AttentionMax

How To Make Cheeseburgers

Max Kalehoff — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:00:42 +0000

I’m not a master chef, though I have some basic cooking skills I picked up while working in French restaurants when I was younger. I don’t apply these skills professionally, though they come in handy in our attempt to raise healthier kids and form a tighter family bond through satisfying meals. I thought it would be fun to produce a how-to series on great homemade meals. I begin this series with a tutorial on how to make cheeseburgers. This was an impromptu documentation — I took the photos with the closest camera to me, my BlackBerry.

How To Make A Cheeseburger

1. Prep. If the weather is nice, I’ll cook on the gas grill on our deck. Being that it’s mid-March in New York, I’m using my heavy-duty iron grill pan inside. I highly recommend them: they cook food evenly, are durable, easy to clean and inexpensive. If your goal is to feed mouths as fast as possible, it’s a good idea to begin heating your grill pan on medium-hight heat at the beginning of preparation. Same goes if you’re using a gas or charcoal grill.

We don’t eat cheeseburgers often, but when we do, we like big and juicy ones. We prefer to use organic ground beef, roughly 20% fat, 8 ounces per patty. That’s a good fat ratio because the burgers remain moist and tasty, while most of the fat renders out during cooking. Knead each portion into a round, thin patty; it’s best to go very thin because the beef will contract as it cooks. Sprinkle salt and freshly ground pepper to each side.

Buns? We switch between toasted challah-bread buns and potato-bread slices, depending on our mood. We use thinly sliced cheese to melt on top, and cheddar and swiss are our favorites.

2. Grill. After your grill or grill pan is smoking hot, you can lay each patty on top. We like our burgers cooked medium-rare, which equates to roughly four minutes of cooking per side with thin 8-ounce patties. If you like your burgers cooked medium or well done (yuck), add another minute or two to each side.

As soon as the first side is cooked, you should flip them and immediately layer your cheese slices on top. The cheese should melt within the four minutes required to cook the second side. You then should remove the patties and rest them a minute on a warm plate — to let them finish cooking and drain the fat.

3. Assemble. Set your grilled patties on top of your bread, on warm plates, as pictured at the top of this post. (Avoid cold plates because they make your food cold.) Serve immediately.

4. Accompaniments. I like to serve cheeseburgers with a light green salad, or sliced pickles. Some people like to include a starchy side dish, like potato chips, French fries or potato salad. However, I find that a delicious 8-ounce burger is satisfying on its own.

Also, be sure to offer a choice of several condiments, like ketchup, mustard, mayonaise and relish. Finally, I find that cheeseburgers taste better with a glass of a full-bodied, red wine, like a cabernet or shiraz.

Enjoy!

The “Plogue à Champlain” Is Great In Montreal!

Mother Nature

Max Kalehoff — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:55:06 +0000

The Northeast got clobbered this past weekend with a storm that brought steady rain, floods and wind gusts up to 80 mph. In our New York City suburb of Pelham, we have a lot of massive, old trees — oak, pine and other. While picturesque, they become vulnerable and hazardous in high winds. Weighing thousands of pounds, they frequently take out power lines, cars and houses. Even falling, dying branches can weigh hundreds of pounds and do significant damage. And these beautiful old trees did more damage during this past storm than I’ve seen in my 34 years of living in the area. It seems there are downed powerlines on a majority of blocks. Many neighbors moved into hotels for a few days because of power loss. We lost our power intermittently, including for several hours last night. Fallen trees have damaged yards and homes on most blocks. Few blocks have unobstructed sidewalks.

This storm hit us hard, though in an unassuming way. There was a subtle, yet forceful impact, occuring over several days. There was no single defining moment, though everyone was part of it. As a result, the news media seemed to have sensationalized the story less than usual (and media sensation, of course, was lessened for citizens without power, television and Internet).

In context, this act of mother nature was nothing compared to others — like the earthquakes in Haiti or Chile, or the floods in New Orleans. But it reminds one that it pays to be prepared for crises and disasters, and keep your cool as you deal with them. It also makes one appreciate luxuries of modern society, like reliable power grids.

Are you prepared for Mother Nature?

(This post was written and uploaded from my BlackBerry during my morning commute. I also took the pictures with my BlackBerry.)

Disaster Preparedness & Safety

Bruce Ertmann On Customer Satisfaction And The Net Promoter Score

Max Kalehoff — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:04:51 +0000

I recently posted about the growing hype in marketing circles around customer-satisfaction and the Net Promoter methodology. Developed by Fred Reichheld, Net Promoter is a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to support business growth and profitability. It’s characterized by the ubiquitous Net Promoter question, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

The point of that post was to underscore that customer-satisfaction and loyalty scoring is worthless if a company is not going to act on the intelligence. That post prompted a thoughtful reply from my friend Bruce Ertmann, a marketing veteran in the automotive industry. In case you missed the discussion thread, I’ve shared his full comment here:

The NPS can be an effective tool for measuring customer loyalty, but only for those organizations that have the basic business fundamentals of customer service fine-tuned. Too many companies refer to their use of this type of survey system as customer engagement, and those are typically the companies that falsely believe they are “in touch” with their customers.

