Yanked Off Yelpers: How To Piss Off Your Most Passionate Users in 7 Days or Less.
July 5, 2008 by admin
Filed under Technology, small business
One of the many positive outcomes of Dell Hell, “Cancel My AOL account”, and “The Comcast Dude is Sleeping on My Couch” is the dramatic change these mighty-mouth insurrections have wrought in the way companies perceive — and interact with — their customers. Most companies these days are not only fervently interested in customer retention and the lifetime value of customers but they’re also laser-focused on their best customers. As a Customer Experience pro, I’ve conducted research studies on countless loyalty programs, goldmining projects, organic transparency, and ‘highly engaged’ market segmentations. I spent five years working with some of Microsoft’s evangelist programs in which we experimented with numerous ‘preferred’ or ‘insider’ strategies and nearly as many years with Yahoo Global Customer Care. Everybody (and rightfully so) is ready to jump through hoops to keep their Loyal Customers purringly happy.
Everybody that is, except Yelp. SFGate reports that the online review site yanked ‘an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?”
I’ve had an upclose-and-personal view of the mystifying way Yelp chose to treat its most passionate users via firebrand Adryenn Ashley, who in the grand tradition of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” decided to fight back by putting her considerable marketing and citizen journalist expertise to good use. On Wednesday she created Yelp-Sucks.com and YelpLawsuit.com, asking people “yanked by Yelp” to sign up for a class-action suit. Apparently, response to these sites is growing as frustrated yelpers chase after both reinstatement — and that so-far elusive apology.
Here’s what puzzles me. Yelp is based in the Bay area. Its founders have deep Internet expertise. They understand the power of igniting a conversation and watching it grow like the wildfires down here in Big Sur. A recent article in the New York Times says: “What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’
s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers.”
Now, I have no insider information on the deleted accounts. I have no idea if any of them violated Yelp’s (fuzzy) rules. But I do know that Yelp is violating most of today’s cardinal rules of Customer Experience. Why would they choose to deal with their most passionate users, some of whom probably come from this ’small group of fanatic reviewers’ in such a harsh and old-school way? Why the cold, quasi-accusatory termination emails? Couldn’t they have at least considered possible explanations for what may appear to be phony reviews? Couldn’t they have started with contacting the questionable Yelpers and saying something like: “Hey, we’re growing like crazy because people like you love to Yelp. But we’re trying our best to keep Yelp a great tool for everyone — and some of your recent activity is raising questions. Here’s a handy contact form. Talk to us.
While Techcrunch claims that these pissed off passionate customers are merely a sign of Yelp’s power, it might be good to mull over these numbers from a recent survey: Eight out of 10 people who go away will bad mouth you. Then they’ll tell somewhere between 25 and 250 people about the problem they had — and they’ll relish explaining it in enraged detail. And woe-is-you if among these customers is a wow-is-me Adryenn Ashley . . .
After they finish bad-mouthing your company? That’s when they’ll scour the Internet in search of your competitors.
I agree Yelp is a horrible website. They are notorious for not following there own rules. They will allow anything and everything written by the worst people and they will put it all on the internet.
To top it all off, they have improved there search words so that they will show up prior to any other information about a business.
It would be okay if they were fair. However, Yelp has got a reputation for being vindictive and petty. If you complain about there policies or if you flag anything, they will be vindictive and they will shut your account down.
If you write a negative review on yelp on there site, you will be banned. So much for freedom of speech. Where are the real reveiws from the real people?
Many folks don’t know this but initially yelp paid everyone $2 per review. Many of these reviews were written by young teenagers trying to make a fast buck.
Jeremey Stoppelman and his pals are also known to be a part of paypal. Many folks will remember that paypal also suffered the same sort of bad reputation.
I agree with Adryenn, Yelp Sucks! Yelp is bent on being sensational and writing the latest dirt on people. This is what initially draws the lunatics, and then they start creating more dirt themselves. Many good businesses have had there reputation ruined by the likes of yelp. Yelp does not follow any industry practices of yahoo reviews, google reviews, and insider pages. Shame on yelp and shame on everyone who continues to use it.
Below’s a thread about someone giving a company a bad review, and then a Yelp employee going out of their way to contact and eventually harass the reviewer. When the reviewer blocks the employee’s communications to avoid further harassment, the employee then opens a public thread, and divulges private emails.
The employee at first vehemently denies being paid by Yelp, but later gets caught confessing to the whole thing: ”yelps pays me a lot of money to protect its sponsors. its a good racket. dont blow it for me.” The fact that this same employee who began the harassment has also given the other company a glowing review, is completely unethical to say the least.
