Panda Marketing

From time to time, we all get emails from friends containing jokes, videos, and links to other sites. On many occasions, these emails are forwarded from other people.

The other day, I received an email containing a link to a video of a sneezing baby panda. It's hilarious, adorable and I had to watch it 3-4 times in order to actually understand what was happening.

Then I forwarded it on to more friends.

About a day later, I went looking for the email to watch the video a fifth time. But I stopped to look at the actual email itself. It had been forwarded 7 times before it got to me. (And who knows how many times prior to that...) The first person forwarded it to 17 people, who forwarded it on to 9 friends, and so on. I could see where 74 people had received this email, and that's not even counting how many others it was forwarded to upstream from me.

This is viral marketing at it's purest form. Consider an item forwarded to 5 friends. If each of them forward it on to 5 friends, and so on, after only 5 handoffs, incredibly 3125 people have received it!

So next time you get one of those funny videos or emails, consider adding your business information (name, website, business description, etc) before forwarding. By the end of the day, you may have your name in front of 3000 new customers!

Oh, and here's that video: