Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Budweiser All Want Your Vote

(MoneyWatch)  Which ad will Budweiser run during the Super Bowl? Anheuser-Busch (BUD) is asking Facebook users to decide. What should the next Mountain Dew product taste like? PepsiCo (PEP) is soliciting input through a campaign called "Dewmocracy."

But the most interesting of the current online elections is the Pepsi Refresh Project. Pepsi recently opted out of the Super Bowl to focus on its social media campaigns. It's giving away more than a million dollars each month to fund various project ideas -- and the grant winners are determined by online votes.

Proposals include everything from training LGBT journalists in rural Minnesota to making a museum more energy-efficient to sending Girl Scout cookies to overseas troops. This month there are 729 ideas competing for funds. The winners will not necessarily be those with the best ideas so much as those who are best at mobilizing their own social networks -- meaning countless Facebook posts and Twitter updates beseeching friends and fans to "vote for my Pepsi Refresh Project proposal," more registrations for the Pepsi website, and other forms of indirect advertising for PepsiCo. Multiplied by hundreds of different project proposals, per month. Well done, Pepsi.