that a very simple but attractive idea was able to go viral not once but twice on the basis of that simplicity.  It’s a timely reminder that sometimes less is more.

For those keen Back to the Future fans out there, the date you might really want to add to your calendar is 21 October 2015, or the day that Marty arrives in the future in the second film. Until then, we’ll leave you with the sage advice that remains true throughout time; don’t believe everything you read on the internet…

Whilst I generally live and breathe digital marketing, I do have one other passion: windsurfing (an interesting combination, I know!).

Because of this, I have shopped with Fat Face in the past and I’m also on their email marketing list. I was very impressed by a recent email/social media campaign they ran, so I thought I’d share it and reveal some of the reasons why I thought it was so effective.

Win a Classic VW Camper

I first caught wind of it on Facebook, when a friend posted a link. When I clicked through  the site offered me the chance to win a vintage splitscreen VW campervan worth £30,000… every surfers dream set of wheels!

Now, running a competition is not a new tactic for data capture, but the prize was perfectly suited for Fat Face’s target audience. It certainly worked with me!

But it was when I clicked through to the landing page that things got really interesting. I duly filled in my details and pressed submit and was then taken to a customised page completed with a unique URL: http://winacamper.fatface.com/tinktaylor

On this page was an option to share the competition with my friends.

Again, this is not a new concept, but I was told that for every friend that entered via the unquie URL that had been generated for me, I would be given a further entry into the competition, therefore enhancing my chances of winning!

This was a great way to incentivise me to share the competition with as many friends as possible. They also gave me the option to do this in a variety of different ways – email, Facebook, Twitter etc – all perfectly customised for the particular network, to make the sharing easy.

[I should mention here that there are issues around email permission that Fat Face would have to be wary of]

It seems that my surfer friends were just as interested in the competition as I was – a fact that I’m sure Fat Face was counting on… Everytime I logged into Facebook my news feed was littered with links to the competition that had been posted by others.

So why was this campaign so successful? There are a few key things to note:

-          Relevancy and targeting – Fat Face makes niche products for specific audiences. By using their existing subscriber base and offering an incentive that would be particularly interesting and appealing to them, the company was able to very effectively target a specific consumer group

-          Functionality – By making the ‘sharing’ process quick and easy, Fat Face made it very simple for me to tell a vast number of my like-minded friends about the competition. I doubt I would have done this if the process had been more complex (and if I wasn’t incentivised to share the information)

-          Tapping into the power of social networking – This campaign is a great example of how email can be the initial spark that spearheads wider, but still very targeted, social media activity

-          What better way to build an engaged list – I was incentivised to send this to friends who shared a common interest. It’s a win-win situation: my friends that signed up gave me another chance to win and also gave Fat Face valuable access to potential, targeted customers.

So well done to FatFace. Thank you for a great competition: a fantastically simple and fairly low budget viral campaign. But most of all thank you for not going out like many others and buying a list, which we know does not have high levels of engagement. This is a shining example to everyone on how to leverage social media and email marketing.

When we talk to our customers and prospects about this functionality, there is a real interest and appreciation of how this could really be used to increase their data capture in practice. Let us know if you think it could be useful for any of your future campaigns our friends at dotAgency would havppily build you one of your own!