Normally I’m pretty skeptical about the way most brands use social media to add buzz to campaigns.

All too often the brands see social media communities and networks as nothing more than a chatty herd who will help spread word about a product for the duration of the campaign. Once the campaign is over the brand loses interest and then ignores the community.

So it’s interesting to read Mashable’s post about PepsiCo Mountain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” – a crowdsourced/community collaboration to “launch a new Mountain Dew flavor with the public’s involvement at all levels of the process.”

The obvious takeway from Dewmocracy is that it defies many of the conventions associated with brand campaigns. Instead it is infused with two crucial elements for social media success – respect for and collaboration with fans of the brand along with an ongoing commitment to social engagement.

Indeed to call this a “campaign” is a bit of a misnomer. Not only is it an extension of the first Dewmocracy project that started back in 2007 but this latest incarnation of Dewmocracy kicked off back in July 2009 and will continue to involve social media fans all through this coming summer. So far, the Dewmocracy project has traveled all across the U.S. offering fans both online and off the chance to sample and vote on one of seven new Mountain Dew flavors. At this point there are three final new flavors to be voted on – Typhoon, WhiteOut and Distortion. To stoke social networking interest and build community involvement Mountain Dew has created a monster social street crew some 4,000-strong called the Dew Labs who are charged with “talking up” each of the three flavors until a winning taste is crowned on Labor Day.

Now, community participation in choosing and shaping new brands is hardly new. But Mountain Dew’s year-long commitment to what it knows is a passionate community is noteworthy and demonstrates that Pepisco realises word of mouth/social media loyalty builds over time and can’t be secured in the timeframe of a traditional campaign.

Most interesting though is the acknowledgment from Brett O’Brien, Mountain Dew’s marketing director, that the brand is fully committed to learning from the tastes and opinions of its devoted drinkers and that, rather than starting, say, a customer service forum it saw participatory marketing as the perfect customer forum for its youthful, socially-savvy market.

As Mashable writes, “PepsiCo looks at social media as the best way to get direct dialog with their fans and for the company to hear from those fans without filters. “It’s been great for us to have this really unique dialogue that we normally wouldn’t have,” [O'Brien] said. “It really has opened our eyes up.”

And surely posed some challenging but useful questions for PepsiCo’s executives. After all, how are you supposed to allocate budget for a marketing brief that actually improves customer feedback, research and development, community building and, hell, probably recruitment as well? And what type of measurement framework should you apply to an initiative that touches so many parts of your organization?

These are the questions many executives will need to ask as they look to shape a social company. Some of their learning may yet come from the “Dew School” of social media business.