Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Is Yelp a Help?


I had an ear-to-ear grin on my face as I began writing this blog entry yesterday morning because I had noticed that my Cinderella Company had received 5 Yelp reviews in one week--three of which came in one day! That had never happened before. Since I was so excited about it, I decided that I would share the good news with everyone.
As consumers, we all look to find people's reviews about products and businesses that we might be interested in online. Later yesterday afternoon, my partner and I were called by a Sales Rep from Yelp to inform us that the reviews were no longer posted. In less than 24 hours they were down. The reason that they were taken off is because Yelp has a filtering department. This filtering department weeds out any negative or positive reviews that a person writes who does not have an account history with them.
This department has been devised to protect both consumers and businesses from people making false claims--either negative or positive. Yelp's position is that they want to make sure that they deliver quality, so in doing so they carefully monitor people's reviews. Although I can understand this, it is still quite upsetting because our reviews were legitimate and I think the company is eliminating too many of these type of reviews. I also believe the company needs to do a better job at conveying their review policy to the public. For the longest time we couldn't understand why our client's reviews were not appearing. We now know why.

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