By Mark Wrafter

In early July 1999, a bored office worker in Ireland sent an email to his friends.

He had visited the website of Juventus, the Italian football club, and saw it was conducting an online poll to select the most promising newcomer to the team.

"Hey if you've never heard of Ronnie O'Brien, he's a young Irish footballer who, after being let go by Middlesbrough, was unbelievably signed by Juventus a couple of months back. He needs your help. Go on, vote for Ronnie, it's your duty as a patriot. Please send this to bored Irish people.Thanks, Eoin."

Little did Eoin, whose identity is still not known, know what he had started. By the following week O'Brien was one of the most famous footballers on the planet.

Like a chain letter, people for warded the e-mail to friends; within hours it ended up on the computer screens of Irish people all around the world. O'Brien shot up from last to first on the poll, with 32 per cent of the total vote.

In one 24-hour period, Ireland's relationship with the internet had changed utterly. It was revolutionary. It had done for us something no other media had ever been able to do.The web grew us an instant community. It did so because the internet is the only media that allows its users to communicate with each other directly, publicly and instantly, be that one-to-one or one-to-many.

The O'Br ien success prompted his fans to set their sights even higher. In August 1999, Time magazine in the United States conducted an internet poll to find the Person of the Century. Why not Ronnie O'Brien, they thought? And so a new volley of e-mails was sent out.

O'Brien vaulted his way to the top of the standings, beating out such notables as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King and Yitzhak Rabin. O'Brien was unaware of the fuss. The former supermarket shelf stacker from Bray found out from his agent a few days later that he was jostling for greatness with Mother Teresa.Then, mysteriously, there was a computer crash.

Time said it was a result of too many people voting online at once.

Instead of being named Person of the Century, O'Brien was taken out of the running, because Time officials said not enough people had heard of him. The official rules stated, "whimsical candidates will not be counted." The US magazine didn't welcome the prospect of having O'Brien on the cover of their Person of the Century issue.

The reaction at the time to O'Brien's demotion was heated. The Irish set about plotting how to dupe the publication again by getting another Irish person to the top of the list.

Ireland's office staff hit back,voting in their thousands for Dustin the Turkey, proclaiming him a great visionary. Within hours the e-mails were again winging their way toTime's US headquarters.

The stuffed ex-presidential candidate polled over 1,000 more votes than Adolf Hitler.

Time eventually realised something was amiss and restricted the nomination to a pre-selected 100 candidates, with Albert Einstein eventually winning.

It was a defining moment for online polls. Never again would a site, unless it was its expressed wish, leave open their voting criteria in such a fashion. It's only the very naive that do so today, but having to protect against it pre-1999 was unheard of.

Scroll on to December 2002 and another Irish attempt - this time successful - to top the polls.

`A Nation Once Again' by the Wolfe Tones snuck in as winner of the BBC World Service's `world's most popular song' contest. It beat classics such as John Lennon's Imagine and Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody to take the title.

Following a late surge in votes, the Irish sing-along crossed the finishing line ahead of a patriotic Hindi song, Vande Mataram. In fact, it was one of only three songs in the top ten written in the English language.

The Wolfe Tones' surprise win again came down to an online campaign in which an e-mail circled the world encouraging Irish nationals and ex-pats to cast their vote. Band member Brian Warfield said: "We can't quite believe it. To be voted ahead of The Beatles is quite an achievement. We haven't had quite the same global profile as they've had."

"More than 150,000 votes from 153 countries were cast in the poll, nominating over 6,500 songs," said DJ Steve Wright, "the top four songs are all similar in that they were voted for in an organised and passionate way by listeners who felt strongly enough that their song should be chosen as the world's favourite. It proved to be a tight race to the top."

Alas, Ireland is meeting its match in the `Modern Seven Wonders of the World' poll, still ongoing. We just can't seem to compete with a population the size of China, but we're trying.

Votes for the Spire of Dublin were neck and neck with those for the Great Wall of China for about a month, until the Chinese called in their university-going voters.

Bernard Weber of the Seven Wonders committee said, "The biggest surprise for me was when an internet viral campaign starts in a country - hundreds of thousand of votes pour in. The first wave came from Turkey, then from Mexico, only to be topped by Peru."

"Recently, in just 20 days of voting, China moved from position 32 in the world ranking to the number one voting participating country. "

The promotional e-mail touting the Spire of Dublin's candidacy went out to the Irish diaspora on January 23. The statistics on that day showed Ireland 17th of some 238 voting countr ies and having transmitted 0.75 per cent of the total vote.That's some feat for a country with a population of only 3.9 million.

By January 28, Ireland had moved up to 4th on the table with 6.3 per cent of the total votes.Only China, Hong Kong and the United States sat ahead of us. Remarkable!

The Irish have it down to a fine art, and know exactly what they're doing. It makes them one of the most net-savvy and highly connected populations on the planet, with votes cast by e-mail, SMS and PDA.

It's viral promotion in action. One person knowing ten friends, who each know ten more, transmits in only two waves, the meme - a cultural idea that produces cultural replication as it is passed from one person to another - to some 110 other people. It's a simple model. Find a niche group with a common interest, give them something remarkable and give them a tool (email) to easily tell their friends about it. And voila.

In a recent article entitled `Strategies forViral Marketing' published in Kellogg on integrated marketing, Charles Spinos a of  Vision states: "Connections among people in a community are powerful because of their shared cultural understanding," Spinosa likens it to catching a cold - "in wired communities, the infection is just a click away."

Mark Wrafter is Webmaster for IT and business consultancy, Vision Consulting, www.vision.com