Local businesses have a love/hate relationship with review site Yelp: The site sends new customer leads to the businesses reviewed. But businesses can also be reviewed (and trashed) without even knowing Yelp exists.
Businesses like Oakland coffee shop Cafe Rooz felt slighted by the ratings site when a few vocal customers posted poor reviews. They went so far as to declare No Yelpers. But still others have benefited. According to Yelp, Joe Alexander’s San Francisco based mattress store, Keetsa, gets 80 percent of its total monthly business directly from Yelp.
In either case it’s a sign of the influence the site has over businesses as a lead generation – or degeneration – tool. Now Yelp is releasing a suite of business tools to give business owners tools to participate more directly in the conversation.
The suite is available at biz.yelp.com and lets businesses:
- Message customers who have reviewed their business
- See how many prospective customers viewed their business page
- Update business information instantly (i.e. hours of operation, categories)
- Receive new review email alerts
Yelp, which has raised $31 million in venture capital, continues to grow briskly. Comscore says they have 3.7 million unique monthly visitors; Compete says it’s more like 9 million.
Hey Nick,
Good to read a post from you, how’s life at Social Media?
Good to see that Yelp is releasing a suite of business tools to give business owners tools to participate more directly in the conversation.
Suraj, I think you’re one of the only people to notice I still write here every now and then.
As to your question..
SocialMedia’s been awesome. I feel like monetization models specific to social media is one of the primary problems out there. We’re seeing a lot more ad dollars moving online because of the rise in interest in social media sites and meaningful analytics attached to their ad spending.
You can already message customers directly whether or not your an advertiser. This is a really cool feature, one they should seek to maintain. They should also allow for two options: a public response or a private one, which is the one offered. You can “compliment” someone and that is a pseudo public response option, but not really. I’m refering to enabling a response, by anyone, not just business owners, to be either public or private. This is neat / fun / useful feature for the end user on many fronts, but it also increases the social features available to yelp. The downside: turning the reviews into a discussion board.
Crazymenu.com offered this last year. It’s amazing it took yelp and all their money and resources that long to implement it.
Don’t forget little ol’ MojoPages. We don’t have quite the traffic but we’re gaining traction. Compete is undervaluing our traffic but shows our proper growth rate. I congratulate Yelp on their success, they’ve executed well and really do a good job catering to their target customer. We’re just getting started and as of yet don’t really have the traffic numbers to be considered a serious threat. But we have a great team, a unique business model and a proven track record of success. If we can execute on our strategy things will change over the course of the next couple years.
hey… somebodies got to challenge them.
Jon Carder
Chief Mojo
Mike come join the Debate! You going to Love it!
http://www.igor...og/debate-this/
Can you link to that mattress business mentioned in the article? I have to buy a mattress next month
it has helped both my coffee shops and people have been really open and honest and i do appreciate what yelp has offered and documented for us and other to enjoy. i have heard the side of things and it’s no easy solution so i’m glad to hear they are trying to do something more considering helping local commerce and helping better it in general is a big big goal. good luck rock and roll and whatever else nice you want to say to yourself right now:]
isn’t this extremely common sense?
Yelp needs to clean up the profanity littering the site, and identify the shills who post and “review” businesses. frankly many reviews miss the mark.
and i see a “premium” version of this biz account coming soon …. which is smart.
hold the businesses hostage and give them more of a “voice” for a “price”
yelp pays ppl to review things, they are spending their money on these. whaz the point?
Hey sd,
I dont know where you get your information, but it that is true, it is one hell of a ruse on their part, because every reviewer we received is a customer I sold to.
Joe Alexander
keetsa mattress
joe@keetsa.com
Yelp still my personal deadpool pick.
First, traffic of either 4 or 9 million is a BIG difference.
I’m not sure how you concluded that 4 million is a brisk monthly number for a supposed nationwide review site that’s been online a little under 4 years and received lots and lots of hype.
Yelp in my area degraded into sporadic reviews and some really awful obscenity laden tirades by members who despite their nasty foul mouths — were somehow promoted by Yelp to be elite members (leading me to believe that internal controls over reviews at Yelp is scant).
Here’s one great example of someone that Yelp holds out as Elite 08 – where most of the reviews are pointless with 4 letter works sprinked in for that college frat boy experience.
Yelp? Yuk.
http://www.yelp...raefbVUjZmlk4Rw
We’ve allowed businesses to engage reviewers since we launched. It seemed like the fair thing to do.
The feature tends not to be used for positive and middling reviews however negative reviews are responded to quickly and usually in full. Example:
http://www.bvie...usiness-in-EC2A
Allowing businesses to directly contribute reduces resentment while also allowing the reviewer to feel as though something has happened as a result of their review.
BView
Yelp is not exactly the consumer/business-owner empowering tool you make it out to be. People enter reviews about a business. Employees at Yelp then call that business, hounding them to pay for advertising, playing off the owner’s fears of negative publicity and the fact that a search for the business of the owner they are talking too, can end up in a sponsored search result for the competition. So they harass the business owner repeatedly and are very annoying about it, and what’s even worse? Yelp wouldn’t exist without that business in the first place. The publicity and reviews are “free”, but they wouldn’t be very useful if there were not businesses entered or being reviewed on their site now would they? But instead of saying Thank You, they repeatedly dog businesses for cash and do it in a negative fear-based way. At least that’s been my experience. Greedy little bastards.
I´ve heard the side of things and it’s no easy solution so I’m glad to hear they are trying to do something more considering helping local commerce and helping better it in general is a big big goal.
