Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Ringtonia.com offers a glimpse into McDonald’s future (thanks to the Olympian) While the restaurant looks more like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Bill Whitman, McDonald’s spokesman, said that the restaurant won’t be replicated across its branches. However he does point out that the fast food giant aims to keep its restaurants more relevant to its customers. Examples of facilities and services available at the hi-tech branch include CD burners and downloadable ringtones.

With that in mind McDonalds could engage in a variety of initiatives such as blogging, moblogging or podcasting to supplement the new design.

Here’s a couple of ideas off the top of my head:

• First off, what better way to stay relevant to your customer by engaging in some of the most popular trends at the moment such as blogging or podcasting
• There could be a blog specific to each country which would be like a retail blog. The aim of the blog would be to act as a salesperson explaining how to take advantage of or use the services on offer.
• They could be really anal and set up a blog for each store. Sounds excessive, but you could form a better link with the customers. One way they could achieve that is by taking photos of kids party and post them on the website.
• Ronald McDonald could do a birthday podcast which the kiddies could take away on their mp3 player. To top this, if the child has gotten an iPod photo for their b-day, he could also get the photos from his special day.

Anyways enough of a ramble, but if we get a hi-tech branch in Dublin I might actually go to the hole that is Mickey-D’s.