For restaurant and small business owners, a bad review in the local paper was bad enough. Now they have to worry about bad reviews online. Review web sites form an entire subcategory, and since reviews turn up when users search, they can contribute to making or breaking a business. This article not only explores the trend, but shows why it's a cause for concern, especially in the case of Yelp.
If you’re a restaurant or small business owner, negative reviews are the last things you’d want to read about your establishment. Thanks to the Internet--where everyone’s a critic--these are the kinds of reviews being published online and viewed by millions of people searching for local eateries and businesses on Yelp , a hybrid social networking, user review, and local search site with over 31 million users worldwide. Successful establishments who don’t have much to worry about can make light of their bad reviews, but for small, struggling establishments online user reviews can make or break their business.
Online reviews have become a powerful tool that create new hot spots and make businesses boom, but bad reviews can close establishments and deliver a major blow to income, popularity, and the number of new customers and referrals an establishment gets. Because of sites like Yelp, small businesses are being forced to navigate a new and unfamiliar world: do they ask their customers for positive reviews? Do they write reviews of their own establishments? Is there anything they can do to get rid of bad reviews that plague their business? It’s complicated for many, and to make matters even worse, there’s evidence that suggests Yelp extorts businesses to make bad reviews go away.
Balancing the Needs of Businesses and Users
In 2009 the New York Times wrote an article that shed light on many of the concerns expressed by small business owners whose Yelp pages had received bad reviews that they felt were unwarranted. Oddly enough, Yelp itself is in a precarious predicament. The San Francisco-based company must seamlessly balance the needs of the businesses featured, many of whom happen to be advertisers on the site, while also allowing its users to safely and anonymously say anything their heart desires.
So what’s the problem? There’s no telling who’s writing the reviews and whether or not they’re genuine. Yelp operates under the premise that reviews are truthful and, according to the company, this can be proved by looking at an establishment’s Yelp listing. If a business has similar ratings, reviews, and comments from multiple sources, it must be true, right?
At the time the New York Times article was first published, Yelp had made some changes to please business owners, but still refused to investigate reviews that local establishments felt were inaccurate. To this day, any company who receives a review cannot respond to it on their Yelp site, whether it’s good or bad.
To appease business owners, whose ads contribute to a majority of Yelp’s revenue, the site added Yelp for Business Owners in April of 2009. This new feature enables businesses to edit their company profiles, post special offers, and privately e-mail reviewers.
One of the biggest issues of contention for Yelp, or rather, where the real trouble began, was when reviews, good and bad, began disappearing.
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