Yelp: very helpful, somewhat sneaky?
I have recently been using Yelp to find a dentist in my area and had great results and got really solid information from the user reviews. I have also been trying to help the ladies operate a small hair salon next to my building get online and get local ads running to get some more business. They are a perfect fit for local advertising on Google, etc. and I’ve been prodding them to get a basic website up so they can start running some ads to it and generating some business. They haven’t been able to get someone to put together a simple HTML site for them, so I figured that I’d go ahead and create a Yelp page for their business (here) and then start running Google local ads to the Yelp page. If you’re in Chicago you can see the ads if you search for “Lincoln Park Hair Salon” or “Lincoln Park Salon”. They should get great results from both the Yelp page and the Google ads. I also lobbed in a query to Yelp to see how much their sponsored results are. If they are using a standard CPC model, that could be a great investment for them too.
The one thing I didn’t like about the process with Yelp was the fact that the second step in the profile creation process asks users for their email address and login info so they can scrape contacts from their email account. It is unclear whether Yelp retains all the email addresses for marketing purposes or they simply look at the addresses in your inbox and then tell you who you know is also on Yelp. I clicked the very, very small link in the upper left hand corner that allowed me to skip this step. Even if they are using the addresses just for me, I sure don’t want Yelp or anyone else in my email account.
Yelp has a great reputation. If they want to keep it, they should access email accounts in a less subversive manner, or not at all. The mother of all inbox scrapers, Spoke.com, has a pretty bad reputation for doing this sort of thing. If anything, they should go the LinkedIn route and allow users to opt into the process after their account has been created.
Edit: Very informative comment from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman below. Thanks Jeremy, if you are indeed Jeremy…
Thanks for the valuable feedback, we’ve been thinking about changing that signup flow for a while. For the record we do not keep or use any of your address book’s email addresses for marketing purposes. We use those addresses to find any of friends that have already signed up for Yelp (it’s great to find friend’s reviews). You must manually select which non-Yelp members you want to invite, if any to the site.
-Jeremy, Yelp CEO
The real truth, Yelp is just a savy slimy extortion game that preys upon small business owners, while using the reviews of the unsuspecting patrons as free content
Stoppelman and Simmons instruct their young sales force to do what ever it takes to get the account, including posting false reviews.
Then they call the business owner to ask if they would like help with cleaning up their yelp page. The owner pays 350.00 or more a month until they wise up or go broke.
[...] Yelp: very helpful, somewhat sneaky? [...]
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 fake 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.