I just got off the phone with ‘Sam’ from Yelp. He comes across as pushy but I know he is probably a young guy that is just passionate about the Yelp website. Unfortunately he wanted to sit and debate with me over why I think Yelp is no longer worth visiting. He did not want to listen to the end user telling him how I felt. He wanted to talk about how great Yelp is and where it’s heading and how they are better than CitySearch, etc. I had to practically yell over him to get him to stop. Enough of the madness. Yelp believes that it is doing its community a favor by removing many reviews (based on what Sam told me). Their so called filter will automatically detect which ones to keep up and which reviews to take down.

I no longer contribute to Yelp, and I would suggest you don’t either.

I tried to communicate to Sam that I felt like I was wasting my time if Yelp did not want to consider my voice just as important as everyone else’s when I wrote reviews. Have written several reviews and not having them show up made me feel like I was not important. I wanted to know where those reviews went. After all I spent my time and energy writing them.

Yelp is not an open community like you might think. It is not social like you may think. If Yelp is going to police their reviews and services they should do a better job at making sure more people’s voices are heard. The users who spend time and energy writing and being a part of Yelp (therefor making Yelp what it is) deserve to have their 2 cents heard. I don’t think abusive language needs to be showcased on the website and do think that hateful or abusive language should be removed, but I don’t think the current policy Yelp has in place is going to work.

When Yelp decides to make the Yelp community a truly social and open community and have most of its reviews involved in the conversation I will participate once again. But as long as reviews are not being given their due credit, Yelp has found 1 less customer and with the ability to communicate that and my reasoning behind it across the internet they should take notice of what the end users think more closely.

More Yelp Contraversy can be found here.

I have been on Yelp and have written several reviews over the past several months. Some good, some not so good but I have found that it can be a powerful tool. I have promoted the website to my clients and recommend that they have some involvement with the website from a business stand point. With automotive dealers it seems that many times the angry customer is the only one online writing about how bad their experience was with a dealership. So in an effort to help my dealers I have assisted them in being more pro-active with their happy customers and getting them to write how well their experience with the dealership went. This has begun to work.

Unfortunately Yelp has decided that it will not show all of the reviews for a particular business. They obviously haven’t considered the time and effort it takes for an individual to write something (good or bad) about a company. Well this is my 2 star rating for Yelp. Yelp needs to wake up because I do not like the fact that I have spent my time to go online and write something about a company, only to find that it is not showing up on Yelp. Yelp has not made any consideration for its user community by clearly coming up with a review method that makes no sense.

What I am talking about is that I myself have written some reviews and I know for a fact I have written one about one of my auto dealers (after purchasing a vehicle from them).This particular client has had 15+ reviews. I know this because I help them track this. Yelp is only indicating 5 reviews. Well, what happened to the other 10+ reviews? It’s like they just disappeared. There is no rhyme or reason to which reviews they have decided to attach to this particular business.

This got me wondering, why am I wasting my time writing reviews on Yelp if they aren’t going to even show up? Why am I going to work at writing to let other customers know how good or bad a company is if Yelp has no regard for what I am doing a) for the community at large and b) for Yelp. By creating this community Yelp has to realize people don’t want to feel like they have wasted their time writing a review only to have it not show up. Yelp needs to realize that people expect to see reviews on many different customers providing information not just a handful. Yelp need to realize that people will not be using Yelp once they find out their reviews are not showing up. This is left me feeling like Yelp doesn’t care about everyone’s point of view, only the one’s Yelp has decided are important.

Based on this experience I feel that this method of picking and choosing reviews really undermines the meaning of Social Media. Yelp is suppose to be an online community where a lot of social interaction takes place. While it may accomplish this, I believe that if the Yelp community gets wind of their practices of not showcasing all reviews but picking and choosing which reviews it wants to display, the Yelp community may get quite upset. As it stands right now Yelp is a waste of time. Don’t buy into writing reviews only to find out Yelp has considered them of no value and therefore not displaying them.

When Yelp decides to change this practice I will begin participating in that community again. Until then I will write poor reviews on Yelp and why it is not worth the time to take out of your day to write a review with them.