And Yelp is expanding here in the Phoenix Valley, seeking sales people to reach out to the Valley's business establishments. And the startup continues to throw fun soirees for its loyal members. As a user, I've been fortunate to be invited to several cool Yelp events over the past 18 months.
But I'm not a business owner who has a listing on Yelp. (Though if you are, here are some great tips to supercharge your Yelp listings). Some business owners are stirring up the pot a bit. Last week, Yelp was hit with a lawsuit calling it out for alleged unfair business practices.
TechCrunch wrote: "The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review."
The smart kids at KBuzz recently wrote about Yelp's sales situation and how allegations of negative reviews being buried have surfaced. And the The Wall Street Journal blog covered Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman's blog post in which he wrote about the company's “weird” automated system. From the WSJ:
"So if Yelp is doing nothing wrong, why do these accusations keeping surfacing?
"In Stoppelman’s eyes, it’s partly because of the company’s “weird” automated system that often removes reviews from business pages in order to filter out spam. “Because this is a difficult task, sometimes that results in legitimate reviews being suppressed from business pages,” writes Stoppelman."
At his blog post on Monday, Stoppelman laid out a point for point rebuttal of the claims in Yep's business dealings with advertisers. He wrote:
"Myth #1: Yelp offers to remove or reorder reviews in exchange for money.
Truth: Yelp Sales Representatives sell sponsored search results, enhanced listings and targeted advertisements. Period."
"Myth #2: Yelp's sales department has the ability to suppress and/or add reviews (and this ability is somehow used to coerce would-be advertisers or punish businesses that decline to advertise)
Truth: Our entire sales department is prohibited from creating any review content on the site. No member of the sales department has the administrative capability to remove reviews."
[Yelp even goes to lengths on its site to dispel the myths about its listing procedures and business operations.]
CEO Stoppelman concluded in his post with: "As I've said, many might say we're weird, but we have nothing to hide. We're doing things differently, but we have never and will never extort businesses; the accusation is beyond ludicrous. In fact, it's deeply ironic that the very mechanisms and processes we've created to preserve Yelp's integrity generate these accusations that we have no integrity. Millions of people rely on Yelp each week to figure out where to spend their hard-earned money and thousands of business owners benefit from the word-of-mouth Yelpers provide. We know this case is without merit, and we will continue to fight these false claims aggressively, as well as fight the guys who are actually being shady with reviews."
My hope is that Yelp can overcome these allegations. Plenty of new business get hit with lawsuits. Google,Microsoft, Facebook - they've all been the recipient of lawsuits about business practices. Heck, even the team behind the Farmville game (Zynga) has been hit with class action suits. Maybe it's a rite of passage for our next emerging corporate titans. Time will tell.
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