So I recently stumbled upon the PepsiCo Zeitgeist, which if you haven’t seen already, I suggest you check out.

At first I was unsure what exactly I was seeing; it looked like nothing more than a glorified Twitter stream. But as I watched a little closer, I realized that the Twitter user streams were being categorized into different topics centered on the SXSW event in Austin, Texas.

I thought this was pretty cool, but what I found really neat was the “swarm” tab. “Swarm” uses Google Maps technology (similar to a previous post I wrote about Google Latitude) to collect GPS locations of Twitter users to show location-based tweets at different restaurants around Austin.

A “zeitgeist” is “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time,” and by definition I see why the PepsiCo site is titled the way it is. It really captures people’s real-time thoughts and feelings relating to events and places around SXSW.

However, besides the novelty of the site, how does this at all relate to PepsiCo? The site lacks any interactivity, as it simply shows a stream of visitors’ comments. Personally, I think a way to improve upon it would be to allow Twitter users to respond and interact with other Twitter users, by using the Zeitgeist as a type of forum.

We already saw something similar to this with Skittles, but the Skittles site focused on conversation surrounding the Skittles brand, whereas the Zeitgeist seems to have little to no relation to PepsiCo.

What are your thoughts about this? Is this the new wave in corporate branding?