That does not mean that the issues discussed there are not vital ones, nor that the dialog between your company and the public is not indeed an open discussion - because to me it looks very frank, direct and lively.

However, I don’t think “image” has to be a dirty word. It describes how others perceive you, and sometimes this perception differs significantly from how you perceive yourself. With McDonald’s, the public perception may well be much more negative than is warranted by the facts, the company partly acting as a stand-in for an entire industry and as a scapegoat for larger social issues. Having an open discussion means expressing your views and listening to the views of others, and OFD as a forum makes such an exchange possible.

In other words: I absolutely do not discount that it is your objective “to have a dialog on the real issues businesses and society face together”. I just think that the way in which the dialog takes place allows McDonald’s to demonstrate its communicative and interactional competence. And that is likely to have a positive effect on how people see you. I don’t feel that there is anything wrong with that.

The situation in a blog is much, much more symmetrical than it is in other situations where corporations and the public interact, meaning all discussants are equally heard (ideally). The result is a corporate image shaped not by “the message”, but by the participants’ evaluation of how the corporate discussant acts (does he listen? does he see my point? does he respond to my criticism? etc).

I know this is a rather long-winded answer but I think the short version is: Open for Discussion works on multiple levels. One of those levels is the perception of the company as a social actor. Act well and people will note it positively. If image as a term isn’t accurate to describe that process we simply need a new word.

I have lumped Open for Discussion together with other blogs which are vastly different - sadly it is the nature of classifications that they are never specific enough. But my semantics of “image-related” simply don’t equate that with something bad. I just think Open for Discussion can potentially change how people see McDonald’s, and that you’re quite aware of that, other objectives notwithstanding.

Thank you for stopping by, Bob, and for your well-placed criticism.

There is, however, a clear link between what Wells Fargo does (insurance, loans) and both GBH and The Student LoanDown. I can’t see anything remotely surprising (nor in any way shady) about a provider of financial services blogging about, well, topics related - if tangentially - to financial services. I think you’re providing a valuable service to your customers and GBH and SLD are both well-written and quite interesting (and I say that being neither in need of a loan nor terribly interested in disasters).

Also, thanks for pointing me to your blog index. I was aware of GBH and SLD, but not of Stagecoach Island. I assume the CEO/B2B blogs you mention are internal, not public. I would be very interested in including internal blogs in my PhD study of corporate blogs, as they may differ considerably in terms of style and structure from public-facing ones, so if there is any chance of a collaboration please email me.

It still surprises me when I read some opinions that GBH is meant to sell insurance–that never came up when we developed it. We see it as a community service, and in fact it comes out of our Historical Services dept (museums, etc). I understand the skepticism that accompanies corporations entering this space. We see it as a new way of communicating, and getting customers to learn from eachother through the conversations that hope to develop. We’re not there yet with all of our blogs, but we’ll stick with it until we get it right

Cheers,
Ed Terpening
VP, Social Media
Wells Fargo