Say 10 times…”We pray to Archangel Michael to swiftly destroy YELP!”

I think it’s better to stick with established review sites like citysearch or try out one of the newer sites like fairplayreviews.com

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

Techcrunch are cover Yelp’s new suite of features that allow businesses to join the conversation which happens around their business. I think this is a great feature and something BView has done since launch….