Business owners and reviewers have always had a very tenuous relationship. With the rise of social media review sites, literally everyone is a critic. Inc. traces the rise of Yelp, and the effect it’s having on emerging businesses. Just remember when responding to reviews, be honest and professional in tone.
Yelp was founded in San Francisco in 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, two men in their 20s who wanted to make it easier for consumers to find good businesses and avoid bad ones. What they created was an online yellow pages with attitude. Yelp lets anyone critique any business and grade it, with ratings from one star to five stars. Yelp then uses a closely guarded algorithm — the company won’t discuss even the basics of how it works — to determine which reviews are displayed prominently, which are buried, and which are removed from the site. Most Yelp reviews are overwhelmingly positive, but some are painfully negative, often in a personal way.
Yelp allows companies to respond to reviews, either by posting a public comment on their Yelp page or by sending a private message to the reviewer. A company can edit basic information on its Yelp listing — such as a phone number, Web address, and operating hours — but it can’t remove itself from Yelp. The upshot is that in the 33 cities in which Yelp has established a firm foothold, most companies must contend with the fact that they neither control nor wholly understand the mechanism by which millions of customers decide where to spend their money.
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