The afternoon session of BlogOn '05 began with an interesting Q&A featuring Chris Shipley, the executive producer of the conference, interviewing Steve Wilson, senior director, global Web communication, McDonald's Corp. Wilson talked about the great difficulties he's faced in trying to bring blogs and other social media tools to the world's largest burger joint. He chronicled the battle he's faced with a group of un-named executives whom he had to cajole, convince and prod to allow him to introduce blogging to the corporation. It was a very entertaining situation, here he is speaking to a conference populated by the converted — most of the people seated on the dance floor of Copacabana directly in front of the dais probably earn a good portion of their living through blogs and new-media technologies — about explaining the benefits of blogs to a group of executives who were nearly paralyzed by the fear of unfiltered communication with the public at large. When asked for a word of advice for people in other large corporations who would like to introduce blogging to their corporate cultures he responded, "Engage your legal department early, and often."

It's been a long road for Wilson, and he talked about some of the largest stumbling blocks along the way. The most important question which needed to be answered was, how can you control something which gains its relevance from being open, and his answer to those executives was to create guidelines, three separate sets of guidelines for blogging. The first set was for internal blogging, the second for McDonald's employees, who identify themselves as such, and comment on external blogs, and the third for McDonald's employees who speak for the company in the blogosphere at large. These guidelines would limit liability and that's a language the executives could definitely understand.

At the end of the day, Wilson has been able to bring internal blogging to McDonald's and hopes to launch a public McDonald's blog in the future. One method he used to sway the executives was to show them that the time has come and passed for them to ask the question, "Should we become a part of the blogosphere?" because their employees, competitors and customers are already out there, commenting on the company. The only question left to be answered is whether they would join the blogosphere as a participant, or remain only a silent target to every disgruntled customer. This is a question all major corporations are going to have to answer at some point. — Brian Ward

Go to the the BlogOn Web site and the event blog.

Tag: blogon