Becky is a marketing strategist for a large company here in Nashville. One evening she was planning some snacks for an evening with friends when her search for a snack led her to purchase a book she didn’t know she wanted. Here’s the email Becky sent to her director the next day:

“I Googled Chili’s because I wanted to find out how much it would cost to get chips and salsa to go. When I Googled Chili’s, this link came up that said “Brand Autopsy: Would you miss Chili’s?” That intrigued me, so I clicked on it and found the blog of a marketing guy who used to work for Starbucks and Whole Foods. He, in turn, raved about this new book that is all about marketing and social networks. I thought it might be something that our whole team would benefit from. Isn’t it ironic that I was looking for chips and salsa and found a marketing book? But it hit the right audience at the right time!”

I really like this story at a number of different levels because:

• It shows the power and influence of blogs even in the most unlikely of connections.
• It reminds me that people trust blogs that seem trustworthy.
• It reminds me that your target audience cannot be segmented so neatly all the time because Becky the marketer wasn’t looking for a book but she found one and bought it (and will likely buy one for the entire marketing team at the company) when she was Becky the snack shopper.
• It reminds me of the power of a Google search and how blogs could make (or break) the positioning of your brand.

The book Becky found was called “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed By Social Technologies” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I’m reading this book now too but I found out about it through Twitter via Jeremiah Owyang.

I’m keenly aware of the irony here (and also the affirmation of the power and influence of social media) that a book called Groundswell benefited from the groundswell in at least two cases I can point to directly (mine and Becky’s) and I’m sure countless others. So the question is, what are you waiting for if you’re not getting in yet? Don’t fight the groundswell.

I use the word Google all the time as a verb, like, “Just Google that to find out…” or “Have you Googled that company?” I suspect you do too. It’s like Google means any type of online search (though you’re most likely to use Google as 65.98% of us are doing.)

How great is this is you’re a marketer? Google is a company whose name has become a verb like Xerox. It’s a rare category. Some brands don’t become verbs but become more generic nouns for something. Kleenex, frisbee, coke (depending on where you live you might call it soda or pop too…but here in the south it’s all coke), and tylenol are examples of this. You say the words and everyone knows what you’re talking about. The bad thing about being a noun is that your name gets used but your product might not. The thing about being a verb, especially for Google, (not so much for Xerox these days I suspect) is that when you’re a verb you get the exposure and the product/service usage too.