I'm in a hotel room in Nice. I know that sitting in a hotel on the Cote d'Azur doesn't sound like 'hard work', but bear with me... I'm here because we're hosting an internal comms workshop for an EMEA client - it's a global firm and a household name.

We've done it twice before, a year ago in Barcelona and earlier in 2006 in Athens. But this time many of the names and faces are new. We've got people coming from the States, Jordan, Lebanon, the Czech Republic, Italy, the UK, Greece, Austria. All coming to explore how they can work better together, share best practices, align their efforts, learn from each other.

As well as these workshops we get them together every month on a conference call and we're currently developing an internal comms toolkit for them, which we have written but they will own, when we publish it as a Wiki.

It's really hard work running a community like this (though being in Nice does help). For us, but especially for our client. He's successfuly built relationships with more than 80 internal comms practitioners in his company, across countries, and across business groups.

Over the next two days we're going to do lots of cool stuff, including a debate on the pros and cons of social media for internal communicators. I'm a little nervous, but mostly excited. Will let you know how it goes in a couple of days.