Turns out the C++ linter (syntax checker) of syntastic has many options that can be set on your .vimrc (unfortunate, I wish it was project specific, like the .clang_complete solution).
To enable c++11 standards and use the libc++ library with clang (which is what my project is using) I added the following lines to my ~/.vimrc
let g:syntastic_cpp_compiler="clang++"
let g:syntastic_cpp_compiler_options=" -std=c++11 -stdlib=libc++"
it now works beautifully.