Cooking-How to Decide Whether to Train as an Apprentice or be Formally Educated

Apprenticeship versus Formal Education:

Having a formal education is a wonderful thing to be able to put on a resume. Training under an experienced Chef can also teach you just as much practical information. There are pro and cons to both. Culinary schools are more structured environments. Apprenticeships are more unstructured environments. If you have the opportunity to do both, I would highly recommend it.

Culinary Schools Pros:

• Culinary schools look good on a resume.
• Culinary schools give a more structured environment to learn in.
• Culinary schools give broad examples and teachings that cross different types of cuisines and styles of cooking.
• Culinary schools have valuable resources and the opportunity to research independently.
• Culinary schools give a person the opportunity to make future industry contacts.
• Culinary schools give what you get out of them.
• Culinary schools teach basic skills along with business basics.

Culinary Schools Cons:

• Culinary school classes can be unrealistic. Six or more people working the grill station in a restaurant is not the reality of what it is really like in the industry.
• Culinary schools can be very expensive. Evaluate whether you want to be paying off college bills for many years.
• Culinary schools may give students unrealistic expectations. Not everyone is going to become an Executive Chef after graduating from a school.

Apprenticeship Pros:

• Apprenticeships give a person a taste of what really working in a kitchen is like.
• Apprenticeships can give you the opportunity to work under many different types of Chefs, and work one on one with them.
• During an apprenticeship, you make money while you are learning.

Apprenticeship Cons:

• The lack of formal education may hurt you in some hiring environments.
• As an apprentice you may not learn as much about the business aspects as you will need to in order to become a Chef.
• Apprenticeship may lack fundamentals that a formal education can and will teach you.

My best recommendation would be to work (or when all else fails) volunteer to work unpaid in a professional kitchen for at least a few months if not longer before you decide to go to school. Unfortunately many people who go right into culinary schools out of high school have no idea what working in a “real” kitchen is like. Boy they generally are in for a big shock.

So before you go spending big bucks on a school make sure you are going to like the industry first before you dive right in. Not all culinary graduates get to be Head Chefs and “in the News.” If you look at the statistics, a year after graduation, over 15% of graduates do not stay in the field, over 40% are still line cooks and 15-20 years after graduation, many are burned out and have changed careers. I know that in my graduating class at CIA, approximately 50% plus are no longer cooking, many of us have migrated to other hospitality industry jobs: food sales, purchasing, product development, etc. but we are we are not sweating in our whites any longer.

Half of the chefs and cooks I have worked with over the years have never been to cooking school and they are just as well trained, knowledgeable and talented as ones who have spent the money to be traditionally educated. There is no “wrong way” to get into the field. Regardless of what you decide to do, you get out of it what you put into it.

Getting employees involved in your social media marketing

There was a recent blog post about the difficulty of Getting the boss on board with Social Media http://twitterforrestos.com/tfr/2010/02/getting-the-boss-on-board-with-social-media/

But what about getting the employees on board?

The major switch that happened just last year, is the repositioning of social media sites from being ones you hide from your boss when they go by, to ones you proudly display on your monitor.

A question was raised by one of the B&Bs I talk to online this past week, “How do I get employees on board social media?”

Interesting question.

While many inns and B&B’s are smaller and the task of addressing SM will fall to themselves, there are an equal number that have employees and there may be a good fit for using one of them to manage your SM marketing.

Like any new business embracing social media, one needs to be a bit careful here, you don’t necessarily want to pick the young whiz kid that sleeps, drinks and eats social media just because they are comfortable with it. This can backfire on you in a big way.

Younger people while they may be more technically savvy and comfortable with new media, are not going to have the background in marketing and customer service and in some cases the ability to say to themselves (before they post something) “This was probably not a good idea or not a good reflection of the business I am supposed to be promoting.”

Just like you shouldn’t trust your 10 year old son to build a website for your business, while they may be worlds above you in technical skills, this is not doing your business a favor and the same applies in the case of moderating and maintaining your social media outlets.

This is your business and your brand, so be careful who you let loose on the world to promote it.

What you need is a member of your staff that is a good marketer and more importantly a good people person. If that person needs training to truly understand the media, then make sure he or she gets it.

Social media is just a new format for interacting with customers. If someone calls you on the phone to make a reservation or walks into your door, you are interacting and engaging with the customer, this is just a new medium for doing it.

