At Mzinga,  I have had many conversations with organizations and agencies about architecting their own social media sites. At some point in the conversation the topic of the large social sites (Facebook, MySpace, and others) comes up. I wanted to quickly discuss my thoughts on this topic here.

When building out your own social media strategy it is impossible to ignore the pull of the larger social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook, in fact it is critical to a successful strategy to incorporate these large audiences.

Individual organizations are building their own focused communities. In a sense these are smaller, new villages when compared to the large cities of MySpace and Facebook. For these community initiatives to succeed they need to build and grow their audience. For these new villages to grow and thrive a great strategy is to build solid connections (or highways) to the large cities such as Facebook and MySpace. By enabling the promotion of the activity from the smaller communities to the larger communities, targeted audiences are going to be drawn back to the smaller ‘village’.

There are many technologies that are emerging today that help to enable this from Clearspring to new Facebook Connect. Today’s social architects can plan their communities success through solid bi-directional connections to the large social cities.