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"Who is Mr. Splashy Pants? It's a really cool humpback whale that got a new name, thanks to a Greenpeace  campaign.  In its efforts to get some needed support for its Great Whale Trail Expedition, a particular humpback whale in danger of possibly being killed by the Japanese Fisheries Agency, which is planning to kill 50 humpback whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.  \nThere's nothing that helps to get people riled for a campaign than putting a name to a face.  So when this really cool humpback whale found itself in need of a name, Greenpeace left it up to the community to think of one for him. Then web 2.0 \"wisdom of the crowds\" took over.  \nWhat to do when web 2.0 hijacks your PR campaign. \nWith 30 top nominations, the clear winner turned out to be Mr. Splashy Pants.  This is in part due to the fact that the link for the name-game campaign was posted across major social bookmarking sites Digg, Reddit  and Boing Boing.  And that is how web 2.0 took over Greenpeace's PR campaign.  \nEven after being completely gamed by a particularly avid fan of the Mr. Splashy Pants name, who found a way around the one-click per IP address regulation and voted with 120 clicks per minute for a solid 38 minutes, Greenpeace ended up being particularly supportive of its online supporters.  The gamed votes were removed from the contest, but Mr. Splashy Pants still won with an overwhelming number of votes, taking 70% of the submitted votes.  Turns out Greenpeace reacted exactly how it should have.  \n\nEmbrace web 2.0!  \nEven if Mr. Splashy Pants isn't the name that Greenpeace would have chosen had it picked its own name for the whale, Greenpeace took a risk in turning the name-game over to the community.  And that means coming out with a name like Mr. Splashy Pants\u2014isn't that the point?  \nThis is a lesson others can learn from, although the general attitude towards crowd-wisdom PR campaigns has softened significantly in the past year.  We're seeing more than ever, for Coke  vending machine design contests to a web-based version of the Amazing Race.  What will they think of next?\n[via inspire action]\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/12/11/mr-splashy-pants-greenpeace/>