Tonight I get to repeat the amazing experience I had last year when I volunteered to sous chef the first annual Thanksgiving Dinner for the homeless at Miriam’s Kitchen.  I excited to share the missive I received from Miriam’s this AM outing the amazing menu we’re preparing and sharing with your guests this afternoon:

• Happy Thanksgiving! (chrisabraham.com)
• Some shelters dish out organic Thanksgiving to homeless (usatoday.com)
• Testomonial from Miriam’s Kitchen (chrisabraham.com)
• Happy Thanksgiving! from The League of Aggressive Progressives – Politics and Your Thanksgiving Dinner (theleagueofaggressiveprogressives.wordpress.com)
• Candy Dish: Thanksgiving Overload (collegecandy.com)
• For A Thanksgiving Dinner That Can’t Be Beat… (wncx.radio.com)
• TV Stars Join Kirk Douglas to Serve Thanksgiving Dinner to the Homeless (aoltv.com)
• Help me make a Thanksgiving dinner for one (ask.metafilter.com)
• Kim Kardashian Reminds You To Think Of The Homeless This Thanksgiving (hills2city.wordpress.com)
• PETA Serves ‘Baby’ for Thanksgiving Dinner (newser.com)
• Survey: What’s Your Mashed Potato Technique? (thekitchn.com)
• Unique Mashed Potato Recipes (livingrichwithcoupons.com)
• Happy Thanksgiving! (growup318.com)
• The story of the three turkeys (tonydelarosa.wordpress.com)
• Can I Make Stuffing and Mashed Potatoes Today? (dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Thanksgiving Alternative Meals (vegontherun.com)
• Alyssa’s Mashed Potatoes (thepantryfairy.wordpress.com)
• Celebrate the Joy of the Season with Special Holiday Values at Mimi’s Cafe (prnewswire.com)
• Mashed Potatoes with Roasted Garlic and Lemon Thyme Butter (savoringeverybite.wordpress.com)

Last Thursday I headed over to Miriam’s Kitchen to pitch in as sous-chef for the first annual Thanksgiving night dinner at Miriam’s and these three photos are representative of my evening:

Carving lots and lots of whole turkeys with a gorgeous Sabatier Au Carbone 10-Inch Carbon Steel Chef’s Knife all by my lonesome:

I am very honored to have been volunteer sous chef on Miriam’s Kitchen very first annual thanksgiving day dinner.

It was tonight and I was honed with the carving of a half-dozen turkeys along with another Chris, using a gorgeous Sabatier au Carbone 10″ chef’s knife. Here’s the note of appreciation I received and also the menu for the night:

Today we are giving thanks for your continued support of our guests.

Without you, none of our work would be possible. But with you, we are able to help our guests through some of the most difficult times in their lives.

We’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving here with our guests today, and Chef Steve and Chef John asked that we share our Thanksgiving menu with you. Because of generous donations from our community, we are able to create this menu for less than $1 per person in food costs!

Thanksgiving Dinner at Miriam’s Kitchen

• Brined and mustard-marinated turkey with herb gravy
• Mashed sweet potatoes with pineapples
• Roasted broccoli
• Farmers Market garden salad
• Citrus cranberry sauce
• Jalapeno cornbread
• Homemade apple pie

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at Miriam’s Kitchen! And thanks again for all you do for our guests.

I also worked the line, asking “hi, happy thanksgiving!  Would you like sweet potatoes or corn?” and serving meal after meal after meal. Thing I love about our guests is that they’re both warm and friendly as well as really picky! They like it like they like it, that’s for sure.

Then, lots of cleaning — and fast.  Why?  Well, it’s thanksgiving and we needed to make sure that Marisol, our lovely dishwasher, got home super early.  And she did, too. Lots of sweeping, mopping, swabbing, and disinfecting.

And, here’s a super-secret: volunteering is super-fun.  It is not like cleaning your room or doing chores or housekeeping.  It is a lot of fun.  There’s lots of laughing. Not just with the fellow volunteers but also with our homeless and down-on-their-luck guests — they’re cool cats.

While I was sous-chef tonight, I am also a floor captain sometimes and get to spend time overhearing political conversations and topics of the day. Something special about Miriam’s Kitchen — and DC as well – is that Washington is a very compassionate city to the homeless and the disadvantaged.

