Dealing with comments: Yelp’s best practices
After my last post referencing Yelp and its reader-comment policies, I got an e-mail from Yelp’s director of communications, Stephanie Ichinose (eetch-EE-no-say). We had a great conversation about what it takes to manage user comments — and deal with retailers/business owners who may be upset with what readers post about them.
Yelp, which launched in 2005, is a reader-generated social networking site inviting reader reviews of businesses in a bunch of cities around the country. They have a St. Louis site, but it’s not actively moderated right now. Here’s a few of the highlights of the conversation:
BIGGEST CATEGORIES: Restaurants make up about 35 percent of all the reviewed businesses that appear on Yelp. Rounding out the top five categories: shopping; beauty and fitness; arts and entertainment; home and local.
KINDS OF REVIEWS: Eighty-five percent of their reviews get three stars or better (on a five-star system).
BEST PRACTICES: They spend a lot of time at Yelp’s HQ figuring out best-practices in dealing with readers’ comments and the reaction from business owners. “At the end of the day, we’re not here to take down a business — we’re here to education businesses about how to engage the community.”
SIMILAR EXPERIENCES: When they get complaints from businesses, “if I can point them to someone they know that has had the same experience, then they are more receptive,” Ichinose says.
THE BIG PICTURE: They urge the owners to “look at the big picture,” rather than fixate on a single review that might be “bad.” How many stars does the business have on average? How many written reviews are there? How many of those are “negative”? If there’s one bad review in a bunch of good ones, that tells readers something. On the other hand, “if you’re getting a lot of two-star reviews, you ought to take a look.”
PUTTING A FACE ON IT: She says they also coach business owners to get involved in the site, to build out their profile page and put a human face on it. Get engaged and respond to readers. “The minute a business owner humanizes and puts a face on a business, it changes the conversation.”
The reviews on Yelp tend to “amplify the good — and the bad.”
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May 22nd, 2008 at 6:13 pm
[...] strategy. Rather than go after the owner of the web site (in this case, Yelp, which I’ve blogged about before), the angry guy tracked down the review [...]