I JUST don't understand it. Why would anyone want the Golden Arches on-line? Of course, I can understand the attraction of McDonald's to parents as a place to take their kids to keep them from continually demanding McChickens.
I can even understand the attraction to kids: a ridiculous clown with big feet and food that is bland and tasteless enough to convince any child that it is something their parent's disapprove of and therefore something they should demand.
But why anyone would want to spend their on-line dollars on a McDonald's forum is truly beyond me.
It was reported this week that through the NBC section of America Online, there now exists a McDonald's forum which, among other things, offers a glossary of common on-line terms, a what's new at McDonald's listing, and a list of prices of Big Macs worldwide. This seems to be way off the mark as a method of on-line public relations.
Sure, those lawyers who force-fed their messages down the throats of every Usenet news reader may have been a bit too direct: McDonald's forces no one to look at their files. But McDonald's seems to offer nothing of sufficient interest to draw people into their forum and spend money browsing their offerings.
After all, why would anyone turn to McDonald's to get a glossary of on-line terms for US$3.50 an hour when they could probably get one for free from another source? Strange indeed.
And probably even more strange is the apparently popular offering of McDonald's Interactive, which is a section where users can download McDonald's colouring book pages and video clips of television commercials.