Every year on 11 November people in Japan celebrate Pocky & Pretz Day. In case you don’t already know, Pocky are thin cookie sticks with chocolate, strawberry, or other flavored frosting.  Pretz are a more mature stick with salty flavors. Their simplicity is matched only by their sheer addictiveness.

Because of the date’s resemblance to the snacks (11/11), every year, their maker Ezaki Glico cooks up a special campaign. In 2011 on Pocky & Pretz Day if you tweeted a special sentence using Pocky and a particular hashtag you could have won free snacks.

However, for Pocky & Pretz Day 2012, Glico has their sights set on entering the Guinness World Records.

The awkwardly yet cutely titled “Try World Record on Twitter” campaign begins at zero hour on 11 November (UTC +9:00) and runs until 11:59pm the same day. During this 24 hour period fans of Pocky are encouraged to send Tweets with “Pocky” in it.

This article was published at 04:00 on 11 November, so that means it’s going on right now!

Their goal is to reach 1.11 million tweets with the magic word which will earn them the Guinness World Record of “The Brand Name Most Tweeted in 24 Hours.”

It doesn’t matter how many times you tweet “Pocky” but they stress that Pretz is a separate brand and is not a part of the record.  The official web site also only references the Japanese katakana writing of Pocky (ポッキー) for the event, so it’s unclear if the roman alphabet writing counts.

If you’re too lazy or confused to type out all those Japanese characters just copy and paste this, fill in your own message and tweet it out:

Pocky! INSERT MESSAGE HERE 「ポッキー」#ポッキー1111

The results of this tweetathon will be posted on the official site on 15 November.

In other Pocky & Pretz Day news, Glico is also holding the Pocky Creators Campaign in which people were asked to submit various works of cinema, music, painting, etc. based on everyone’s favorite chocolate covered stick for a chance to win prizes.  Since the contest ends in 5 hours of this writing it’s too late to submit, but you can still check out other people’s works.

So don’t forget to tweet a Pocky tweet, have a Pocky night, and may all your Pocky & Pretz Days be bright!

Source: Glico TRY WORLD RECORD on Twitter and Pocky Creators Campaign, via IT Media (Japanese)