I feel like a kid on Christmas morning! Today's announcement of the merger between Prospero and Mzinga is something that many of us at both organizations have been anticipating and working on for weeks now.  I thought it would be fun to give you some insight into how we leveraged an array of social media to get to know each other, spread the news, and manage integration projects.  The following is a short break-down of how we used social-media during the acquisition:

Bonding and Informing on Twitter:

• Building Bonds: Aaron Strout, Jim Storer and Heather Strout and I are all pretty active on Twitter. Before we were all officially introduced to each other, Twitter was a great way to informally get to know each other and interact. It has been fun linking to each other's blog posts and commenting on each others Tweets. I feel that Twitter has definitely helped us to all know each other better and thereby helped us to work better as a team.
• Spreading News: The Mzinga integration team wanted to ensure that when all of Prospero was informed of the merger, that we were all as excited as they were. During our internal announcements, I used Twitter's direct message feature to let Aaron Strout know immediately about the incredibly positive response from the Prospero team. It was fantastic to be able to provide this real-time feedback.
• Answering your Questions: We are all really excited today to also be available to answer questions about the merger on Twitter. Please follow @astrout, @jstorerj or @crbrowning for the latest information on our two organizations working together!

Blogging w/ SEO and Strategy:

• API Driven blogging: On the technology side, I am really excited that we are moving from Prospero's templated technology to our XML API, for the enhanced design flexibility and greater SEO (Search Engine Optimization) capabilities it provides. Not only that, but it was incredible to see that the combined Mzinga/Prospero team was able to complete the project in less than a week. With all of the other client projects that we have going on, this really blew me away.
• Blogging Strategy: Jim Storer is leading our overall corporate blogging strategy and we have had some great conversations about the other blogs that will be added to the site and who else will be blogging. In the spirit of transparency, he or I will blog more about the behind the scenes of our own strategy.

Collaborating through Message Boards:

• Project Management: Prospero's culture has been driven by leveraging our own message boards to manage projects and explore new technologies to accelerate internal discussions and increase transparency. It has been fantastic to see the teams already re-brand these internal message boards to the Mzinga look as we discuss new projects like the new blogs mentioned above!
• Client and Partner forums: I am really excited about upcoming creation of a client and partner knowledge base and message board and the increased direct interaction our clients and partners will have with our developers, integrators, project managers and client service managers. Look for more info to come on these soon!

Lessons for Community Managers: Mergers and Acquisitions are part of corporate life as we now know it. Business social media provides a powerful set of tools that goes far beyond promotion. As Prospero and Mzinga have seen over the past few weeks, social media applications not only help us to communicate externally, but to bond internally, manage project and are helping us to forge stronger relationships with clients during an extremely complex transaction.

As Mzinga's co-CEO's Rick Faulk and Barry Libert are fond of saying, there is no business process that we know of that can't be improved by social media... and that includes the merging of Prospero and Mzinga!

As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

-Colin