In a recent talk on Ted, marketing guru Seth Godin talked about the development of tribes in today’s mass culture. Whilst this has been around for centuries the internet makes it easier for people to connect and you see it everyday on the internet, facebook is a portal for people to find tribes, social niche groups that share the same interests. What we see is the power of social groups to give rise to massive cultural “movements” like the iPhone, like Susan Boyle, and like Dr Horrible’s sing-a-long blog, etc.

One new start up in line with this tribal mentality is Get Glue. This Firefox add on is a meta social network which offers contextually relevant social information as you browse. Once installed as a toolbar it sits dormant until you hit one of the sites in the Glue network; i.e Amazon, where it will then drop down and show you which of you friends were on a particular product page and what they thought of it. Currently its enabled on major movie, music and books sites like Amazon, imdb, Rotten tomatoes, Wikipedia to name a few, but it’s easy to see how Glue could work across a whole range of categories from restaurants, hotels, services, etc. Also when you are setting up your account there is the option to sync with you friends on Facebook.

Head Up is a similar start up that is also a Firefox add on that can aggregate content based on what you search and also what your friends are searching for.

So what do these kind of technologies mean for marketing today. According to Jerimiah Owyang, writer of Web Strategy ” Marketing as we know it will have to switch to focus on social recommendations.” This is also what Godin talks about is his theory on modern day tribal culture. As technologies like this and the semantic web continue to develop and be adopted we need to develop strategies around hooking the leaders of these tribes or social groups, and then let them do the rest by spreading the word to their friends, and then their friends and it will continue to ripple on.

Watch Godin’s talk on the tribes we lead here.

Leading creative agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently decided to auction off their team of hard working interns on eBay. Creative head Alex Bogusky was behind the idea and launched bidding with a tweet last Saturday, the starting bid at $1.00.

I just had a look, and the current bid is sitting at $5,400 with 6 days and 7 hours to go, that number’s got nowhere to go but up.

So what do you get if you are the winning bidder? The Crispin Porter + Bogusky intern team will put together a creative presentation for you over a three month period, this includes strategies, brand repositioning and concepting. Production or any advertising materials is not included, either is travel expenses or any other collateral for the interns – pick up only.

Every year they spend part of their time working on pro bono assignments so the winning bidder will replace this activity; “It would be great if the high bidder is a cause-related thing,” Mr. Bogusky said. However they have specified that “CP+B reserves the right to decline services in the event of a conflict with any of our existing clients or for any other reason (like if you sell cigarettes) in our sole discretion.”

In a similar vien Art Director Jon Kubik and copywriter Adam Noel who recently left the agency side of life have launched there blog Steal our Ideas.com. Just shy two weeks old the blog is the concepting board for these two creatives to throw out ideas for any agency/ company/ designer to steal if they wish. They have even explicitly stated that they are happy to put together ideas for specific briefs. So if you can’t afford the Crispin interns you can always try these two.

Fanta have also jumped onto the Augmented Reality Bandwagon but stepped up the game by using it to create a mobile Augmented Reality Game Application. Yes that’s right, Virtual Tennis lets people play tennis against each other on their mobiles.

So how do you play – users need to first of all download the game from the Fanta Micro site, print out the virtual tennis court and that’s all the sporting equipment you need. Multiply that by two, and you and a friend can get playing – more details on the Fanta Virtual Tennis site. Currently the app only works on some Nokia versions including N81, N95, 6120 and 6121 smartphones (more on the site) so if you have one or can get you hands on one it’s definitely worth a serve or two.

The growth in Augumented Reality applications and mobile apps is a pretty good hint as to where branding is headed these days. Have a look at Virtual Tennis in action on You Tube.

The 13th Annual Webby Awards were announced last week and as per ususual they have on display an extensive range of innovative online work from Website, to Online Advertising, Online Video and Mobile. This year Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor was named artist of the year in recognition for his work condemning the old record industry distribution systems. This year Nine Inch Nails released their album The Slip on their website for free download.

Other winners included SNL face Jimmy Fallon for Person of the Year, Comedian Sarah Silverman as Best Actress, Lisa Kudrow for Outstanding Comedic Performance and renowned Family Guy Creator Seth McFarlane as Film/Video Person of the Year. Twitter was Breakout of the year and the most prestigious agency of the year award went to R/GA for outstanding performance across all the Webby categories.

I’m still making my ways through the lists of nominees but paying particular attention to the interactive advertising categories it’s amazing what you can do with banners these days. The winning banner campaign was from Clemenger BBDO NZ for Distracted Drivers which allowed users to send a text message via the banner, similarly on an amazing level the people’s choice winner, Pepsi’s Dear Mr President by R/GA allowed users with web cam access to record video messages through the banner!

And the list goes on so enjoy.

I like most people spend my day to day life wading through data. In between emails and facebook I work in online advertising and in my first week my boss said to me “You gotta learn to love the data.” And whilst I have learned to get along with data it’s a love hate relationship.

In my surfing the other day I came across a talk that JeffreyVeen did at the Web 2.0 Expo recently on designing for Big Data. Veen is one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and probably most well know for his work on Measure Maps which was scooped up by Google in 2006, that also took Veen with them to work on Analytics.

Whilst coming from a strong Software, data analytics background he is able to distill a few of his key design principles that can be applied to a whole range of disciplines. It’s a good talk and definitely worth the 20 minutes if you have them. But I just wanted to share one example he used – that of Harry Beck’s London Underground Tube Map.

The iconic linear, non -geographic map was created in 1931 by engineering draftsman Harry Beck and has stood the test of time with his design concept still being used today as a standard for train systems around the world.

Rather than trying to superimpose a diagram of the rail system over a geographic road map Beck drew on his previous experience working with switch boards and created a linear diagram that closely resembled electrical schematic diagrams. Beck saw that train passengers had no real need or care for the geographic accuracy, but simply wanted to know which train to catch to get from A – B.

However if this map was designed for drivers it would be completely useless to them and that’s the take away – Beck designed for his users and gave them the information they need with no excess clutter, and that’s a challenging thing to do.

Other good examples Veen used for data design were Dr John Snow’s work mapping the cholera outbreak and Charles Joseph Minard’s depiction of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812.

Yahoo just upped the game on the Web Analytics battle between them and Google with the release of their upgraded analytics tool. The suite was first launched in October last year after they acquired Analytics Platform Index Tools in April.

However the product is only available to Yahoo advertisers (search or display) that have an suit on their account. Dennis Mortensen, director of Beta Insights said that the new toll was aimed at larger clients who have a need for deeper complex analysis.

The new added functionalities released on Friday include demographics metrics detailing audience age, location and primary online interests for people who have enabled the demo targeting on their campaigns – which I am going to have to talk about in another post!.

Whilst it’s still a fair way from taking a piece of Googles Market Share pie, it is definitely a step in the right direction for Yahoo.