I think this is a very good move for yelp
We see the same thing over here in the UK with The Brownbook (http://www.brownbook.net).
It AMAZES me how much emotion flies round when you talk about the principle of letting people review your business. Shock-horror! You mean they might say something BAD, heaven forbid. Solution: TREAT CUSTOMERS RIGHT. OK, so you will never get 100% good reviews, but THAT DOESN’T MATTER, what matters is that the large proportion of reviews must be good.
I think that business owners who fear a single bad review are forgetting that us consumers are intelligent enough to weigh up the good and the bad and make a human judgement: 1 bad review in 10 does not a bad business make. In fact, that 1 bad review makes those 9 good reviews sem more genuine.
And about that guy BANNING yelpers from his business, RIDICULOUS. If his business is getting that slated then you can bet people are talking it down anyway, and if it wasnt on Yelp then it’ll be somewhere else, he just doesn’t know it yet, thats the power that the Internet gives us consumers.
And my final rant… IS IT TRUE what DontBelieveTheHype (comment 15) says about that sales technique, that REALLY SUCKS. We run The Brownbook in a far less aggressive way, and thats why our businesses love us. We have over 2.2million UK businesses listed, and we DONT GIVE THEM ANY PRESSURE, we let them choose. We don’t even sell them advertising, but they can claim their listing to get alerted to reviews and the like. It’s just a little different, a bit more ‘for the people’ I like to think. We’re about to launch in USA, so there will be a little more choice soon (also Canada and Australia incidentally). AND WE’RE looking for a US Country Manager. If you would like to chat about joining us mail me on jerry[at]brownbook[dot]net. Thanks.
This is a smart move.
Still, Yelp has a great concept but they have raised too much money. They are becoming bloated and slow to respond compared to the startup sites out there that are making inroads.
Yelp don’t even sell them advertising, but they can claim their listing to get alerted to reviews and the like. It’s just a little different, a bit more ‘for the people’ I like to think.
The concern about the content of reviews (shills, jilted lovers, etc.) illustrates why it’s important to read the contents of reviews, rather than just the numerical summaries. However, as the review sites get more popular, the adverse effect of any biased review will be diminished.
It’s obvious by the responses that some viewers are unclear on this whole Yelp thing. I respond from my perspective as an active Yelp member (Yelper) for over a year.
Yelp does not pay people to write reviews. They acquire their content for free from willing participants attracted to Yelp for the community and social aspects. However, some businesses choose to boost their businesses with patently fake reviews, it’s possible some may be written by employees/owners/paid shills.
There is swearing because that’s how we talk. Their slogan is “Real People, Real Reviews.” I even swear, and I’m old enough to be your grandma. Some very witty Yelp contributors were banned recently, so perhaps Wayne will be happy. Their move to greater business legitimacy is, however, harming their reputation among their contributors.
Jerry, I like your style!
Yelp does not pay people to write reviews?
Here’s a yelp ad posted on craigslist:
Yelp.com Hiring Witty Writers with Flair for Social Networking”:
“This critical role includes:
· Writing witty and insightful reviews of all the places you frequent.
· Getting your well-written friends (and their friends to join Yelp and start writing
· Moderating the Talk Boards, creating Lists, sending Compliments, and generally being a model Yelp community member
· Spreading the word about Yelp to the broader community.
The right candidate:
a. Knows Atlanta’s hot spots and influencers
b. Is extremely well-written
c. Is one of those “connectors” that makes other people want to follow them.”
here’s the definition of shill:
1.a person who poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating, as at a gambling house, auction, confidence game, etc.
I think there is a difference between paying people to pretend to be a customer and paying people to write about there experiences. They are paying for people to add content, not fake reviews. A shill as you point out has an agenda, while Yelp is asking people to take their time and share their experineces. Hardly illegitimate. Are you that naive?
Bizboy,
what part of shill don’t you understand?
1.a person who poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating, as at a gambling house, auction, confidence game, etc.
who is paid to yelp? and who is not?
I think the future of business directories are user generated, social, internet yellow pages. I believe this will help keep the content fresh and up to date. Jippidy.com is one such user generated small business video yellow pages.
I can’t even leave my website address or last name, because these Yelp people (um, bless their hearts, but…), I’m just not so sure of what they’re capable of! I’m playing dumb and trying to avoid them!
They’ve been hounding me for over a year.
Just want to dial in my 2 cents’ worth: They do seem to hound, and I sometimes wonder what they might do when they’ve been turned down 20 times. Are they really hounding me out of the goodness of their hearts?
I get so skeptical… if I can run my own page (except for the comments), just like I can on so many other free social network pages, then why do they continue to pursue me? Makes me suspect they must be trying to sell me something…
I personally think that yelp sucks. I hear that all of these millions of dollars have been invested into the site, but why is it that they can’t get their internal search engine to work right? You can’t find much of anything with their search engine.
I think it’s better to stick with established review sites like citysearch or try out one of the newer sites like fairplayreviews.com
We pray YELP goes bankrupt and sinks to the bottom of hell, and takes its MAFIA YELPERS with them. We pray that GOD shows no mercy for all the personal damage and EXTORTION they have inflicted upon small business owners and the children they support. YELP is a den of snakes and deserve to BURN for the lies and slander they spread on the web.
Pray PSALMS 140:12 for their destruction!
Say 10 times…”We pray to Archangel Michael to swiftly destroy YELP!”
I can’t stand Yelp and feel the same anger towards them. – I’ve been extorted by customers who now Yelp badly about my business – all lies and there’s nothing I can do about it.