See for yourself, and quickly, before Yelp pulls the thread down to cover up their tracks:
http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-francisco-calling-you-out-atlas-plumbing-review
I enjoyed this post, Sarah, and would love to see a follow-up on how you think the shake-up in current financial markets will impact the more inane offerings of Web 2.0. Brian Smith, the first commentator, is right to trace Yelp’s genealogy back to PayPal (and Ebay). Max Levchin, PayPal’s founder, is the chairman of Yelp. If the global economic crisis and credit freeze has made anything clear, it is that privatization and deregulation masked strategic connections that run so deep as to be invisible. It would be a savvy strategic move on Ebay’s part, since they’ve dabbled before with gaming similar “communities” of user-generated content (e.g., Epinions.com), and it would be just another turn of PayPal’s aggressive multi-level marketing screw.
Could you cite the survey from which you drew this statistic?
“Eight out of 10 people who go away will bad mouth you. Then they’ll tell somewhere between 25 and 250 people about the problem they had — and they’ll relish explaining it in enraged detail.”
Before the current market turbulence, there had been speculation that Google would acquire Yelp’s “content.” Former Yelp employees tell of fraud (unidentified paid writers, in-house writers, fake profiles) and violations of standard industry practices for so-called word-of-mouth marketing. The lack of transparency is incredible. Given Google’s respect for an ethics of information, my hope is that Google will opt for Yellow Pages or Citysearch over Yelp’s cesspool of spam, plagiarized material, misogyny, and Myspace narcissism. It’s a real pity that the “real people, real reviews” of Yelp 2008 has devolved into delusional consumerist fantasy-play.
If it isn’t clear, I am among the 80% whom Yelp’s byzantine “communitarian” fascism estranged. I never received compensation through Yelp, nor did I ever expect to. Yelp attracts an appallingly entitled marketing focus group group that demands comps and freebies from small business owners. And yes, I have been relating my situation to friends, business owners, and colleagues in enraged, do-businesses-really-work-this-way?! detail. Nothing like good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth…
Techcrunch’s conclusion that an erosion in Yelp’s original user base is a sign of Yelp having “made it” — oh, and the San Jose State University business school prof who plugged more “Yelpitude” in the NYT over Zagat’s … in *my* reality, negative press is negative press and hate is hate. Those running businesses and making decisions ought to have matured beyond those playground days of pulling pigtails to show affection.
JS:
The survey you asked about is a proprietary survey conducted by me on behalf of a client for a Customer Experience project in 2006.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I’m glad I’m not a Yelper. Too Byzantine for me.
You may have visited Yelp.com once or twice to read costumer reports about where to eat or which doctors to see, well, guess what? We have discovered that ‘Yelp‘ costumer reviews are completely fake. We know this is true, I did a simple test and wrote a negative review (one star) about three business that I know to be terrible and thought people ought to avoid. The reviews where up for a little while but sure enough not only my negative review were taken down almost immediately by ‘Yelp’ employees but also one of my negative reviews was replaced immediately with a positive 5 star “fake review” on the exact same date! The new fake review was so complimentary it stunk of fraud a mile away. You heard right, either Yelp employees or their contracted minions are writing fake positive reviews on a 24 hours basis, that is impressive fraudulent activity on a magnitude we have never seen before. Not even Amazon.com does that, and we know Amazon has its share of fake reviews. So, there you have, thanks to me now instead of a warning this business has a misleading rating courtesy of ‘Yelp’, so we vote ‘Yelp” the “Top Ten Most Deceptive Website” of 2008.
Yelp sucks.
I was originally a fan as it helped me to find a good mechanic but I have my own business and asked many of my clients to post reviews for me if they felt good about my service. They did and Yelp promptly deleted them with no explanation. I couldn’t find any phone number for the company and they were no help via email.
I even offered to give them the contact info for my clients to prove that they were real, honest reviews but they didn’t care and made no effort to resolve the issue.
Thank you for posting this! I feel better knowing that it’s not ‘just me’. I had engaged in a series of emails with Yelp user support to try to find out why they were suppressing some of my reviews. It was never clear what I needed to do to convince them that I and my reviews were real. Ultimately I emailed them to say I was thinking about canceling my account, and bam!, they canceled it for me before I could to do it myself!
They definitely suck, and seem to be mainly interested in courting businesses.
I too was banned from Yelp. I’m not sure why, I think it was because I started to verbally assault people on the talk forums. I made negative references to blacks, Mexicans, Jews, vegeterians, feminists, enviromentalists, liberals, women, fat people, ugly people, the handicapped and retards.
I didn’t read anything on yelps terms of service about bad mouthing the groups mentioned above. I didn’t read the terms of service at all.
I had about 51 reviews on that site and I believe a lot of people enjoyed reading them. With the closing of the account went the reviews. I don’t really have anything negative to say about Yelp. Well, except maybe their company name is pretty odd.
Bruce
Obviously Bruce works at Yelp. What a pathetic post.
If you want to know what kind of people leave reviews on yelp, visit and watch their local threads for a few days. If you read what’s on the talk threads, you willnogice that It’s made up mostly of people who have no power or controll in their own personal lives, and yelp empowers them. They are very trashy people.
