Yelp Official Blog

Business Owner Speaks: Leon C.

PC World gives Yelp iPhone App a Thumbs Up

We were excited to see PC World include us in their roundup of Best Free Smart Phone Apps. Check the list to see if there is anything on there you haven't heard of. 

Oh and on the Yelp iPhone App front stay tuned, we've got a major release coming soon!

Pizzeria Delfina Owner on NPR says Yelp... It's the future

Craig Stoll, owner of popular San Francisco restaurants Delfina and Pizzeria Delfina recently captured headlines after putting a few of his business' negative reviews on staff t-shirts. The news broke on 7x7 and was picked up by numerous blogs and newspapers, even American Idol host Ryan Seacrest took note!

The local buzz has now spread nationally with NPR's On The Media broadcasting this great interview. I enjoyed listening to his perspective on the complex relationship many business owners have with Yelp and online reviews.

The segment makes it clear: business owners generally understand that Yelp is a great way for consumers to find businesses, and for businesses to get good feedback about how they're doing.  However, negative reviews legitimately hurt, and it's frustrating when a review feels unfair and you have no way to publicly respond.  We're listening carefully to owners like Craig, and I'm looking to see if we can't address their concerns in a way that works positively with the Yelp reviewer community.

Digital Culture Clash?

Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News has been writing about Yelp of late and I thought his most recent piece was spot on.

Chris: "After wading through the responses, it became clear that there is a real disconnect between many in the local business community and Yelp. The company recognizes that, and I think it is attempting to bridge the gap. Doing that successfully will require striking a balance that the company hasn't quite achieved yet."

Absolutely agree. Our site's reach and influence has far outstripped our initially modest efforts to explain to business owners who we are, what we do, and why. To step up our efforts we've recently hired a Manager of Local Business Outreach who will coordinate education and outreach activities which have already begun in cities across the US. Just in the last couple of weeks we've had Yelp representatives speak to the Denver Independent Network of Restaurants, the Ann Arbor (Michigan) Main Street Business Association, the Metro Independent Business Alliance in Minneapolis and the Rotary Club of Miami Beach, just to name a few.

Chris: "If Yelp releases too many details about its algorithms and policies, then it might provide information that could be used by other merchants and reviewers to game the system. If that happens, it becomes less valuable to consumers. Walking this narrow line will require constant adjustments."

This is a key challenge of our business (and other similar businesses). We purposefully make it easy for people to create an account and start contributing reviews. The obvious risk is that some people will try to take advantage of this ease of use to write fake reviews or solicit biased ones, so we deal with this problem by using an automated review filter that hides a small percentage of all reviews. The system is necessarily secretive so that it's difficult to game. All of this turns out to be enormously frustrating to a lot of business owners because it’s not intuitive why one review might stay up and another gets pulled down. We understand that, but the alternative is much worse: a site that is full of fake and biased reviews. It's also worth noting that we're not the only company to deal with this type of problem: PayPal has a system that allows easy payments but tries to identify and stop risky transactions and Google has some of their best and brightest working hard to ensure you can't manipulate their secret ranking algorithm.

Chris: "Jean Katsuro, owner of the Classic Rock jewelry store in San Jose, called to tell me that she signed up for Yelp after hearing great things from fellow business owners. That, and the fact that Yelp was already increasing her business, persuaded Katsuro to become a client.

Hopefully, Yelp's struggles and progress will provide lessons on how to bridge this divide, so it doesn't become a chasm."

It's great to see Yelp advertisers be given an opportunity to share their side of the story, but we do hear the critics too. We are working hard to address the concerns shared by all businesses and we'll have more news on the outreach and product side over the coming weeks and months. Should anyone have any questions or immediate concerns, please contact us at www.yelp.com/feedback we're listening intently and do respond to every email. We're a new and fast growing company (a little over 4 years old) and we fully recognize that we're not perfect. Thanks for bearing with us as we strive to be the most trusted way for consumers to connect with great local businesses.

Knock, Knock. Who's there? Yelp in Gmail.

Our friends over at Google just launched a pretty nifty Gmail feature where an email with a Yelp link (after opt-in) automatically pulls in the businesses star rating, review count, and other useful info from our site. 

You can turn on Yelp previews in the Gmail Labs Tab under Settings

Here is the new feature in action:

When a Yelp happens in Canada does it make a sound?

Apparently! A happy Yelp anecdote in today's Vancouver Sun...

"I got a call from a dentist who said, 'I got nine new patients from Yelp. What should I be doing, I've never even heard of Yelp,' " Breikks said.

Yelp.com is a website that has user-generated reviews on everything from restaurants to dentists.

"Yelp is starting to come up on the radar," he said. "It is starting to take off."

People Love Us On Yelp

I always get a kick out of seeing People Love Us On Yelp stickers around town. We send the official ones to qualifying businesses once per quarter (if you're a business owner with a bunch of reviews and an average over three and half stars, keep an eye out!). This one from Ali Baba's in Greenwich Village appears to be "hand-crafted"...

Some Negative Reviews = More Customers?

No one wants to receive a negative review, but there may be a silver lining as this week's Economist points out...

"Initially, publishers and authors were worried that allowing negative reviews would hurt sales. Online retailers have generally been reluctant to allow users to leave comments, says John McAteer, Google’s retail industry director, who runs shopping.google.com, the internet giant’s comparison-shopping site. But a handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. 'No one trusts all positive reviews,' he says. So a small proportion of negative comments—'just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn’t be perfect'—can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers."

Are Consumer Reviews of Doctors Useful?

As I occasionally like to do in this blog, I'll let someone else do the talking... The following email was sent to me and is reprinted here with permission, thanks for the nice note Glenn!

--

Hey,

Just a quick note to let you know how useful Yelp was for finding, of all things, an OB.

 My wife is an oncology fellow, and many of our friends are doctors. But she still used Yelp – exclusively -- to choose an obstetrician because you need to find one without being able to ask around (most people don’t announce their pregnancies until the second trimester because of miscarriage risk). And the OB we found via Yelp was awesome.

Anyway, if you ever get weary of Yelpers’ endless quest for the perfect pulled-pork sandwich – and you shouldn’t, I mean please, don’t, *ever* – you should know that the way you guys have branched out into other fields means you just have a bigger and deeper impact on people’s lives all the time.

Which you already know. Anyway, I don’t even know why I’m sending you this note – you’ll just give me a hard time about not putting Yelp reviews on a listing page that is already a bit bloated – but I’ve been meaning to say thanks.

Hope all is well with you. You’ve guys have handled yourselves really well lately, by the way.

Regards,

Glenn Kelman | CEO, Redfin

Yelp Elite Events: Mea Culpa

After my last post discussing how we handle Yelp Elite events, I closely scrutinized a handful of business pages to make sure no reviews for Yelp events had slipped through and ended up on a hosting venue's page (admittedly I should have checked more thoroughly before publishing). Unfortunately, I found that in a number of cases a handful of event reviews were in the wrong place. The vast majority of Yelp Elite event reviews are on the event's review page, but any Yelp event reviews on a hosting venue's page flies against our goal of ensuring (to the greatest extent possible) that business reviews on a given page are objective and unbiased.

As a result of this discovery, we will immediately move any stray Yelp event reviews (starting from the time we implemented our policy in 2007) to their proper place and will ensure the process is improved and every single Elite event review goes to the correct page.