By Christine Frietchen on March 15, 2010 in
Yelp, a popular user-review website that has a strong foothold in rating local businesses and services, has been slammed with two class-action lawsuits alleging extortion -- specifically that Yelp offers business owners control over posted reviews in exchange for buying advertising on the website. In both cases, separate business owners say that Yelp offered to delete negative reviews in exchange for a monthly ad contract -- and when the business owners declined, positive reviews disappeared. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has flatly dismissed both suits as without merit.In an interview with ABC News, Vince Sollitto, VP of corporate communications for Yelp, says that businesses don't understand how Yelp works. While the company does actively remove postings, it only does so for suspicious reviews: "In order to protect consumers and businesses alike from being victimized by fake or malicious reviews, we employ an automated algorithm that we can't disclose entirely or else people will game the system," said Sollitto. The company doesn't remove reviews based on whether or not a business buys advertising.
The stakes here are high, as even small businesses see how online reviews affect their bottom line; in an already strained leisure market, hotels and restaurants are especially dependent on good customer ratings to keep their business humming. In response, more and more small businesses are actively inviting customers to write reviews. Clearly, the most ethical tactic is to invite ALL customers to write reviews, good or bad. Where it all gets murky is when businesses selectively invite customers to write reviews, or when business owners make suggestions as to the content of a review.
We read some good examples in travel columnist Christopher Elliot's article on the Frommers.com website. Elliot, a well-known travel ombudsman, gets plenty of reader comments about iffy review situations. Take Pam Stucky, for example, who received an email solicitation from a Scottish hotel, suggesting that she write a positive review on TripAdvisor. But although Stucky had made a reservation at the hotel, but hadn't even stayed there yet. The hotel owner even suggested ways she could write more than one review using pseudonyms.
To combat the influence of solicited or fraudulent positive reviews -- or possibly vindictive reviews written by a competitor, both Yelp and TripAdvisor spell out their policies, and use algorithms to try to identify fishy reviews. But there's no way a computer can catch all such reviews, and there's little to protect consumers against the type of under-the-table shenanigans alleged in the two Yelp lawsuits.
Our best advice? Read all online user reviews with a critical eye. Look for balance in a review; those that are entirely glowing or entirely negative aren't very helpful anyway. Look for comments in a review that indicate the person actually stayed at the hotel, or used the service, or ate at the restaurant, and disregard reviews that make sweeping blanket statements.
And if you're a business owner, we don't see any problem with inviting customers to write a review of your restaurant, hotel or service after they've completed the transaction -- but invite ALL guests to do so, not just some. Furthermore, if any review site implies that they'll trade control over reviews in exchange for buying advertising, please report the incident to the Better Business Bureau. In order to keep online reviews helpful for both businesses and customers, it's important for everyone to maintain transparency.
Read more about spotting fake reviews and phony blogs in our previous Productopia posts.