McDonalds: A Look At Open For Discussion
McDonald’s is a popular place to eat, but just how popular is their corporate blog?
I decided to take a look.
This is another in our ongoing series of corporate blog reviews. Previously, we’ve taken a look at the Kodak blogs, the General Motors blog, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and Wal-Mart.
McDonald’s corporate blog is called Open for Discussion.
According to the “About” section of the blog, this blog is about corporate responsibility. McDonald’s wants to “to share what we’re doing and learn what you think.”
That’s a great purpose statement. Let’s see how the McDonald’s blog holds up.
One thing that impressed me about Open for Discussion is how easily I was able to find it. All I had to do was type the phrase “McDonalds Blog” into the search engine and the McDonalds blog was the first result. That’s good, because there are several blogs about McDonald’s that are not affiliated with the company. McDonald’s also links to it from their corporate site, although it is not on the landing page.
I also really like that McDonald’s apparently has a team to address the area of corporate social responsibility (a fact that becomes evident when you look at the titles of the various bloggers).
Now, I’ve been a big advocate of saying that business bloggers, especially small business bloggers, do not need to publish daily as long as they publish regularly. I say that because I feel daily blogging could place a strain on a very small business without a corresponding return.
However, McDonald’s is not a small business. In fact, they are quite the opposite. They are a Fortune 500 company. Yet, they only post less often than once a week. I think that they could afford to do a little better than this in terms of posting frequency.
Here are some of the other findings about the McDonald’s Open for Discussion blog.
On a scale of 1-10
- Ease of Finding: 9 - The blog was easy to find in the search engines and the corporate website does link to it.
- Frequency: 6 - Sadly, the McDonald’s blog is only updated several times a month.
- Engaging Writing: 7 - The writing seems fairly interesting. I like the fact that there are several corporate “voices,” as opposed to just one corporate voice.
- Relevant: 8 - Open For Discussion does a good job of sticking to corporate responsibility, as it pertains to McDonald’s and McDonald’s customers. I would like to see more customer concerns and issues addressed more, if not in this blog, perhaps in another one.
- Focused: 9 - The blog stays focused on McDonald’s and on corporate responsibility.
- Honest: 9 - As far as I can tell, the blog accurately portrays McDonald’s policy about corporate responsibility.
- Interactive: 7 - Comments are turned on, but that’s about all this blog is doing for interactivity. There doesn’t seem to be any other effort underway to get readers more involved - there are no discussion forums, livechats, contests, or polls.
- Responsive: 8 - The blog is getting comments and they are being responded to. (However, there could be more comments if there were more posts.)
Business and Blogging rates Open for Discussion a 63 out of 80 possible points. This score makes it about average for the corporate blogs that we have reviewed so far.
How would you have rated this particular corporate blog?
To read more business blog reviews, head over to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging wiki.
Image Source: Laura Spencer of WritingThoughts
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Reviews
1 opinion for McDonalds: A Look At Open For Discussion
27 Resources for Evaluating Blogging ROI - KoMarketing Associates
May 15, 2008 at 3:01 pm
[…] McDonald’s, Laura Spencer […]
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: