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….

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.bview.co.uk/listing.....ss-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

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.com/user_detai.....VUjZmlk4Rw

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

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”