Google Buzzed

Do you remember when you heard from your friend, or that notorious “somewhere”, that Google gave better search results? Next thing you know, you are going to Google.com to look for things on the Internet. Now, people are telling each other to just “Google it” when trying to find some information on the web. All of a sudden this company you heard about has become a verb for doing what it is that they do.

Take this to the next level (a few years later) and you can type in Google on any of the blog search engines and find a gazillion results for Google. What happened here? How did a company go from strict word of mouth all the way to one of the most talked about companies on the Internet? They don’t do television, radio, newspaper, magazine, or celebrity endorsements. They don’t have creative slogans, Google series cars, or a stadium named after them. So what do they do?

Going with their college-like image, they get buzzed. Basically, this company has managed to stand out in such a way with right crowd that all they can talk about is Google. It’s almost cool to know the latest thing that Google is up to these days. It’s so cool, people write about it the second they find out so as not to look “behind the times” or “scooped”.

With this kind of buzz, Google can do almost anything and people will talk about it. Google recently released Google Trends, Co-op, and Notebook. Here are some graphs showing the amount of buzz on each of these.

Google Trends

Google Co-op

Google Notebook

Google also recently bought DMarc Broadcasting, note the spike in buzz the second it was announced:

Another thing that Google can do with this buzz is make noise around something that was previously barely a whisper. Measure Map was popular with a lot of bloggers, but when Google bought them it became the talk of the town.

These things all go to show the capability of not only buzz, but almost what I would call a buzz-based brand. Google branded themselves in new ways and are reaping rewards that other companies just can’t get to. They can do anything short of sneeze in a bucket and I’d guarantee there will be a ton of buzz about it. Other companies using traditional marketing methods have to work pretty hard to get a certain brand established. It is also extremely expensive. When other people are providing this much publicity on their own, it ends up saving a ton of money and also seems to generate brand equity much faster.

Another interesting thing is that this is all self feeding for them. The stronger their brand, the more buzz they generate, and the more buzz they generate, the stronger their brand becomes. It’s a great mechanism, and I’m not saying it’s easy. However, you don’t have to duplicate exactly what Google has done in the sense that you need these numbers. If you just accomplish a tiny bit of this then it can be considered a success. Buzz seems to the new way to do things, so make sure you take advantage.

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