Acquiring My Attention in Communities

In case you haven't heard, there's a social media acquisition in play. Community builder Mzinga has announced that it's acquiring white label social networking company Prospero.

This is certainly a newsworthy item from a business standpoint: a leading company in the communities space, Mzinga has a number of major entities as clients, including AOL, ABC, ESPN and many others that aren't acronyms. Barry Libert, one of Mzinga's founders, co-authored a book that speaks to the wonder of communities - We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. And Prospero is equally as impressive, having built social networks for the likes of iVillage, Comcast and the New York Times. You can check out their press release for more details.

As I looked over the announcement, one of the things that struck me about this is how many of the players I know in this exciting development:

• Aaron Strout & Jim Storer are both at Mzinga and are a couple of top-notch social media guys, both of whom I recently saw at Boston's Social Media Breakfast (and Jim was one of my co-presenters)
• Colin Browning of Prospero lives in the next town, and I've been following his Northern & Southern Hemisphere tweets for a while
• PerkettPR is handling Mzinga's public relations - I've gotten to know Jeff Glasson & Christine Perkett through various social media & tech functions in Boston
• Doug Haslam works for Topaz Partners, Prospero's PR firm

And, to make things even more interesting, Aaron, Jim and Colin are basically holding a press conference on Twitter at 8:30 a.m. to discuss online communities. Since Twitter is a community of sorts, it's entirely appropriate. If you'd like to get in on the discussion, you need a Twitter account (it's free) and you should follow everyone I mentioned above. Here are their Twitter IDs/links, just in case:

• @astrout - Aaron Strout
• @jstorerj - Jim Storer
• @crbrowning - Colin Browning
• @missusp - Christine Perkett
• @jeffglasson - Jeff Glasson
• @DougH - Doug Haslam
• @scottmonty - what the hey, if you're not following me yet, you should be

I'm not only looking forward to seeing how this little Twitter experiment turns out, but I'm expecting some great things to come from the combination of these two social media powerhouses.