I should add that I personally like to see some negative reviews. If they are all positive, I tend to wonder if the reviews are gamed. Then I’ll look for trustworthiness factors – such as number of reviews, date of reviews, quality of reviews, who is writing the reviews, etc. I also realize that most people are motivated to write a review if they had an exceptionally good or bad experience, so I try not to base my opinions on overly positive or negative reviews.

Many of my friends disagree, however. At times, I feel like my fiancee is the only other person in my everyday social circle that uses Yelp. My friends tell me it’s not so much the negative press as it is the quality of reviews. I guess their experiences don’t always match up to what the reviewers on Yelp are writing. (Ironically, many of those same friends write Yelp reviews, so go figure.)

I understand that they are TRYING to keep businesses from skewing their results, but it seems completely unreasonable that over 90% of our customers are happy with their experience here, but our rating on Yelp basically has that inverted.

It’s not like a car dealer is the ideal business to do well on review sites, but there has to be something that can be done.

I’m happy to look into this phone # correction issue for you. Feel free to email me directly — luther at yelp dot com

- Luther (Business Outreach Manager)

My experience with Yelp is that it really does not offer more value than any of the many other online business directories or review sites, especially depending upon where you are. No matter how they “filter” reviews, I don’t trust reviews in isolation, and I don’t have the time to read over a Yelper’s review history to understand whether or not we might have the same likes and dislikes in hopes of making a determination as to whether or not a specific review is trustworthy from MY standpoint.

From a business standpoint, I’m still waiting for Yelp to contact me regarding my attempt at setting up a business account. If your phone line is actually different from what’s listed from their data provider, I guess you’re out of luck. It’s been about 4 weeks now. Not holding my breath and not worried about it. Guess waiting would always be better than the alleged extortion reported by others. Who knows what the truth is. From my experience, I just don’t think the product is as special as everyone wants it to be.

When yelp “gets the word out” to bloggers who is that really serving?

If I put on my SMB hat from the other side of the table I still have to wonder what it really takes to build up a nice portfolio of reviews. I guess what I am saying is that most SMB’s in general are not reading industry blogs or even the WSJ where I saw the story so who are they informing with these efforts?

Moving forward don’t you think there will need to be some transparency (maybe just to the degree that Google feeds the SEO community?) so new businesses on yelp would feel comfortable?

Thanks for your insight as always.
.-= Frank Reed´s last blog ..SMB Social Media Adoption Rate Doubles =-.