In the aggregate, the blog functions as a new type of public relations tool adapted for the blogosphere. Company employees push the McDonald’s message, and a few people are allowed to respond. While on the surface the blog looks like an effort to reach out to the public, it is clearly an attempt by McDonald’s to personalize its executives and the decisions they make, and to get out in front of issues in the public eye as they relate to McDonald’s.

This blog is a result of McDonald’s using iUpload’s tools to harvest intellectual capital from inside the company, Hopper says. “They primarily used blogging internally and encouraged people to write whatever they want in their blog spaces. As people write blogs, it is bubbling out into the [McDonald’s] intranet site. [McDonald’s] is trying to make this stuff discoverable to the appropriate audience,” he says.

But the McDonald’s corporate responsibility blog is just one part of what iUpload clients can expect.

While iUpload started out managing web content for companies in the late ’90s, three years ago Hopper and company decided they needed to rethink their business for the next generation of the web. “Our DNA is web-content management. We were just managing single web pages and letting 10 or 20 people operate a page wasn’t enough,” Hopper says. “Companies wanted to cast a wider net and keep people involved to collaborate and share information.”

Now, iUpload offers corporate blogging tools that can help a company mine their own employees for insightful ideas, anecdotes about best practices, or product feedback and then manage that information flow into an internal or external blog.

“With the simple nature of blogs, we can manage smaller pieces of information and get a lot more peopled involved,” Hopper adds.

Hopper says iUpload has three key components: encouraging employee participation, managing content, and distributing that content.

The participation element is key, Hopper says, because without a wide range of input, a corporate blogging community will not be successful. However, there are many different methods that clients can use to interact in their iUpload communities (blogging, commenting, emailing, and others). Furthermore, employees can create and manage their iUpload content without any programming experience, thanks to provided tools.

After raw input from clients or outside observers is created, companies like McDonald’s want to be able to manage how that content is used, if it is used at all. This flow of content is a critical step for iUpload’s big brand clients like McDonald’s. “We have to be able to manage how that content flows: what approval cycles does it have to go through?” Hopper says.

Companies who are collecting online communications for use in a public blog need to make sure that the wrong, embarrassing, or damaging information isn’t posted in public and that all the blog input from site visitors is kept as a record.

But what happens after all this content is created? Individual blogs, group blogs, web sites, or picture galleries can then be managed and sent to where they are effective. An employee blogging about his job could create content that could fit perfectly into the product section on the company’s web site or apply to internal operations and could be posted on the company intranet, Hopper says.

The scalable and brandable iUpload tools are available on a per-user or page-view payment plan. They charge $1,500 per month for the first 300,000 page views or the first 100 users.

John Bruce, iUpload CEO, says his company is poised in a “fascinating position.” His company is obviously valuable, he says, because the nature of corporate communications is changing. “We are going into an enormous change in how corporations interact with employees and customers,” he says.

To check out McDonald’s corporate responsibility blog, visit Open for Discussion.