Is Your Business Using Yelp Wrong?

Yelp is a business owner’s best friend. Until it isn't

I noticed a business on a social site complaining that their Yelp reviews were being hidden. No surprise. I’m betting that business asked their happy customers to review them and the customers obliged to be helpful. I’m also betting that those customers left their one review and then never logged in to Yelp again. Yelp accurately assumes these people were solicited reviewers and hides them.

Why? Because Yelp is a social community of people helping other people find good businesses to patronize. What Yelp isn't is a place for your customers to leave reviews of your business if they aren't going to be participants in the Yelp community. Yelp is looking for people who participate socially and like to help others.  When a new user creates a single review and then stops participating, it looks fishy, and it should.

Fake reviews, solicited reviews, and paid reviews are a persistent problem for Yelp and their algorithm is set to detect those and remove them from public view. I was reading an anti-yelp site yesterday with lots of business owners complaining that their few negative reviews were showing and the positive “5 star reviews” were being hidden.

I’ll tell you exactly why that happened. Regular Yelpers reviewed that business unfavorably. Then the business owner solicited friends and regulars to create positive reviews, but those people created a Yelp account, never filled out a profile and never participated in the community beyond that one review. So, the solicited reviews are hidden and the negative reviews from trusted Yelpers are visible. This is the way it should be. I can also tell from the way some of those business owners were expressing themselves that their negative reviews were probably spot on.

Yelp can double your business or destroy it - that’s the reality.

How does a business shine on Yelp?

The answer is to let customers know you are on Yelp but not to solicit reviews from people who aren't going to become regular participants. Yelp will see a bunch of 1 time reviews and begin to view your account with suspicion of review buying. Let your Yelp reviews happen organically because you do a great job with customer service and delivering value. Never forget that Yelp is a community of people who like to share and help other people. Do a great job for every customer, whether they are a Yelper or not, and word gets out.

It is also inevitable that you’ll get a negative review, no business keeps 100% of its customers happy and one day a sourpuss will let the world know about his horrible experience at your business. It is imperative that you, the business owner, respond to those negative reviews in a professional manner. Respond with an apology that the reviewer had an unpleasant experience and mention why that might have happened (don’t blame the reviewer if you can possibly avoid it), then list the steps you are taking to eliminate the problem. Owners who come off as argumentative or arrogant will do twice as much damage as a negative review by reinforcing the negativity and convincing future readers that Mr. Sourpuss might just be right. Don’t offer to “make it right.” Doing so looks suspiciously like you are attempting to buy off the reviewer to get them to change their review.

A negative review or two isn't a business killer, but a lot of negative reviews can be when they start creating a pattern. Most people who read reviews are smart enough to know that there’s always going to be a negative or two. What a Yelp reader is looking for is a consistent pattern in the reviews. Think for a moment about how you've checked out reviews on Amazon for books or other products. Nobody has 5 stars on every review, there are always a few cranks and competitors down in 1 star territory. But a pattern of low rankings that overwhelm those 5 star reviews stands out and makes you think twice about the product. So it is with Yelp reviews.

Where should those great reviews go? Google Places (which I covered here). The bottom line in both is the same:

Provide exemplary customer service and the negatives just become noise from cranks. 

Linkedin Thought Leaders

Over the past couple of months I've found myself intrigued by a new feature on LinkedIn  Content from Thought Leaders. What’s is actually more fascinating than reading the content has been watching how various Thought Leaders are using their new content channel on LinkedIn.

Thought Leaders are good promoters by nature, that’s how they got to be leaders of thought in their respective spheres. They promote their ideas and they brand themselves well. In creating the Thought Leader space, LinkedIn provided this group with a new marketing platform to expand their reach. The more aggressive participants took to this new channel and started figuring out how to use it to their advantage instantly.

Tony Robbins, for example, started off with some original content but then shifted management of the channel over to a marketing flunky and the channel spent a few weeks as just an ongoing sales pitch for Robbins products without providing any value to the reader. In the past month the content has changed to be more tailored to LinkedIn and it appears more thought is going into who comprises this new market and how to interest them.

Richard Branson is just having his marketing team port content over from his company blog (none of which appears to be written by him.) It’s good stuff but I think the self-promotion level is higher than it should be.

Guy Kawasaki wrote some original content for LinkedIn but quickly just turned his channel into another spigot for content he is posting across his entire social network. I think this is a mistake but I also know how tough it is to generate original content for specific channels (you see how often I manage to get a blog post out here!) Writing a lot of original content is hard, especially if you’re running a business, promoting a book, setting up your next project, etc.  One thing I keep reminding myself that as a leader, my job is to innovate and market.

 Blogging is marketing and needs to be treated as such.

So, I’m hoping to do a better job at creating original content in 2013. With a book and a web app to promote, it’s time for me to start getting on the ball with my own marketing and original content. Either that, or I need to invest in a bunch of cleverly branded lolcats.

Happy New Year!