No dogs, Yelpers allowed
Since I wrote this article on Yelp, the people-powered reviews site, I found out that a owner of a San Francisco Bay Area cafe mentioned in the piece has posted signs in his two coffee houses that read "No Yelpers!!"
Why? Apparently the cafe owner wants to discourage any (more) customers from writing bad reviews of his businesses on the site. I'm pretty sure that's not the way to do it.
But more importantly, it seems like that first homemade sign in a coffee shop means Yelp has come up in the world, if only a wee bit. It's joining an esteemed list of cafe no-nos: no cell phones, no skateboards, no bare feet, no Yelpers.
Unlike refusing to serve a barefooted hippie talking on a cell phone with a skateboard under foot, policing Yelp reviews is next to impossible and like trying to stuff a genie back into the bottle. Many small-business owners angry about snarky customer reviews have learned that lesson. Sniffing out a Yelper or any other reviewer in an anonymous sea of armchair critics online is no easy task. The best advice is to adapt.
Yelping is anonymous, so who is going to know if those Yelpers are being honest, or just trying to trash the competition?
There are many websites like Yelp that allow a person to post reviews anonymously. To answer your question, what business owners can do is try to address the negative reviews directly on those very websites.
Or, like you pointed out, as a business owner, you can post negative reviews of your competition.
Ultimately you have to trust that the consumer will weigh both the negative reviews and the owner's rebuttal, and come to a reasoned decision. I would hope that that person would go down to the cafe/restaurant and try it out themselves.
But as an owner, it is your duty to stand up for your business. The Intertubes and all the people-with-nothing-better-to-do-than-post-fake-negative-reviews
are here to stay and if you want to compete you've got to adapt.
- Yelpers are a decaying communuty
- by UranusDeMilo August 15, 2007 3:33 PM PDT
- I got involved with the "yelp community" about a year ago, and saw it go through the *same cycle* that any "internet community" goes through when it's run on the same model. Bluntly put, the "Web 2.0" approach of letting users generate content with little more than "community policing" is a model that works well when it's small, but has serious problems when it's scaled to large audiences.
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- Wishful thinking.
- by aabcdefghij987654321 August 20, 2007 10:26 PM PDT
- If only hating made it so.
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(6 Comments)Yelp in the SF Bay Area has ballooned far beyond the point where the "unregulated forum" model starts to show signs of decay. Bluntly put, it's well on it's way to becoming an irrelevant forum loaded with attention-hungry twentysomethings, all pursuing "UFC" (Usefull, Funny, Cool) votes with little regard for the small buisness owners they carp about. As I stated elsewhere, forums like this are started by founders. They're next bolstered by thinkers and doers. They young and the beautiful come soon threafter, and their throngs of followers are usually hot on their tails. Soon thereafter, the dirt-bags show up....and if they aren't regulated, they usually take over the community.
What Yelpers really fail to see? There's a generation behind them that *doesn't understand* the complex, unwritten, and ever-changing ethics of Web 2.0 forums. They don't care to learn these things, and they don't have large amounts of time to invest in doing so.
What they do see? Cheeky, arrogant, smack-talking college kids that have taken a swing at a buisness they've poured their heart and soul into. Worse yet, some fail to differentiate it from serious news. They don't see how irrelevant it really is.
There's a discussion regarding this topic on one of yelp.com's forums as I type. The attitude and tone of being used by most of the participants makes me *almost embarrased* to have a Yelp profile. It's loaded with kids that have no idea what it's like to run a small buisness, and have little concern for anything other than their group-standing at the next open-bar "yelp elite" event or DYL (Destroy your Liver) gathering.
I sympathize with this buisness owner *completely*. My guess? If he does a good job, all the junior-high style retaliation that the Yelp community can muster won't put so much as a dent in his buisness. Cafe Rooz will continue ********** as a buisness....and if yelp.com doesn't get it's act together, it shant....