In a Google Hangout with John Mueller earlier this month on Google+, John explained how it works when a thread in the help forums gets escalated to a Googler.
John said that one of the more active non Google people in the Google forums will see it and they have a way of escalating it higher, to a Googler. John said:
And usually what happens there is that the top contributors, rising stars, the more active people in the forums, they'll take these threads. And if they can't figure it out on their own they'll it escalated to us and, someone on Google side will get back to them and say, oh, they have to do this, this or, this. Or maybe we'll go to the thread directly and say, oh, you need to do kind of this. Or maybe we'll just take that escalation, say, OK we'll fix this on our side manually, with the manual web spam team to kind of make sure that this problem is solved.
He said this around the 42:27 mark into the video, first explaining how to safely post questions and then how things get escalated.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
