Anheuser-Busch and BlueLithium have announced "Clink," a strategic partnership between Here's to Beer, Inc. and MingleNow.com.

MingleNow, created by BlueLithium, is a social networking site that focuses on the 21 to 35 year-old night-clubbing demographic. The site connects users to locations through social networks to allow them to find what sort of club is right for them.

With "Clink," MingleNow users can upload their pictures of friends clinking beer glasses together to the site. The community is not moderated, nor is the content controlled by MingleNow.

Spurred by a slight decline in beer consumption over the last decade in favor of wine and spirits, Anheuser-Busch launched the Here's to Beer campaign last year. The campaign champions the social benefits of beer, absent of any branding particular to Anheuser-Busch beers, through television ads and a website. Now, in an effort to ramp up the campaign, Here's to Beer is taking advantage of the hottest trends in the online world: social networking and user-generated content.
 
MySpace.com has already won the broad-based social networking scene, according to Gurbaksh Chahal, chairman and CEO of BlueLithium, explaining MingleNow's niche focus on the 21 to 35 demographic. Chahal went on to observe that unlike homepage takeovers and other forms of display advertising, "Clink" is integrated as a feature of MingleNow.

The campaign has seen substantial success with 50,000 users joining in January of this year, and 300,000 users signing on this month.
 
The companies are now considering adding mobile capabilities that would allow users to upload pictures directly from their mobile phones to the MingleNow.