Nine Hours Ahead

I just barely had time to unpack after the Factiva Social Media Roundtable trip to Palo Alto and I am off again -- this time to Germany and France to talk about media measuring in Europe.

We are holding a customer roundtable in Frankfurt on Wednesday. No bloggers at this one. It's more of a chance for Factiva to talk to our customers and prospects about media monitoring and about the new world of social media. My hunch is that Europe (I know it's dangerous to generalize) is a couple of steps behind the States on putting together corporate action plans on monitoring social media. It seems that outside of a few industries and locales in the States who already get it, much of rest of the U.S. is about 6 months behind. So I suspect Europe is 6-12 months behind that.

I'm eager to hear feedback on Wednesday to see if I'll be surprised or not.

An Aside (and generating my own customer content): Kudos to Continental Airlines who wisked me off my delayed flight into Berlin and onto my connecting Lufthansa flight. They met me at the door of the plane, ran me to a waiting car and we zipped across the tarmac -- but too bad they couldn't get my bag to my second plane as quickly. (Huzzah to Lufthansa, who several hours later brought it to my hotel.)