In terms of getting employees on board SM, I would recommend designating just one or possibly two and make it part of their job description. Give them some incentives for doing it.

• For every 100 facebook fans you get us, you get a $25 bonus.
• For every 200 quality followers you get us on twitter, you get a gift certificate.
• For every new media app that comes along and gives us the ability to save time and money and you can implement it, you get XX
• Press their buttons and give them some incentives.
• Give them some ownership of it, SM is not something you should just trust to anyone and make sure the employee(s) you designate to maintain it, know that.
• Make sure they get recognition for it. There is nothing wrong with letting them promote themselves a bit in your SM (within limits) but having a personal stake in a project tends to give people more of an incentive to do well with it.
• Give them some benchmarks to work towards and sit down and develop a long term plan with them. Social Media exposure, followers and fans don’t happen and come to you overnight, it’s something that needs to be worked on. Make sure you have a plan in place to reward them for their efforts.

Assigning one person as your voice and that someone is trained as both a people person/customer service superstar and a marketer may be a more expensive use of your payroll in the beginning then using the intern from the local college at $8 bucks an hour, but you get what you pay for.

Social media is not going to go away any time soon and it will probably keep expanding into more and more areas that we haven’t even thought of yet. Start with a strategy and start implementing it, as more people embrace it, you will see more options open up and more ways that it can be utilized to reach out to both potential guests, future guests and repeat guests. The ROI more then makes up for the time and money spent on it.

Caveats, make sure you retain original ownership of your Social Media accounts, just like Facebook Important Information for Facebook Fan Page Business Owners make sure your twitter and other SM accounts are owned and created by you and you always have access.

And thank you to http://twitter.com/HoptonHouseBnB for giving me the heads up on this one  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/vodafone-twitter-obscene-tweet , a good example of being careful who you give the keys to.

Lodging Marketing:  http://chefforfeng.wordpress.com/marketing-for-lodging-resources/

Restaurant Operations:   http://chefforfeng.wordpress.com/restauranting/

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if…..

Remember Jeff Foxworthy? Or maybe this should be a Letterman list?

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

You have social media links on every piece of content you have online…..with no followers, no fans, no unique content and you are trying to get people to pay you only $49.95 for a “Get more business using social media” handbook.

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

You follow 2000 people on twitter and the only people following you are p-o-r-n bots.

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

You troll social media sites messaging people out of the blue, “Get my ebook and learn the secrets of being a millionaire in just 500 easy steps.”

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

You write in your blog posts, you are a heavy user of twitter and your last post was May 2009.

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

If someone innocently follows you back on twitter you immediately spam DM them and then troll their website for an email address, so you can spam them by email (with of course no Can-Sspam policies or un-subscription options).

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

You have a wordpress blog installed on your site and its been up since 2008 and it still has the default template text in it.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, emphasis consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nullam dignissim convallis est. Quisque aliquam. Donec faucibus. Nunc iaculis suscipit dui. Nam sit amet sem. Aliquam libero nisi, imperdiet at, tincidunt nec, gravida vehicula, nisl. Praesent mattis, massa quis luctus fermentum, turpis mi volutpat justo, eu volutpat enim diam eget metus. Maecenas ornare tortor. Donec sed tellus eget sapien fringilla nonummy. Mauris a ante. Suspendisse quam sem, consequat at, commodo vitae, feugiat in, nunc. Morbi imperdiet augue quis tellus.

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

Your click through site from twitter or facebook is a badly misspelled template site with flashing red lettering and annoying pop-ups.

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

You “talk” to Oprah or pretty much any type of celebrity on twitter and you think it makes you look cool and you think anyone that uses twitter is stupid enough to think they reply.

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

You have a pricing form online for your social media “expertise” costing several K for the “starter package” with not one single portfolio piece to back it up with.

You know you’re a social media “expert” or “guru” if:

Your business bio lists all of your failed enterprises before becoming a whiz kid at social media.  “Before I went into social media, I had a Cambridge Who’s Who directory business… but it didn’t work out and then I tried training race horses but the horses didn’t like me, so it didn’t work out. I went to work for Bernie Madoff but he took all my money, so it didn’t work out. But go ahead and trust ME because I’m a savvy business person!”

Feel free to add some more!

The 4 most important things that lodging needs to do on twitter………..

………BEFORE they start trying to market on it.

The first one is the Most Important!

