by Cools Medley
Recently Yelp held a town hall meeting and invited a few business owners to attend so they can discuss their programs and answer any questions about Yelp Advertising services. However, the meeting backfired and turned out to be a complaint forum from pissed up businesses. The audience got aggressive with their questions and complaints on how their legit reviews get filtered. However, Yelp only wanted to discuss the benefits of their advertising services.
LA Times was there to cover the story.
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by Cools Medley
A ruling from a Virginia Court of Appeals has rendered anonymous reviews unprotected, at least in Virginia. The popular online review website Yelp is at the center of litigation regarding the legitimacy of anonymous reviews. On one side is Yelp, whose terms of service explicitly ban users from posting faked reviews that are negative or positive. On the other side are the businesses hurt by these reviews.
This landmark case will shape the landscape of online reviews for some time to come. The plaintiff’s case seems to mirror the plight of so many businesses with reputation and image problems. Yelp uses an automated system to deal with spoofed reviews, which it claims is capable of dealing with these fakes. Yet the fact remains that fake reviews have become an industry in and of themselves. While this court ruling does little to improve these conditions, it does set the precedent for future cases.
by Cools Medley
Yelp is one of the most important destinations on the Web. Its database of user-generated reviews can offer potential shoppers a quality source to vet a business before they shop. But faked reviews are threatening to dilute that landscape, eating away at the purity that a service like Yelp needs in order to be successful. In response, the company has announced new and aggressive steps to remove these false reviews.
The CEO of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppleman, is creating something of a firestorm with the announcement. Companies caught “soliciting” reviews by paying their reviewers will now get a kind of badge that designates their business as one that paid for reviews. This messages comes as a popup that the user cannot avoid clicking on. With Yelp reputation already being such a hot commodity, businesses will need to exercise even more caution when asking for reviews.
Our CEO, Carl Medley, wrote about this change in policy.
