To celebrate its return to the UK, beverage brand Miller has released an online dashboard that pulls together data from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to help you discover what's trending in your city, and what will be trending later that evening -- if you live in the UK, at least.
The map-based dashboard, dubbed Miller Time Tonight, pulls in conversations and images from social networks and checkins from more than 750,000 venues in 10 cities in England, Scotland and Ireland. (London, notably, is not yet included.)
It's an exceptionally useful service in theory: Instead of crawling multiple events sites to get a rough sense of social activity in your city, and then turning to social networks and SMS to learn what your friends are doing, you can access it in a single place.
Of course, the project's success is hinged almost entirely on building up a large enough data pool to identify trending spots -- and that means getting people to sign up and agreeing to share their Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare updates with the site.
To do so, Miller has begun a large media push in the UK that spans TV, out of home (billboards) and Facebook. The company will continue to drive traffic with additional ad launches -- including Facebook Deals in a few weeks -- and by partnering with major events and music festivals, says Neil Kleiner, head of social media at Havas UK, the agency that developed the campaign.