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"Formula 50 is the Vitamin Water flavor co-created by 50 Cent, a top seller, and a personal favorite of yours-truly. As good as the flavor is, sometimes I think I could concoct something just a bit better.\nVitamin Water, no strangers to social media marketing, agrees, so their handing over the keys to their flavor creator lab and tapping into the Facebook community for flavor innovation. \nThe brand's latest kitschy Facebook gimmick is an app, aptly named flavor creator lab, designed to get Facebookers involved in a crowdscouring initiative for an all new Vitamin Water flavor to be sold on shelves next year.The app, which lets you monitor the top 10 most buzzed about flavors right now, play games related to health and wellness, and eventually vote on your favorite flavor and design the label, may appear to be just another attempt to attract Facebook fans, but the Glaceau brand is serious about the outcome. Not only will the new flavor and bottle design be unveiled in December and released to the public for purchase in March 2010, but the winning designer will take home $5,000 cash for their efforts.\n\nThe app itself doesn't exactly give you the ability to mix flavors together to create your own, but instead lets you monitor social media buzz on the top 10 flavors in contention. It pulls in social chatter from Google News, Twitter, Flickr, and Foodgawker, which means that your tweets, blog posts, searches, and images could all help nominate a flavor for consideration. The more chatter on a flavor, the more likely it will make their final top 10 list.  Once the social buzz has been tabulated, app users will be able to vote on their favorite flavor, starting September 14th.\nThe most interesting aspect of the app and social media marketing campaign, however, is the bottle design. Starting on October 5th, you'll have the opportunity to use the app to design the entire label. This includes look and feel, your own spin on the flavor blurb (ever notice how funky the flavor blurbs are?), and the be all end all flavor factor \u2014 the name. You can work in teams with up to two additional Facebook friends, and the winner will be decided by Vitamin Water and their celebrity partners.\nThe Vitamin Water initiative is certainly a creative exercise in crowdsourcing and we're anxious to see how fans will respond. In fact, the community-endorsed flavor, if successful, could make more brands rethink typical celebrity endorsements.\nFor the record, we think coconut would make a mighty fine Vitamin Water flavor and hope to see it solidified in the top 10 list, but we'll leave the rest of the social buzz up to you.  What flavor do you want to see in the top 10? Will you be lending your designer chops to create the new bottle? Let us know your thoughts in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/09/08/vitamin-water-flavor-creator/>