This might sound unbelievable, but it is absolutely true! PepsiCo, the owner of Mountain Dew soda brand has rented a bowling alley in Brooklyn to throw a “taste test” party. They were testing the brand new “Ultraviolet” diet soda. Most of the guests were Twitter users and fans. On a projector screen, everybody could watch Twitter search queries related to @mtn_dew and occurrences of the hashtag #newdietdew.

People were really starting to enjoy the new product and Twitter searches for #newdietdew showed that it received very few negative responses to the taste test. From within the guests, one could hear exclamations like “truly the king of sodas,” “like drinking a rainbow…everybody knows the best part is the purple,” and “THE summer cocktail mixer of ’09.” This could be partly because some tweets could win prizes like an HDTV or a casino weekend package.

In the end, nobody knows for sure if this Twitter advertising campaign will work or not. “You can use Bitly-type links that have specifics and analytics baked in, but you need to have a pretty clear business goal to know whether it worked…Were you trying to raise brand awareness? Were you trying to get a certain amount of traffic to a certain page? You have to be measuring the actual business role you were trying to get done.” – Laura Fitton, Pistachio Consulting.