With online and offline commerce increasingly driven
by reviews, businesses can be irresistibly tempted to make themselves look
better than they are. They commission favorable descriptions of themselves and
may even bribe customers to say how terrific things were. The most unscrupulous
write unflattering comments about competitors.
Like every Web site that depends on consumer
critiques, Yelp has a problem with companies trying to manipulate their
results. So it set up a sting operation to catch them. The first eight
businesses — including a moving company, two repair shops and a concern that
organizes treasure hunts — will find themselves exposed on Thursday.
For the next three months, their Yelp profile pages
will feature a “consumer alert” that says: “We caught someone red-handed trying
to buy reviews for this business.” Potential customers will see the
incriminating e-mails trying to hire a reviewer.
“The bigger Yelp gets, the more incentive there is to
game the system,” said Eric Singley, its vice president for consumer products
and mobile. “These notices are the next step in protecting consumers.”
Yelp has more than 30 million reviews. For every five
new notices that are submitted, one is determined by internal filters to be so
dubious — either highly favorable or highly critical — that it is banned to a
secondary page, which few users bother with, instead of appearing on the
business’s profile page. Many of the reviews tagged as fake are written by
people new to Yelp.
To have the best shot at getting a solicited review
onto a profile page, a sneaky business needs to find someone with a track
record on the site, whom Yelp has called an “elite” reviewer. It does this by
advertising on classified sites like Craigslist.
That was where Yelp went to conduct its sting. A Yelp
employee posed as an elite reviewer and got the businesses to reveal
themselves. The size of the promised payments varied widely, and so did the
work required.
Lots of small-business owners have experienced
frustrations dealing with sites that post consumer reviews. What do you think
of the company’s new, more aggressive stance?
Sources and more details:
“Talking to the Chief of Yelp, the Site That
Businesses Love to Hate”: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/business/smallbusiness/25sbiz.html
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