Bob at McDonald’s blogs

I always really like the tone of Bob at McDonald’s blog posts. He’s the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility at the company. In his piece today he answers questions on the minds of business students at Washington University:

http://www.openfordiscussion.iupload-stage.com/default.asp?item=3047257

His posts make for good corporate content because they don’t feel corporate at all. You definitely feel you’re getting his personal perspectives, just as the blog descriptor says, and also the sense of a committed professional doing a job rather than a corporately trained and constrained one.

Other corporate bloggers should learn from Bob’s and McDonald’s example. Not only is the style good but the posts are regular and they address substantive subjects, often ones you’d think McDonald’s would avoid.

What unfortunately lets the email subscription service to the blog down is the lack of a prominent link to the McDonald’s website where the blog sits and, therefore, direction from McDonald’s on what else [most current] I should also be reading about CSR at the company.

I resorted to a Google search to find where the blog content resides and was disappointed to find it’s on the company’s corporate site rather than their consumer one, though with a little bit of looking around you can access it from the consumer site as well.

It makes for a bit of an annoying user journey, jumping between McDonald’s two sites to get access to their broad range of content on CSR. I’m curious about how the content is split and repeated and what I might be missing, if I only visit one or other of the sites.

I’d also like to see the Values in Practice blog, the one Bob is a main contributor to, being more prominently displayed on the home pages of both the corporate and consumer sites, as its style and content could go further to engage the casual/consumer reader of CSR issues than the polished corporate content available.

A bigger push on Bob’s blog might help speed up the demand for sustainable and “green” products that in today’s blog Bob frankly admits still isn’t there yet amongst McDonald’s consumers. Have they considered displaying Bob’s posts next to the menu boards in McDonald’s stores?