The new McDonald’s corporate blog, Open for Discussion, has prompted a fair share of discussion over at Naked Conversations, a blog about a book about blogs (I’ll let you figure that one out.) Author Shel Israel says McDonald’s is offering slow service in a fast-food environment, since the blog had only one post after a week in business:
"The folks at McDonald’s really should know that if you want the crowds to come in, you’d better serve them up faster and better than that. You can’t have a menu with six categories and then offer just one little morsel. I keep coming back for faster fare and it just isn’t there."
Thank you, Shel, for telling it like it is. I mean, if you don’t post at least once a day, you might as well not bother. When a company like McDonald’s starts a blog, I expect to be inundated immediately with McNuggets of news.
Shel’s post also got me thinking about the all those media tortoises in world full of hares. Just consider the following:
• Newsweek – What’s up with that? Only once a week? You can’t leave a slice of Gouda around that long without it becoming rancid. Look at Newsday in Long Island, they totally “get it." Newsweek, step it up, baby.
• Atlantic Monthly – This is just insane. Once a month doesn’t cut it in today’s blog-eat-blog world. Might as well call it The Atlantic Who-Gives-A-Crap-By-The-Time-It-Comes-Out. Then again, it’s almost worth the wait to see how much crazier P.J. O’Rourke has become.
• Foreign Affairs Quarterly – Now this is beyond the pale. How can you possibly have a discussion about foreign affairs in our post 9-11 world once every three months? It would take an entire issue just to print all the crazy stuff Iran’s president said during that time frame. We could have invaded another couple countries by then.
• Corporate Annual Reports – Where do public companies get off printing one report a year? Do they think we’re that stupid? This is how we get situations like Enron and Tyco, people.
McDonald’s, corporate America and mainstream media, we’re on to you and we’re not going to take it anymore. Give us this day our daily blogs or we’ll never let you live it down. We’ll be sure to read them – that is, as soon as we can find the time.
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Gary Goldhammer -- Strategic storytelling for brands, organizations and executives 
I’d say give them a chance, maybe they only just started the blog. I agree it is best if they blog on a regular basis, and you would think a large company would have a lot of resources to blog. But maybe they don’t have a lot of resources. How about asking them some questions?
John, good thoughts. But just to make sure, you know that I was only joking, right? Maybe I need to be clearer with my sarcasm 🙂 It’s ridiculous to go after McDonald’s for blogging “too little” — it’s their blog, they can do whatever they want. One post a year would be more than a lot of other companies are doing anyway 🙂 Thanks for the comment, I appreciate the conversation!