A Japanese animation called “Lupin the third” is doing a massive scale promotion in Japan. (Lupin the thrid, the main character is a heroic phantom theft, like the original “Lupin”) And they are using social media a lot!
At the beginning, a official account of “Lupin” was created on mixi, and they let users to become “friends”. And they collected opinions of what the users want him to steal. I thought maybe they would use these opinions for the idea to make another animation, but actually a famous statue in Shibuya in Tokyo has gone. Seems the actual police force was cooperating with this project too.
What happened was uploaded to their account on youtube and flickr, and in the physical world, lots of announcement appeared. Even after that, they stole “the cover of the famous magazine”, and “the famous character of the restaurant” etc… and it’s still going on!
As for online, if you put a blog part on your blog, “he” will come to steal it, and the stolen blogs are shown on the official website. And they are going to have a party to share the “treasure” with users both online and offline…
They update the situation on Twitter. Users are also updating what’s happening with their mobiles. The original content was just a character of an animation, but they are using lots of both online/offline media, and now it’s becoming a big inter-media-campaign. This is great.
Check it out if you are interested in.