There are such terrifying horror stories that I hear from homeless folks from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and many other cities.  The only criticism that Miriam’s Kitchen gets is that its food is too foodie and that such gourmet, fancy, meals are too good for the clientele — and I ask, what’s up with that?

To be honest, I see how careful and respectful John Murphy, my head chef in the afternoons and evening, is of food and how hard he and other work every day to secure the best food possible for our guests I am moved.  I am also moved when I see John rush up to the on-site herb garden to fetch a handful of basil, rosemary and thyme.  I really don’t believe that making a nice, hardy, meal of great quality and without lots of processing costs that much more.

What I do know is that it takes a lot of love and attention.  The staff of Miriam’s Kitchen has that in spades.  Instead of kicking myself for not having been doing this since I started undergrad in DC in 1988, I will just be grateful and honored and appreciative that I have Miriam’s Kitchen in my life now and well into the future.

There are several things that are keeping me rooted in DC and Miriam’s Kitchen is surely one of them.  I believe that Miriam’s Kitchen is a a very rare and precious thing and I single-handedly aspire to inspire people around the country and the world to try to adopt what Miriam’s Kitchen is doing every morning and every evening, five-days-a-week.

As part of his blog post, Stating the obvious, Olivier Blanchard asked quite a few questions that suggest that it is essential that brands, companies, and so forth, not outsource their social media strategy to agencies.  One of his most pedantic is this one:

“Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency?”

I think that is complete crap because it is not an either/or game. Outsourcing to an agency is like hiring a wedding planner so that you can actually enjoy your own wedding and guests.  The bride and her family choose the planner and the planner works with the family until everything is right, but when it comes to the ceremony and the reception and all the details, a majority of the staffing and operations are taken care of by other people — especially if you’re not an event planner.

This is doubly true if the wedding is going to be huge or formal. Intimate weddings can be self-planned and self-staffed but if you’re going to scale to a Royal Wedding or a Society Wedding, then you’re going to need a lot of help — especially if you want to be freed to have the time to meet all your guests and enjoy the experience yourself.

And all that help, that experience, the logistics, and the staffing and service comes from an agency that is built to offer such services, sort of like my Abraham Harrison.  Here’s the comment I posted onto Olivier’s blog:

“Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency?”

No, but you can outsource everything else.

You can outsource all the cooking, you can outsource all the cooks and cleaners. You can have the turkey cooked and all the food prepared.  You can outsource the drinks table, if the thanksgiving is a large affair.

When it comes to scaling, can you do a thanksgiving dinner on your own if you plan to serve 100?  1000?  If you plan to serve the homeless on Thanksgiving day?  These question and answer sets are so pedantic they make me want to cry, Olivier, mate.

When it comes to a simple thanksgiving dinner, you’re correct, but in the real world, do companies do all the work themselves when they host a holiday party?  Even for their own employees?

No!

They either go to a restaurant where all of the ancillary services are supported by the staff, cooks, waiters, hosts, etc; or, they hire a party planner and make sure, like a wedding, all of the details are “taken care of.”

Agencies — like mine, anyway — serve as the cast and crew to enable to host — you, the brand — to not have to spend all of his time in the kitchen and filling drinks but, rather, where you should be: at the head table raising glasses in toast or mingling around making sure your guests are having a good time.

What people forget is that we agencies should not replace brands but should facilitate and enable brands.  In other words, we’re wedding planners and you’re the bride, groom, and their parents.

The more intimate the wedding, the more the family can pitch in; however, I daresay that the upcoming Royal wedding party will only make the most basic of decisions for the wedding ceremony as there will be hundreds of guests and instead of being sandbagged they wedding party needs to spend some time sharing themselves with the constant stream of guests and well-wishers.

Does that make sense?  Now I am going to cross post this to my blog!  Love the convo, mate, and we need to meet one of these days, for sure!

