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"One of the men responsible for The Cove \u2014 2010 Oscar winner for best documentary \u2014 used the Academy Awards stage to promote a web and mobile-based activism campaign tied to the film's save-the-dolphins subject matter.\nDuring the acceptance speech, dolphin activist Ric O'Barry held up a sign saying, \"Text DOLPHIN to 44144.\" The cameras cut away to the crowd for several seconds \u2014 possibly to avoid taking sides on the contentious issue of dolphin hunting.\nViewers who caught it and followed the sign's instructions were subscribed to text updates and plugged into the larger social media campaign for the film and its cause.\nText messages and the web have increasingly played a significant part in activism lately. The American Red Cross ran a very successful text message donation campaign  for relief efforts in Haiti, Twitter was used by protesters in Iran to make voices heard and to organize events, and websites like Change.org rally like-minded people around causes with more efficiency than was possible before the web.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Cove on the Web\nThe campaign is rooted in a Takepart.com page that links to several ways people can get involved, including the text campaign, a letter-writing campaign, and a Facebook Cause app page with more than 500,000 supporters. The Cove's Facebook fan page has 115,000 fans at present, and Facebook has been used to organize live-streaming Q&amp;A events with Ric O'Barry.\nThe Cove is also using Zannel to spread the word. The service helps users share videos and images related to the campaign with their friends on Facebook and Twitter.\nHas The Cove's Activism Worked?\nWhile the impact of the social media campaign can't be measured just yet, the film itself has caused a major uproar that has made things very difficult for the dolphin hunters who live and work in the Japanese cove that the film documents. Dolphin-hunting season was postponed more than a week after the film made inroads with the Japanese press.\nWhen the film was shown at Australian film festivals, officials in an Australian sister city to the town where the dolphin hunting takes place voted unanimously to end the sister-city relationship, though the decision was later reversed.\nWe've embedded a brief clip of O'Barry's texting banner below. Have you participated in campaigns like this? Do you think they do any good or do you believe they're just preaching to the choir? Let us know in the comments.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/03/08/the-cove-movie-oscars/>