1. Check your profiles, look at it when you are not logged in. Go to http://www.twitter.com/(yourinn) and take a peek.

• Have you put your profile bio in? Most people will not follow you, or follow you back (I don’t, unless I know who you are, without some sort of bio and link)
• A website link or blog link? If you don’t have either, consider using a link to a directory page your establishment is listed on, if it has photos and information. Do NOT shorten your link with a url shortener. People that put a shortened URL in their twitter bios are generally looked on with suspicion, its mostly used by spammers and MLM marketers, if you see this on some else’s profile, I suggest you click far far away.
• When you put your weblink in, test it, I come across at least 2-3 inns per week where the links are incomplete or in there as http://http://www.janedoeinn.com
• Is your profile and other information to the right readable? Twitter should make it so you can’t make the sidebar deep red and then make your text the same or a very similar color. If I can’t read it, then neither can your future guests.
• Please don’t make your text color white, while this may look cool on your sidebar profile overlaying a dark color, your main text in your tweets online in the “whats happening” portion of your twitter stream is not readable either. I can see it on tweetdeck and other apps but people using twitter online just see nada.
• Check your bio, look at it while not logged in. Twitter does not like & and your nice Bed & Breakfast translates as Bed&ampBreakfast. B&B to B&ampB etc.

If you are not sure where to go to start customizing, near the top right of your page, go to the settings tab.

This is a good example, I emailed them awhile back about this but if an inn (or anyone else) happens to talk to them on twitter regularly, they would probably appreciate a DM.

-It can be useful as well to change your bio occasionally and change your links as well. Redirect people to your blog or Facebook Fan page for awhile, you may find a change in the amount of traffic you get.

2. Use URL shorteners

I like http://bit.ly/ the best. Sign in and create an account, you can track click throughs from your shortened links easily this way and a shorter post makes it much easier for others to retweet you if you post something of interest. I don’t know how many times I see someone writing the full 140 characters and would like to retweet the post but can’t because no matter what I cut, it’s still too long. Even when you shrink or abbreviate the update when you are retweeting it, it loses some of the appeal and it makes it less likely that people will bother. They might read it but retweeting is important.

A bit more on retweets: http://chefforfeng.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/twitter-marketing-for-inns-and-bbs-part-6power-of-retweets/

3. Check your followers and get into the habit of it.

If you are going to be active on twitter and not just use it for PR/SEO purposes (which is fine, you do what you can, when you can) don’t rely on email to let you know when you have new followers. The more you tweet, the more followers you will get generally because the more “noise” you are making.

After talking to a bunch of people about this with similar problems and seeing this also on my own account. I get an average of one email per every 7-9 people that actually does follow me, so relying on email to let you know when you have new followers and most importantly someone you might want to follow back is not a sure fire bet. I have taken to logging in briefly online at night to check out new followers who I have not been emailed about, there’s usually a few, or more then a few in some cases. If you have a potential guest follow you and you may not necessarily want to follow them back, you can still send them a nice (not spammy) DM or @ them to say hello. Acknowledgment is half the game.

4. Check your @ replies and get into the habit of it.

Learn how to check your @replies and learn to talk to people, I see conversations going back and forth between new tweeters (if I’m following both) who it’s clear they are talking to (or at least they think are talking to) each other, I have people ask me questions and I only catch them because I have socialoomph.com and tweetbeep set up for my name, URLS and twitter name. Or I have seen people @ other people or businesses and it’s clear from tracking it that the @’ed person has no idea that they have just been spoken to.

I like tweetdeck (or seesmic) because I don’t have to stay web based and keep tabbing over to my replies online, it makes life easier in a lot of respects.

If we have some new peeps on twitter and they don’t even know where to begin, http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/ is a great resource for all things twitter.

If you are looking for some ideas about what other lodging establishments are tweeting about, check out http://twitter.com/forfeng/lodging and http//twitter.com/forfeng/lodging2, there may be a #3 eventually and I add to the list almost daily, so follow the lists or just check back. There is a 500 count minimum on lists if people are wondering. It’s got a cross section of B&B’s, inns, motels and hotels on it and I did that deliberately instead of categorizing them because it pays to pay attention to all sectors of the business. If I was a B&B that was pet friendly I think I would want to keep tabs on other local establishments especially if a local hotel started being pet friendly as well.

If nothing else, pay attention to #1.

Lodging Marketing:  http://chefforfeng.wordpress.com/marketing-for-lodging-resources/

Restaurant Operations:   http://chefforfeng.wordpress.com/restauranting/