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.