There’s an election coming up in Germany, in case you hadn’t been following European politics. And one of the promotional tools has to go down as one of the oddest I’ve seen - certainly since a “Win a Trip to our Abattoir” on a can of pork luncheon meat (honestly!).

MobHappy reader, Irakli, sends in a story where the Chairman of one of the parties, Edmund Stoiber, will call 1,000 “selected” people on their mobiles, urging them go out and vote. Well, actually, it’ll be a recorded message of the great man sent to 1,000 people’s mobile phones.

This would be mildly annoying if you were one of the recipients - being phoned by a computer is pretty intrusive to most people, no?

But the reaction the party is expecting is that people are going to be so delighted that they’ll volunteer their friends’, colleagues’ and family members’ mobile numbers, so that they can get the same call from dear old Edmund too. And this will snowball into hundreds of thousands of calls.

I think someone needs to go back to viral marketing school. Or maybe it’s a cultural thing and Germans will be ecstatic to hear from Edmund and be only too pleased to involve their friends.

But I can’t see it myself.

Image from Wikipedia. Edmund Stoiber is not the one on the left of the picture.