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The launch of intranet blogs by McDonald's is significant because it's not a high-tech company.

You can talk about the likes of Sun, Microsoft, and IBM all day long, but the reaction from execs will be the same: "We're not a high-tech organization." But holding up McDonald's-a fast-food company-as an example of corporations turning to internal blogging as a communication channel has the potential to make some executives sit up and take notice.

I noted Steve Crescenzo's post on McDonald's blogging earlier this week, but now we get a detailed report from ClickZ Networks, reporting at New York's BlogOn conference where Steve Wilson, the burger company's senior director of web communications, addressed the crowd:

"If your task is to move the culture of a company, you're not going to move it by the flip of a switch," Wilson said. "You have to show that an open dialogue can occur, and create an ongoing dialogue to move from point A to point B."

The company has no plans yet for external blogs, Wilson said, but went into considerable detail about the planning and execution of internal blogs, which are written by executives and departments. It'll be interesting to see, now that a major, non-high-tech mainstream corporation has launched intranet blogs-pilot program though it may be-how many others will be willing to give it a shot.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.