Consider an organization that dutifully uses the Net Promoter system, monitors the loyalty metrics and, perhaps, even goes so far as to allow customers to write in comments on the very survey that derives the NPS. Those surveys are often administered by a third party, and the data is input into one of too many customer databases where it usually sits siloed within the company’s “customer satisfaction” department. Mary may have been blown away by the product and customer experience, and Paul may have expressed anger over the same, but no one in the company really “hears” this and thus, there can be no response; no action.

Consumers who sometimes feel they are being surveyed to death often criticize the Net Promoter system. Many of these consumers also feel it is not very authentic, because companies often like to cheat the system by prepping customers beforehand or even rewarding them in advance for returning perfect 10 scores. The auto industry is historically notorious for this bad practice.

I don’t think anything will ever substitute for full on customer and consumer engagement via the many traditional and social media channels available to companies that are willing to do the work, willing to listen and willing to be accountable for the results. The NPS is limited in that it typically only produces a metric that (1) is derived from customer input and (2) reports after-the-fact information.

Companies that are truly on the cutting edge of continually cultivating lifetime advocates are constantly monitoring and participating in the conversations that abound about their brands—in real time. They tend to pull in customers and build their advocacy base because they demonstrate real transparency; they are authentic and credible. They’ve taken care to create a customer experience that is at least commensurate with the brand and they have integrated that important business component throughout the organization so that everyone knows what it takes to deliver on the promise. That’s how great brand reputations and trust and loyalty are built over time. Not just by chasing a metric.

And when things go awry—as they will from time to time—these great companies seek to optimize all of the above and get out ahead of the problem—in real time. Their humility is honest and believable. Failing at that, the greatness fades, and the brand may be irreparably tarnished. Just ask Tiger Woods—or Toyota.

Brands: Beware Of Slimy SEO Middlemen Meddling Through Social Media

Max Kalehoff — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:12:04 +0000

If it’s your job to promote and protect your brand reputation, then you should beware of slimy SEO middlemen that meddle in social media and customer relationships.

Most brand managers are aware of the risks of engaging in “black hat” and “gray hat” SEO tactics. These methods attempt to attract search traffic in a deceitful manner that violates search engines’ terms of service. Such tactics include keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, link farming and blog comment spam, among other. They can get you blackballed by the search engines, making you invisible to many of your potential online customers.

But there’s a new threat emerging: SEO middlemen that participate in social media and blogger relations for the sole purpose of boosting search-engine traffic. Many of these efforts are backfiring. Let me share a recent personal example:

An account executive from an established SEO agency contacted me last week on my personal blog. He indicated his agency was representing a major furniture brand, for which I’ll spare public ridicule. I give this account exec credit for fully disclosing his client relationship, but the accolades end there. He did his homework on me, as indicated by his compliments and thoughtful references to my alma mater, various posts on my site, and short family videos I’ve published. But his intimate patronization was nothing more than fake flattery. And the hard pitch that followed made his interaction entirely unpleasant and unwelcome.

I’ll paraphrase this huckster’s pitch: “I noticed one of your posts has a link to our client. In an effort to assist with our online marketing efforts, would it be possible to modify this link to a new URL that will aid our SEO optimization efforts? Please let me know if this is possible. It would be a great help to us. Thank you for considering this request and please continue to provide marketing insight on your blog, as well as comical videos and stories of you and your family’s adventures!”

This request made me uneasy because it was completely tied to a self-serving SEO agenda and nothing else. Instead of spraying untruthful admiration and greedily requesting value beyond my generous public advocacy, this agency exec should’ve recognized me as a brand promoter and let his client know that I’m a potential fan to start a more meaningful relationship with.

But no, the SEO middleman with the narrow agenda had to get in the way of a fruitful customer relationship and potential long-term opportunity. As a result, I probably will never advocate or do business with him or his client again. This sort of of commercial engagement is nothing more than spam.

Brands: beware of slimy SEO middlemen that meddle in social media and customer relationships. Middlemen are not an excuse for bad deeds. Nor are they a buffer from the consequences.

This also was my latest column in MediaPost.

(Photo Credit: freejay3)

Child Online Safety And Responsibility

Max Kalehoff — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:10:08 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

I had a good meeting yesterday with the child-safety product group from Symantec, the Internet security software company. They shared an aggregation of research that underscores the naivety of too many children when they use the Internet (i.e., giving out their passwords, or succombing to phishing sites). Symantic also mined their own database of child Internet search queries, tracked through Symantec’s security software, and found that “sex” and “porn” were among the most prevalent queries (top five). Their research also underscored the child-online safety challenges of parents, including digital ignorance, a lack of visibility and control, and simple tools and methods in which to ensure safety and teach responsibility.

As you’d expect, that’s where Symantec’s family protection software comes in. OnlineFamily.Norton (www.onlinefamily.norton.com) is a free Web service that gives parents a flexible way to view and control child Internet usage among Windows and Mac computers in their household. While parental control is an obvious feature, I liked the Symantec team’s philosophy of using the system to drive discussion, education and responsibility. We’re going to test the software in our family, where our oldest child is three and quickly becoming computer literate.

I’ll report on our experience in a month or so. In the meantime, a few thoughts come to mind. First, child-safety software quickly needs to extend to mobile and gaming devices, where a growing percentage of Web usage is taking place. Second, child-safety protection software needs to be marketed to kids, not just parents. The natural reaction for a kid is to reject control. But what if child-protection software became attractive to kids as well — through various incentives and direct benefits? What if kids were the ones to introduce the software into their families if their parents already have not?

(This post was written and uploaded from my Blackberry.)