Via Marketing Conversation and The BrandBuilder Blog

I received a link to this lovely blog post from Mr. Michael Obraitis about his sister Sarah Obraitis’ new business venture: meat pie making and selling. I was in love with Sarah before, but the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach so Sarah (of Heritage Foods USA) is officially the most amazing woman alive.  Please check out Au Pied de Cochon Meat Pies (Brought Right to You!) by Rachel Wharton

Forget turkey, I want a tourtière on my Thanksgiving table. That’s the holiday meat, meat and more meat pie made in Quebec. Luckily we just got word from Sarah Obraitis of Heritage Foods USA that’s she’s baking a few of these beauts with help from Hugue Dufour, from the famed Canadian restaurant Au Pied de Cochon where the pies are a local passion. “It’s beyond tradition,” says Obraitis, “it’s an obsession. People carry them out ten at a time.”

Using the great bits leftover at Heritage, Obraitis and Dufour are now making the pies at a kitchen in Manhattan for $30 a pop, using spiced ground pork, braised meats (those can include beef, venison and guinea hen) and potatoes, mushrooms, onions and beer. Plus each 9-inch meaty wonder–they are frozen, and packaged with baking instructions–comes with a jar of homemade cranberry ketchup.

For T-Day tourtières, you’ll have to get one this weekend. Just email Obraitis at sarah@heritagefoodsusa.com before the end of the day today, and as long as pies are left she’ll work out a way to get you your pie (pie payment requested upon on delivery!) They’ll also be taking orders for Christmas and New Year’s Eve through December. I get my first tomorrow morning, and my prediction is there’s no way in hell it’s making it till Thanksgiving.

When I realized that I could download the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a contact list of over 900 of the top advertising, marketing, PR, and SEO bloggers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been scheduling calls with all of the folks I have been admiring on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hopkins, “one of Australia’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment.  We had a great chat — and amazing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the conversation and I jumped at the opportunity and late last night Lee published Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most complete description of what we at Abraham Harrison LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a better, more comprehensive, way than I could even conceive of doing myself.  Here it is, in full.  Be sure to visit (and subscribe to) Better Communication Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world?

G’day – thanks for returning!

I just finished a fantastic conversation with Chris Abraham, the President and COO of AbrahamHarrison.

If you’ve been around the internet for a while, especially in the ‘marcoms’ (marketing communications) space, you would certainly have heard of Chris; if not of the man himself then certainly of one of his marketing and outreach programs.

Chris is one of those select few online marketers who’s text doesn’t read like a traditional online direct mail piece – you know, with LOTS OF CAPITALS and heaps of bold text and yellow highlighting and italics and

• bullet
• points
• a-
• plenty

and testimonials by the kazillion…

I could point you to a zillion of those sites – which is not to say that the style of marketing they use is not successful; it is, otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it. But you know as soon as you see the huge, bold, bright red and often in CAPS headline what to expect for the rest of the (very) long toilet roll of a page.

Chris takes a much softer approach, always has done, and it seems to work for him and his style of copywriting.

Video, the radio star and plain ol’ bandwagon idjuts

With the advent of Web2.0/Social Media there were many ill-informed and just plain ‘bandwagon’ pundits who hailed the death of traditional communication tools such as email, web1.0 sites and – gasp – newspaper, magazine, radio and television.

Much as television didn’t kill radio as force it to rethink its place and find its niche, so too with Social Media. Every new technology platform or societal change brings with it a change in how all that came before it must view themselves and continue to offer relevancy.

Radio didn’t die, newspapers haven’t been killed off, I can still pick up plenty of magazines that appeal to all demographics and both genders from my local newsagent, and email hasn’t disappeared off the radar (if my bulging inbox every morning is anything to go by).

So it was fantastic to finally chat with someone who, like me, believes that email is STILL a fundamental part of the marketing toolkit.

In talking with Chris today, he was genuinely flattered that a fellow copywriter would find his material engaging; I thought it was brilliant reading and his deployment strategies for his clients brilliantly executed.

You see, Chris, like me, believes that email won’t go away, but WILL have to change in order to survive in the new communication landscape. Our shared view is that it will have to evolve in a couple of ways:

1. Shorter emails will be the best way of getting people’s attention
2. Long-form emails are best saved for newsletters; trying to ‘sell’ via email will become even harder to excel at.

If you’ve ever received one of Chris’ emails, you will be stunned by several things:

1. They are short – only 2-3 paragraphs
2. They link off to a SMNR (Social Media News Release) that gives a far more in-depth level of information (and all the material you might need to help you spread the word or get involved)
3. If you email Chris or anyone of his team back you WILL get a response, usually within 24 hours (Chris says they try to get back within the hour, but time zones can sometime defeat them)
4. The emails ‘read’ like they were written by a human being, not by a ‘PR’ flack or a ex-journalist hack; they aren’t full of ‘me, me, me’ stuff telling you how wonderful I (the company) am, but neither do they ‘strip-tease tantalise’ you so that when you do click on the link you end up feeling cheated
5. You get the very real feeling that there’s someone real at the end of the email.

Here’s an example (taken from my post about the Fresh Air Fund):

Hello again, Lee

On Sunday I asked if you would kindly help me spread the word about 200 inner-city children I have yet to place with host families in August. I apologize for following up so soon, but time is of the essence and you know how funny email can be. To make things simple, everything is collected into an online resource page http://freshair.smnr.us

This appeal comes straight from the top, so please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Yours sincerely,

Sara

–
Sara Wilson
Fresh Air Fund
sara@freshair.org
www.freshair.org

Sara is a real person, not a ‘fake’ character. I sent her an email yesterday, wondering if her ears were burning, because Chris and I were talking about her:

G’day Sara,
Just finished the phone call with Chris — oh boy! Were your ears burning? They should have been!!!
Kindests,
Lee

From: Sara Wilson [mailto:swilson@chrisabraham.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 24 February 2009 2:02 AM
To: Lee@leehopkins.com
Subject: Re: Fellow Power 150 blogger

Hello Lee,
Just a quick note to re-confirm that Chris will be calling you at 10 am, your time, tomorrow (Tuesday).
No need to reply unless something has come up on your end, otherwise he will speak to you in about 7.5 hours!
Best,
Sara

In reply, Sara said,

Lee,
And I thought it was just hot where I was last night … 
It’s very kind of you to mention it, thanks.   Chris is a great guy to work for, and generous with compliments, but it’s always nice to know that someone appreciates you, isn’t it?
Cheers,
Sara

Controversy

Because Chris and his team start any campaign with an email-based blogger outreach, some of the ‘holier than thou’ social media purists occasionally give him ‘stick’, or snicker behind his back and call him a ‘spammer’. Not true – the team are very hot on ensuring only a good taste remains in the mouth of any blogger they contact, and of only offering bloggers something of actual value to the blogger.

Which is a behaviour totally unlike the hapless, clueless and insulting PR flacks who regularly show up on The Bad Pitch Blog and who attempt to fill my inbox with material about electronics, or sanitary napkins, or (ahem) extension kits, or pharmaceuticals shipped from Canada. Thank goodness I have SpamArrest to filter them out before they hit my inbox!

Chris and his team have painstakingly built up a list of nearly 35,000 bloggers across several different demographics and topic areas of interest. Visiting their blogs, they harvest their email address. They then politely email them once to offer them something of interest – if the blogger likes it, they very often blog about it; it they don’t then they don’t. What is fascinating is the response rate Chris gets for his clients.

Word of mouth and gossip-sharing amongst internet marketers has the average rate of sales of anything (be it a blog post or an ebook or a ‘course you cannot live without’) as around 0.01-0.05% from an initial mailing, with the follow-up mailings increasing that to, perhaps, 1.0-2.0%…

Chris and his team regularly get a takeup in the order of 5%, which is phenomenal. In addition, once you start developing an email relationship with anyone in their team (as I have with Sara Wilson) then all future mailings will receive much more attention than would otherwise be the case. A case in point is my own, later, post on the illegal cluster bombing being carried out in South Ossetia and The Survivor Corps run by activist and author of the very powerful book,  I Will Not Be Broken, Jerry White. It is only because Sara had taken the time to develop a relationship with me over previous months that I read and responded to the material from Jerry White. Without that relationship I would never have bothered with a topic outside of my normal areas of interest.

It is the classic ‘relationship marketing’ that Social Media Marketing pundits claim to aim for but rarely achieve.

Goodness, if I could have a dollar for every new ‘expert’ that’s popped up in the Social Media space I would retire a very rich trillionaire (and at the same time wondering how you could be a trillionaire and not be very rich – I guess if you were living in Zimbabwe you wouldn’t be…).

