McDonalds' New Internal Blog Initiative

According to Brandweek, McDonalds is now looking to a blogging solution to solve the age-old question:

How do you get feedback quickly from the troops on the ground to the team in the white tower?

http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003723126

This move takes the Golden Arches to a new level, encompassing 15,000 locations in the US and Canada, supports English, Spanish, and French languages, and is open to every employee (not just official content about the company, but also more human-interest or personal stories as well). HQ will hopefully position themselves to be responsive enough to the feedback from the front lines, and are presumably using this data to drive better decision making around promotions, products, and other initiatives.

It’s also interesting to note that McDonalds reported record year-over-year sales growth for in-store sales, and that this feature is looked to as a way to continue that strong growth by improving internal communications. Not sure if we’d ever see this information, but it would be great to see a case study a year from now on what this program has been able to do for them (did it help vet new product offerings> Did they figure out new operational efficiencies? Were they able to gain insight on local promotions that were successful and transform them into a broader initiative?).

Given that this is an internal move, McDonalds is sidestepping some of the worries and potential pitfalls that blogging can expose companies to:

What if someone says something bad about our company?

What if we get sued for libel?

What if our competitors uncover trade secrets?

Going internal is a good first step before going live to the public. It helps show you what blogging means, what it requires to create great content (often underestimated), and depending on where the blog is targeted it can be a great way to get some feedback and ideas from across the company that otherwise may never have bubbled to the surface.

In McDonalds’ case, though, their Corporate Social Responsibility division had been blogging since January 2006.

Check out their first post:
http://csr.blogs.mcdonalds.com/default.asp?item=124518

They really struggled initially with the best way to use this medium. When you read the comments, you can see the mix of congratulations and criticisms, but most importantly you can also see that no one from McDonalds ever responded to the initial comments:

Lack of personal voice from the author
No way to contact the author
No response to questions posed to the author
Worse still: ...YOUR COMMENT WILL NOT BE DISPLAYED ON THE BLOG UNLESS IT IS APPROVED BY THE AUTHOR."

Not exactly an auspicious start or in line with social media best practices, but establishing this medium and openly embracing this world is definitely a start. Well known blogger Shel Israel posted a great open letter to McDonalds' blog author Bob Langert, about what steps McDonalds could take to make better use of this medium:

http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/02/mcdonalds_blogg.html

From the article and to McDonalds' credit, Langert proactively sought out Shel as his biggest critic and solicted feedback on how to make things better. Another great move, but no public comments were ever posted from McDonalds about this, so it's questionable how much this advice was taken to heart. They seemed to have forgotten the fact that blogs are all about conversations to spark debates and new ideas, not veiled PR moments that are positioned to be something they’re really not.

Their CSR blog is a great tale of how you can take the plunge, but you must ensure you're ready to respond publicly to feedback that will arise AND that you're being completely transparent. I'm not sure what fanfare this was launched with, but the fact that there were only 26 comments on the first blog -- coupled with the policy about posts being approved -- makes you wonder how much openness we're actually seeing. Hopefully this new internal program will yield better results.