Reverse yelp - I wish there was a website that allowed businesses to rate and post reviews on their customers - good and bad. And while we are at it, if someone is going go leave a review, their identity should not be anonymous - why not ? It would only be fair for both sides
Yelp is a complete racket! I have had eight 5 star reviews removed but one disgruntled associate loses her job and spend the next two months becoming an elite yelper just so she can post a negative review about my business. And, it will never be removed. Now they call weekly to get me to advertise on their site. They want me to pay them money to facilitate a blank bitching board for any peon to write any biased review about my business without any verification or recourse? Oh Yes, now businesses can respond but that doesn’t affect the star rating which is what clients see when they do a search. I am astonished that there is no legal recourse. I am so looking forward to Yelp going down. They are greedy bastards and deserve to be sued into oblivion.
I am a web designer and as part of my wrap up with my clients I asked them to post a review on Yelp.
I had 5 reviews and then one day I had one.
Like most people there was no explanation, no response and I tried to contact yelp several times. It was very upsetting that people spent all that time creating an id and composing a review for my services just to be deleted. These were easy to see that they were “real” reviews as the people had non profits and their own businesses, which were not even on yelp but of course had websites I created for them. Many people had warned me about yelp before I joined. I heard bad stories and how they ask people for money and favors and how unfair Yelp is. (I live in the Bay Area where they are HQ’ed) now I see they were right.
I gave up on yelp and I tell all my customers to avoid them at all costs.
I do public speaking and Yelp is not part of what I encourage for people to use online.
I’m so happy I decided to google “yelp sucks” LOL. Glad I’m not alone in feeling totally screwed by them. As a small business owner, I too got the neverending phone calls to advertise w/them, which were followed by my repeated no’s. Guess what then? Suddenly positive reviews of my business stopped showing up and our score dropped from 5 stars to 3.5, with the last 2 being 1 star reviews. When I tried to tell the rep or the “system” that this was very fishy, I got the usual “filter” response. Get the hell outta here! That’s a bunch of baloney and anyone w/an iota of common sense can see that not buying Yelp advertising = bad reviews published galore. Oh and I also sent him several firsthand experiences of business owners from the internet that challenge their so called filter system: i.e. disgruntled former employees who happen to either be Elite members that have close relationships w/Yelp managers, that have the power to control reviews published and EVEN TRACK IP ADDRESSES! I got nothing but that he would forward the email/info to his supervisors. Oh please. Yelp is not legitimate or even ethical. Yelp sucks!
I have really grown to despise Yelp.
The worst things they could have done….they did:
1) Allowing people to add others as “Friends”.
2) Instituting an “Elite” class of users.
The above two has led to a cliquish society, wherein people are no longer
submitting reviews for the sake of providing information, but to appear
clever and cute to their “Inner Circle”.
If Yelp members were a “lone wolf” society, a little in the way of individual
thinking might be present.
“Review of the Day” (ROTD) : What a coincidence it is that the best written,
and most informative review is usually penned by a leggy, good looking Asian lady (just sayin’).
Restaurant Review Drinking Game: Take a shot each time someone:
* Chimes on and on about what is and isn’t “Authentic (insert country here) Food”.
Who *cares*? — Did it TASTE good?
These grousers will slam say, Mexican food that is “Americanized”, but if you
call it “Mexican - West Coast Fusion”, then *that* is OK.
* Whiny wimps lamenting how their delicate and sophisticated palates were
offended because their precious “Fro-Yo” was found lacking (these people always
like *the* worst toppings as well).
Wow, those starving people in Haiti got nothing on you.
* Any mention of “Fresh Ingredients” is thrown in.
“Today in Talk” : Heaven forbid anyone seek any real advice here, because this section is where the Rabid Mob…err…I mean “Elitists” really come into their own.
Here, they can exchange in their preferred form of journalism: “The Rapid-Fire Snark-fest”!
The one appearing the most callous and using the most “F-words” ummm…”Wins”.
“Elitists” in General : Unless there is some unknown correlation between concise, clear, objective thinking and communication and Drunken Fratboys and Hot Spoiled Girls, then take their reviews for what they are: Young People Showing Off For One Another.
Yelp really sucks. As a business owner like many here, it is good to have good reviews. The good reviews always get remove and customers will not go out of their way to re-write it again. Yelp just assumes that good reviews are fake reviews. They keep all the elite reviewers though. One day I had a bitchy lady came to our establishment. Walking with her chin above her nose, she looked like a customer hard to please. We still served her with a smile and she still wasn’t happy. Later that night we got a negative review from her and it stayed on forever. I would not mind if the review was true. IT was not true, she said my iced coffee was too sweet when she never ordered it. She had a regular coffee, she even came up for seconds. Why the biased review, I will never know. No employees of yelp will remove it either because it reflects their opinion. Well how about the reviews that were previously removed, it reflected their opinion too. This is a terrible site that is a huge disadvantage and not to mentioned biased.