You wouldn’t believe the number of ‘leading social networking and social media marketing experts’ who have suddenly come out of the woodwork and set up communities in places like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, etc. Curiously, I’ve never heard of these folks before. Most of them don’t even have blogs, or if they do those blogs have only been around for less than a year. Curious, hey?

But Chris, on the other hand, has been around for a long time, has figured out what works and what doesn’t, and as evidence offers the following case studies:

• Energy Bill 2007 Case Study
• Financial Services Reputation Defense Case Study
• Firebrand TV Case Study
• Fresh Air Fund Case Study
• International Medical Corps Case Study
• Movie Producer Reputation Defense Case Study
• Snapple Antioxidant Water Case Study
• Survivor Corps Book Promotion Case Study

If you want to see the sort of posts that are associated with Chris’ kind of blogger PR pitch outreach, here are some examples:

• Thank You Operation Survivor Bloggers
• Thank You All Who Supported International Medical Corps!
• Thank You Again Survivor Corps Bloggers
• Thank You International Medical Corps Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Holiday Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Camp Counselor Bloggers!
• The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach
• Happy Thanksgiving from Abraham Harrison

Here are some examples of client SMNRs from Chris and his team that I especially like:

• http://anamigo.smnr.us
• http://freshair.smnr.us
• http://banclusterbombs.smnr.us
• http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us
• http://survivorcorps.smnr.us
• http://iwillnotbebroken.smnr.us
• http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us

So what???

The whole point of this post is NOT to fawn at the feet of someone who clearly knows what he is doing.

The whole point IS to let you know that you don’t need to throw out your baby with the bathwater:

• Don’t jump on the Social Media bandwagon without educated advice
• Don’t take advice from a pimply 17 year old fresh out of high school
• Don’t take advice from a less-pimply 23 year old fresh out of university
• Don’t ditch all of your understanding of how ‘people’ and networks work
• Don’t take advice from someone who doesn’t even blog themselves, or Twitter, or Facebook… (see my post about Social Media Gurus)
• Don’t take advice from someone who has been blogging less than 24 months

Instead:

1. Download Todd Defren’s absolutely superb ‘Brink’ guide to Social Media and Richard Meyer’s great presentation, ‘Social Media : What you’re afraid to admit you didn’t know’ (he also has a great pharma and biotech-focused pdf presentation). Download and read Trevor Cook’s and my ‘Social Media Report’.
2. Talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing – in Australia that means folks like Stephen Collins, Laurel Papworth, Trevor Cook, Darren Rowse, Gavin Heaton and, humbly, yours truly. If WE can’t help you, we can certainly put you in touch with someone who can. Unlike the USA, where there seems to be a spirit of “You’ll prize my rolodex out of my frozen dead fingers!”, there is no fierce spirit of competition here in Australia – we have  ‘co-opertition’ wherein we all help each other out if the ‘fit’ seems better for the client.
3. Stick to reading the seasoned ‘pros’ of the online marketing and/or business communication space: you cannot go wrong if you start at folks like any of the above, or Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, Mitch Joel, Joe Jaffe , Laura Fitton and Chris Abraham himself; see who they link to. Follow your nose from them – all the way along the path you will be reading ‘the good oil’ as we say here in Australia
4. Examine Chris’ examples above and see for yourself how simple but effective your online marketing can be if you do it with the right intention – of helping out the blogger, not flogging stuff for your client. Get the relationship right and you will flog stuff for your client anyway, trust me!

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Currently listening to ‘Next’ by The Necks from the album ‘Next’. Superb jazz funk from one of Australia’s great cult bands.

Apparently I am sage when drunk on Chimay:

So Chris returns from Germany, and we all head out for Belgian food. After a few glasses of Chimay, I turn to Chris, our resident web-guru, and say, “Can you explain why I haven’t posted an entry since Thanksgiving? It’s like there’s a quality-control censor in my brain.”

To which he replies, “Dude, that’s publishing. Not blogging.”

Touche.

According to Chris, if I just let the words rip, I’ll give you reason to visit Trashcan more often and not just when “some place burns down.”

So onto the New Year’s Resolutions…

I spent my entire evening getting caught up on work at the office and then pulled myself off the workstation and sulked home. I was tired and felt worn out; although I was not fatigued. Before anything else, I pulled on my orange Saucony Jazz runners and some togs, stretched slowly, and then hit the pavement.