Q&A talks about the power of social media with Darnell Holloway, Yelp’s manager of local business outreach.
Q: What’s Yelp all about?
A: Yelp is a website and mobile app that helps consumers discover local businesses. In January, we had 100 million unique visitors come to our site and we have more than 36 million reviews worldwide.
Q: How are you cutting through the clutter out there with sites like Groupon and web pages that are offering deals?
A: Yelp’s focus is on providing consumers with information to help them discover local businesses and, in turn, decide where to spend their hard earned money. In addition, we provide business owners with a free suite of tools that allows them to join the conversations that are happening about them online. These tools allow business owners to build out their online profile by publicly and privately responding to reviews, uploading photos and entering information about their business. Unlocking these tools also give business owners the opportunity to offer Yelp Deals, check-in offers and gift certificates to their current and potential customers. Once a consumer is looking at a Yelp business page, they’re already interested in making a spending decision and Yelp Deals give businesses the ability to convert this traffic on their Yelp page into paying customers by giving them the option to “Buy Now.” In addition to appearing on Yelp business profile pages, Yelp Deals will be highlighted in search results and in a dedicated deals section of Yelp.com designed to allow consumers to identify great deals in their area. Deals are also accessible on the go from our iPhone and Android mobile applications.
Q: How is Yelp dealing with the Facebook program that seems similar to what Yelp has to offer?
A: Yelp connects consumers with great local businesses through the rich detail of the 36 million reviews users have contributed. This content — including both praise and criticism — gives consumers an accurate picture of what their experience would be like if they patronize a specific business. This rich content spans virtually all categories of businesses, enabling consumers to tap the wisdom of all users not just that of their friends on a particular social network. Because of this rich local content, numerous companies, including Bing, have partnered with Yelp to power their local search.
Q: You recently held a roundtable of sorts with local business owners?
A: Our local Yelp Hartford community manager, Emily Cahill, recently hosted a lunch roundtable in Hartford. Discussion topics ranged from how to “unlock” the free business tools and best practices for responding to critical reviews to how to build out a business listing to its fullest advantage. Some of the biggest concerns were around why Yelp has an automated review filter. Attendees were curious to learn more about how the filter works and what ends up getting filtered out. As far as why the filter even exists, it’s there to protect both consumers and business owners from fake, shill or malicious reviews. The filter works behind the scenes to analyze a wide range of data points about every review that is written on Yelp in order to determine which reviews will be displayed on a given business page. It applies the same set of rules equally across the board for everyone, non-advertiser and advertisers alike. While Yelp intentionally does not give out information on how the filter works — if we did, we would be overrun by reviews written by people hoping to game the system — we did explain to the business owners that there is no amount of money anyone can pay Yelp to manipulate reviews and our filter does not punish those who do not advertise. The filter applies the same set of rules equally across the board for all users, no exceptions.
Q: What were some of the tips you offered to deal with critical reviews?
A: While 80 percent of the reviews on Yelp are three stars or higher, every business out there will likely receive negative feedback at some point because it’s impossible to please 100 percent of the people you deal with 100 percent of the time. That being said, don’t lose your cool when it happens to you. Instead, take some time to think about what customer service policies you have in place in the offline world and apply that same logic when dealing with online reviewers. To be specific, consider implementing constructive feedback when appropriate and get in the habit of addressing the concerns of critical reviewers — diplomatically of course — using the private message or public comment feature at biz.yelp.com. We know this approach is effective for business owners because we went straight to the source. Over the past year we held numerous town hall meetings with business owners and members of the Yelp Elite squad (some of our most prolific reviewers) to learn what resonates with consumers. Yelp users consistently mentioned that they appreciate getting a response from business owners after leaving reviews, whether positive or negative. We also continue to see examples of how a well thought out response to a negative review can result in a return visit from the customer, as well as a bump in star rating.
