Yelp lets businesses set the record straight with owner comments

April 9, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Yelp is trying to make business owners a little less cranky about getting dissed on the popular review site by allowing them to respond publicly to reviews they believe are inaccurate.

The site, which is best known for its restaurant reviews, helps business owners by giving them online exposure without paying for expensive ads, and its reviews can highlight positive feelings from a business’ supporters. At the same time, it can be pretty frustrating when some random person trashes your business, especially if they say something that’s just factually wrong in the process. Yelp’s occasionally fraught relationship with business owners has surfaced in cases like dentist’s lawsuit against a negative reviewer (which was settled) as well as rumors that Yelp will take down negative reviews, for a price.

So will the next step in that relationship be all-out brawls between business owners and reviewers, captured on the Yelp site for our amusement and edification? Well, no. Yelp Communications Director Stephanie Ichinose tells me business owners will only be allowed to correct inaccuracies or offer additional facts, not argue with reviewers. Yelp users will be able to flag comments that step outside those boundaries for removal. (You can see a mock-up of the owner comment feature below, but Yelp says it isn’t finalized.)

Yelp already offers other features to give business owners a fair shake, such as a space in their profiles for special offers and a way to send private messages to reviewers. The latter feature has been used by thousands of owners, Ichinose says. (It’s interesting to compare Yelp’s approach to the revamped Citysearch site, which gives equal prominence to editorial content, messages from business owners, and user reviews.) The new owner comment feature seems fair, and probably a more manageable way to address accusations of inaccuracy than actually trying to determine the truthfulness of each claim.

Of course, if you’re a business owner who really wants to argue, I suppose you could just try to impersonate a normal user, but that’s always been a possibility. If you ever find yourself tempted in that direction, I urge you to think of something more cleverly passive aggressive, such as Pizzeria Delfina’s Yelp review T-shirts.

Next Story: Cleantech could top venture capital within five years
Previous Story: The new City on a Hill is solar-powered

Bookmark and Share

Tags:

Photo of Anthony Ha

About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • swag
    The fatal flaw of Yelp is that "normal" users are generally pretty useless. Few have the breadth and depth of experience to have a valuable opinion in a specific category. Not to mention that the system is geared to incentivize the best and worst reviews and to remove incentives for ho-hum average reviews -- and most long tail businesses live in the ho-hum murky middle of the bell curve.
  • What kind of "breadth and depth of experience" do you need to know that you didn't like the pizza? I mean, I value professional reviewers, but I think random "dude on the street" opinions are useful too.
  • Hmm, looks like someone's tweeting over there..
  • Haggie
    The problem is that nobody cares what a bunch of idiots think of Restaurant X and as Yelp's userbase grows, the further it moves away from insightful, useful reviews to inane, useless comments from the hoi polloi. It is the inherent flaw any any review site.

    The way to combat this (that Yelp and other review sites have never seemed to grasp) is to allow the user to self-select their own ratings universe. For example, alongside the mass rating for Restaurant X, show me what my "Yelp friends" or people I've flagged as "Trusted Reviewers" have rated it.

    I really don't care what some guy with a faux hawk and a tribal armband tat that lives with his parents in San Jose thinks about anything. So allow me to filter out his reviews.

    And then design a technology that filters this type of guy out of everything, online and off.
  • I don't find Yelp as useless as you do, but agree that some filtering would help. I believe that's what Citysearch is doing with its Facebook Connect integration.
  • But we at FeedbackJar already allow Business Owners reply.
  • jk
    I recently posted a new profile at _mill ionair echats.com_, a millionaire and hot girl dating club. I saw celebs' profile with pictures and blog there..By the ways, i've got many friends including celebrities there, believe me.