The protests in Ferguson, MO are still playing out so it's hard to say what exactly the effects will be, but I suspect not nothing.
In Hong Kong protests in 2003 helped stop the passage of a security law restricting activity that the mainland Chinese government doesn't like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_1_July_marches). More recently protests helped prevent a "moral education" bill from being passed here also.
In general I think it's a bit shortsighted to look at protest movements and think they're ineffective because many of them do not produce change. Protests are (generally) a way for people without a lot of political power to have their voices heard. They're going to fail a lot of the time, because protest movements start when people don't have other kinds of leverage or power.
Also, I think it's important to remember that at least part of the goal of a protest movement is getting attention. The Occupy Wall Street protests didn't directly change much, but they did create a national (and international) conversation about equality that didn't really exist before. It's a lot harder to evaluate that kind of indirect result, but I think it would be a mistake to discount it. (The OWS protests also spurred the creation of Occupy Central, one of the organizations that's leading these protests in Hong Kong.)