• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, September 20, 2011

Grassroots social marketing is catching fire, and the results can be impressive for mobile marketing.

At this year's Summerfest music festival, the mobile marketing campaigns for U.S. Cellular powered by Vibes Media saw remarkable growth in attendee participation over last year, much of it apparently driven by the social-marketing savvy of the bands.

"We've been doing this for three years, but the actual rate of participation was up 51% this year," says Alex Campbell, co-founder and CEO of Vibes.

U.S. Cellular sponsored one of several stages at the 11-day event, at which up-and-coming bands compete for recognition and prizes. As usual, Vibes ran the live stream of projected SMS comments via its Text-2-Screen technology and ran the text voting that determined winners.

Total texting volume increased 37% over last year, although attendance was up only 2%, Campbell found. More than 40,000 messages were sent and the number of unique participants in the texting was up an impressive 51%. Even the Text-2-Screen activity rose 15% over last year, Vibes says.

But what was behind this spike in activity?

The text platform became de rigeur for this youth segment years ago. It's not as if the audience just discovered the next new thing -- text voting. Campbell checked and compared everything across previous campaigns -- from raw head counts to differences in messaging and even weather -- to explain the jumps, but saw little evidence of change.

The key variable was with social media and the bands themselves. "The bands were promoting this via their social media, so the battle of the bands was engrained from the start," says Campbell. The small garage and start-up bands have, out of necessity, learned to master the tools of Facebook and Twitter to drive activity among their fans. Campbell found that many of the bands involved were using these channels to drive the fan base to use mobile media.

"So the people who came to the concerts already understood there was a social component to this. If you are an emerging band, you have to use social to market for yourselves. The bands are doing this quite well, so it is spilling over into mobile." Before one band went on stage, Campbell saw they tweeted their fan base to "do it and do it again and retweet."

In effect, both Vibes and partner U.S. Cellular were increasing their scale by drafting on the authority the bands already had within their well-established social-marketing channels.

Campbell says brands could do worse than to pay closer attention to what some of these local bands have achieved in moving their fan base to action via social and mobile means.

A year ago, Vibes was not seeing this grassroots social media effect on mobile campaigns, but now it seems unmistakable and suggestive. "Imagine what sponsors would spend to get a 51% lift on participation," he says.