Yelp now lets businesses have a say too

Some looking for Los Angeles-area bars on Yelp, the popular review site, might be a little confused when reading the entry for the Dresden Room Restaurant, which constantly refers to "Marty and Elaine."  Who are these Marty and Elaine characters, you might ask, and why do reviewers keep talking about them?

Starting Thursday, Yelp is giving businesses a chance to explain themselves. The site, which had about 15 million unique visitors in the last month, is launching an "About this Business" section of the site. The section will allow businesses to tell readers a little bit about themselves, including their company history and specialties. Users can access the site by clicking on a tab next to the reviews.

The feature will be a boon for small businesses that don't have their own websites but want to give potential customers more information about themselves, said Jeremy Stoppelman, chief executive of San Francisco-based Yelp. "It's about setting expectations in your own words, identifying the customers you’re trying to reach," he said. "That can help bring in the right customers."

A motorcycle bar can be branded by reviewers as a dive bar and lose stars, for instance. But if it calls itself a motorcycle bar from the get-go, reviewers might have a different perspective.

Bad reviews can do a lot of damage on Yelp because business owners are powerless to do anything about them. As one business owner wrote on the review page for Yelp itself:

Anyone who is insane can trash your business. Unfortunately I have one negative (and inaccurate) review on my business. There is nothing I can do to change this as false as it is.

Yelp has a feature that allows business owners to contact reviewers individually, but they have not had a public place on Yelp to describe themselves and address customers until now. "We’ve had this progression of adding features with the goal of creating a positive connection," Stoppelman said. 

-- Alana Semuels

Photo by Yelp via Flickr

Comments

[M.]

Yelp is biased, and therefore nor credible. Here is my experience as a consumer/reviewer:

I wrote several reviews on Yelp but didn't see them appear on their website, so I wrote to them: "Greetings, I noticed that my reviews (some good, some bad) don't appear on your website. Can you tell me why? Are you conveniently deleting some reviews? Let me know."

Their reply was astounding: "Yelp has a system which automatically determines which reviews show for a given business. Just as your Yahoo or Gmail email account doesn't deliver every email (spam, etc.), we don't show every review. This protects both business owners (by suppressing reviews that may have been written by a malicious competitor, for example) and consumers (by suppressing reviews that may have a definitive bias, having been written by owners or their friends). It's important to note that these reviews are not
deleted (they are always shown on the user's public profile) and may reappear on the business listing page in the future."

My reply: "Thank you for taking the time to write back to me. Although I understand your point of view, I do not agree with it. I put time and effort in writing the reviews, which were honest, and reflected my experience as a consumer (never a friend or competitor) with the businesses I wrote about. All were factual, none were either too flattering or insulting. Not seeing them posted tells me that Yelp has an editorial line I do not subscribe to. I have therefore removed my reviews, to post them on more objective sites."

Yelp has lost all credibility as a rating site as far as I am concerned.