While the McDonald's Corporation has not jumped headfirst into blogging, it certainly is further along the path of acceptance than many companies of its size.

Last week, the company began an internal program that introduced corporate blogs, available only on the corporate intranet, behind the firewall. While this is seen as a small first step, it's an important one in a company the size of McDonald's, said Steve Wilson .....

..... When Wilson first sat down with McDonald's senior executives to talk about the need for a blogging strategy, the first step was to explain to those executives just what a blog was and why they should care. After that, he showed them that even if they chose to ignore blogs, they wouldn't be going away.

"We showed them that there were already members of our crews blogging, operators blogging, and customers blogging," Wilson said. He then showed the executives results of a blog search that found 675,000 entries by McDonald's employees, franchisees, or customers talking about McDonald's in one 90-day period. "That got their attention very quickly," he added.