When I started my job I was asked what number I wanted on my business cards.

Did I want the restaurant number?

Or.

My personal cell number?

There are reasons for doing both.

I know restaurant GMs that do use their cell numbers. It means issues are dealt with faster. There is a direct line of communication.

Going with the restaurant number means you aren’t being called at 8:00 am on your day off to see if you have availability on Wednesday before thanksgiving for a party of 6.

I chose the restaurant number.

Which brings me to my point.

Almost every day someone tells me to just text them the answer to their question.

I don’t like text messages in general. I’m not much better with emails and FB messages. I forget that I read it. I read the email at 3:00 am on my day off, after a few bourbons and completely forget that I read it. Next thing you know I respond to it three days later and totally missed it was time sensitive. Or that I already responded to it.

The other reason I don’t like text messages is that sometimes it would be a 30 second phone call. But it’s 20 minutes worth of text messages.

So no. I’m not going to text you. I’m going to call you. I’m going to leave a message. And I’ll wait for you to call me back.

Can we talk about social media in the corporate world?

999 out of every 1,000 businesses have a social media presence. Yes. Some businesses don’t engage that way. They are few and far between.

For the rest of us it’s a grab bag of how it’s executed.

At large corporations like Wendy’s who have funny and engaging posts they have a full time, 24 hour a day team, who monitors their feed.

Some businesses hire a professional marketing team to do this.

Some places rely on the internal marketing team to do social media.

Other businesses give it to a 22 year old intern and they post and monitor the feed.

Until this restaurant, I was responsible for the content. Coming up with content isn’t actually very hard. What’s hard is carving out the time to do it between writing schedules, budgets, meetings, payroll, inventory, invoicing, and actual day to day operations.

Also, unless you’ve hired a professional photographer, framing the photographs, with decent lighting, context and composition can take much longer than you have. There is a reason people get paid big bucks to photograph food.

And it’s a whole other issue if you want it to be funny, informative, and entertaining.

This is a long way of saying most businesses don’t have someone monitoring their feeds 24 hours a day.

Which is a long way of saying that if you need information, a reservation, have a billing problem, a gift card issue, a complaint, a compliment, etc it’s so much better to reach out to the restaurant directly.

I have had instances where you check your messages and discover someone sent you a message two weeks ago.

It’s really bad when the message was time sensitive.

So for the person who left the message this week about a gift card issue. The outcome was we messaged you back to say call the restaurant so we can discuss the problem with you.

So if you’d called to begin with you’d already have a solution.