In July 2009, Mountain Dew launched the “DEWmocracy Campaign” – an unprecedented, multi-tiered brand collaboration effort harnessing the “collective intelligence” and enthusiasm of Mountain Dew fans across the USA to create the next Mountain Dew flavour. Leveraging a broad array of social media to engage with Mountain Dew enthusiasts – and to enable those enthusiasts to interact with each other – Mountain Dew is allowing its fans to “oversee” such brand-development tasks ranging from selecting and naming the new product to creating its package design, advertising and promotion. The challenge was to support public relations efforts to establish the brand as a social media leader by providing easy access to vast amounts of information associated with campaign in form of a multi-media hub. To date, the DEWmocracy press launch and media hub have generated over 55 million media impressions and engaged more than 235 traditional and social media contributors. The media hub has received a total of 7,009 page visits and more than 1,800 unique visitors. DEWmocracy will culminate with the new soda’s debut on Labour Day 2010.

The team sought to make the media hub as simple, “clean” and intuitive as possible – a significant challenge given the vast amounts of relevant information designated for inclusion (65 individual media assets, including: 11 media documents; 19 videos; 18 images and 17 external links). To accomplish this, the team created a home page that is visually analogous to a road map, with each of the campaign’s seven stages representing individual stops along the way.Because of the sheer volume of information housed on the media hub, its architecture was key to ensuring an intuitive and engaging user experience. The site was developed using HTML, making it easier to manage frequent content updates over the course of the campaign. Easy access to downloadable, shareable content - including videos, images and text - was critical for social media influencers to become DEWmocracy advocates.

- The media hub exceeded expectations with over 1,800 unique visitors and page visits totalling 7,009 to date, exceeding the goal of at least 250 media and bloggers having visited the site. A significant portion of the traffic was generated directly from inputting the URL- Average time spent by visitors to the media hub was 250 percent more than the average time spent on Web sites in general- Generated positive stories in top-tier publications such as Wired, CNET and Mashable, with headlines such as “Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right”- Generated more than 55 million media impressions