Our last post covered the jam Yelp was in that required them to vociferously defend their own online reputation.
Recap:
Businesses that contacted Yelp with issues about negative reviews posted on the Yelp website, alleged that Yelp personnel counseled them that they could re-arrange their negative reviews to more favorable placement if they bought Yelp’s advertising package.
This was a serious allegation that required a public response from Yelp. Yelp’s success as a local review site is in large measure due to consumer TRUST that the reviews they read from other consumers are untainted.
Furthermore, although not as damning, businesses complained that they had no recourse to challenge/remove factually inaccurate reviews. (As an example: a review that claimed a specific meal was terrible, such as fish and chips, when the restaurant never even offered fish and chips.) While not an allegation of impropriety, it added to the growing discontent about the fairness and trust consumers and businesses alike could expect when dealing with Yelp.
Update:
Yelp executives have categorically denied the advertising in return for more favorable re-ordering of negative reviews charge and have mounted an aggressive PR campaign to answer the charges and defend their reputation. They followed that up by changing their policy of not allowing business owners to answer negative reviews on their site.
Why This Matters:
This is serious stuff. Yelp is in head-to-head competition with their nearest rival, CitySearch. The competition is fierce, including challenges over whose publicly available data shows the most visitors and use of their site (important to their advertisers). These companies are top competitors in a class of business made possible through Web 2.0 technology and User Generated Content (UGC) in Social Media.
By some accounts, Yelp had 25M unique visitors to their site in March 2009. March 2008 was 10M unique visitors. YELP clearly is experiencing phenomenal growth. Trust and Credibility are Critical Success Factors for continued success. They are challenging their senior competitor, CitySearch on many fronts (including user ease) yet Trust is essential.
For business owners, the entire category of consumer reviews is a true challenge to their reputation. Monitoring what is being said about key executives and the business is becoming an essential business practice. And the types of businesses that are now impacted is growing – restaurants, shopping, health, etc. Managing an online reputation is new, uncharted territory for almost all of them.
Other issues are emerging as this Rhubarb puts a spotlight on the Social Media category of User Generated Content Reviews. Stay tuned…
