Do establishments have a real issue with Yelp?

I don't quite understand this, either. I know that this is one year later that I'm responding, but something happened recently that made this issue jump up at me again. A few weeks ago, I told my friend Charles he should go to a restaurant I liked. I added that they got 4.5 stars on Yelp, which is practically unheard of. He said, "Yeah, but Yelp is just a scam."

I wanted to say, "Where did you find evidence of that?" But, it probably wouldn't have mattered. I stuck up for Yelp, but I don't think I convinced him.

My friend Charles is my bellwether for spotting when ideas have hit the mainstream, and this one definitely has hit the mainstream. Yelp seems to be switching gears based on all of this negative feedback, too.

Is the lesson here that anyone in the business of social networks needs to be ready for the backlash against policies that are open and about sharing and that includes loosey-goosey anonymity? Maybe every social-networking-type business -- no matter how hands-off and like a "utility" they want to be -- is destined to meet this same backlash when they hit a certain level of growth and acceptance.

In my mind, they probably had to wrestle with how to make money and maybe flirted with ideas about advertising and placement that they ultimately abandoned, but I don't see a lot of evidence that they've been out to extort anyone. It frustrates me to see people jump to this conclusion.

Okay, stepping down off the soapbox now.

Wait, wait, wait. "Flirting with ideas" is what you do around the coffee pot. When it reaches the point of actually making the kind of calls that have been repeatedly reported, it's not flirting any more. Maybe it's aberration, maybe it's a rogue salesman or three, or maybe it's extortion; the anecdotes aren't enough to resolve that, but they're more than enough to document that this moved beyond "flirtation." This is not about "jumping to conclusions." This is documented behavior, repeatedly and consistently documented.

And this is not about "size." Plenty of socially connected, socially aware companies are larger than Yelp!, and haven't had such incidents.

What this is about, what "every social-networking-type business is destined to meet," is transparency. Social networking type customers network, socially. If you step into this space, you can't expect to hide the details of how you act, and you can't expect to hide how you react to the reaction. When Yelp! posted (on their "Myths" page) denials of what was being reported, they were covering up. Cover-up is not an acceptable response. There are a number of acceptable responses, like "oh, you're right, we'll stop" or "that was never policy, we've chastised the offenders" or even "we can't find any evidence, can you provide more details." But denial of what is established is only wool-pulling. It's not acceptable in any business milieu, but social networking means it's very much less likely to work.

You're right: It's about transparency. Great point. Of all of your suggestions, "provide more details so we can get to the bottom of it" is the best one to me. Yes, they are spinning this, although that's to be expected.

The only thing I take issue with is that every free-weekly reporter and wannabe city blogger looking for a scandal has been pushing a ton of anonymous sources to try and give this story legs. So, there's very little that is really reliable, IMHO. Let's also acknowledge that business owners who legitimately don't get good reviews from customers -- who are, let's charitably say, not as focused on customer service -- are going to complain as loudly as possible (and as anonymously (non-transparently) as possible).

Maybe the new process of allowing business owners to respond will help. We'll see. Thanks for the great take on it. Tons of layers to this, and I hope Yelp gets it right.

My post was just removed by Yelp on this site. I don't think Yelp should be allowed to remove any of my comments. Are they in the business of removing all reviews everywhere online now?

I removed your post, janet. I am the community manager for Get Satisfaction. I removed your post because you copied and pasted one reply into multiple topics, and those topics weren't about your complaint at all. If you are here to pepper our site with the same off-topic reply to make a point, we will remove them. However, feel free to participate.

If it's any consolation, Yelp removed one of my reviews in the last two months, and I am not happy about it.

I understand about the copy and paste. Won't happen again. Just trying to get the word out about the racket that is Yelp. They are just awful and a breeding ground for no-lifers to self placate. If they find out who I am there will be fake negative reviews on my business as pay back. That is how they work.

Yelp is not interested in helping business owners. They only allowed businesses to respond because of all the negative press. Yelpers can still remove the business owner's comments if it doesn't suit them. I've had eight 5-star reviews removed but one elite yelper who wasn't even a client writes a negative rev iew out of spite and it stays up permanently as I watch all of my other, verifiable positive reviews go missing. They have even removed several of my comments on this site. Bullies.

Eric, I'm new to GetSatisfaction.com. A consultant pointed me here when I discussed my problems with Yelp with her. I started collecting examples of Yelp! review deletions for my business about 2 months ago after I got so frustrated at the frequency of the deletions. I recognize most of the customers from their reviews--I have a car repair business and most people give their first name and mention the type of car they have and the work they had done so it's pretty easy to connect the dots. Some of these customers also called to complain that their Yelp reviews had disappeared and wanted to know if we had something to do with it. I get e-mails from Yelp regularly that point me to charts showing how many months I've gone without paying them for advertising and how I could show better reviews if I'd just pay them. I'm happy to be an named source with actual evidence of what I think is at best incompetence by Yelp and at worst malfeasance and extortion. My last sales call from Yelp was just Sept. 16, 2009 and 4-5 reviews disappeared within a week of me saying that I didn't want to advertise with them. So whatever this problem is--or even the smell of a problem--it is still happening.

Sorry to hear about your experience. I just want to be clear that I don't have a dog in this game. There are no Yelp employees representing Yelp here, and I am not representing them. I have had great experiences with Yelp, for the most part, but I, too, have had two of my reviews seemingly disappear over the course of time. That made me angry, for sure. Why did they disappear? They were negative reviews, to be sure, but why wasn't I notified or given a chance to re-review the business?

It's hard to know what to think without having more transparency into how their community managers moderate. My guess (and this is a very uninformed guess) is that they may remove reviews that get flagged that are perhaps attached to profiles of users that seem anonymous, have only posted once, or are attached to an IP address that has multiple users posting in the same company section (that appear to be astro-turfing).

Eric, thanks for your response. I didn't think you were a Yelp employee. In fact, I was a Yelp advocate for about a year and asked all of my customers to provide reviews on Yelp. I believe we have great customer service and was confident that, on average, our reviews would be good. I have a competitor that regularly posts fake reviews on Yelp and other sites so it may be that this competitor is flagging my reviews and causing the deletions. But if that's the case it is still a serious problem that a competitor could savage my reputation via Yelp. I became concerned with Yelp and contacted them before we ever received a bad review and while our average was still 4.5 stars. The concern was that at some point we would receive bad reviews and if Yelp kept deleting most of our reviews then when we did get a bad review it would skew the results more than it should. That is exactly what happened. Our Yelp score jumps from 4.5 to 2.5 to 2 to 4 depending on whether we have 2 or 3 or 4 reviews showing at any one time--despite having received a total of 15 to 20 reviews. One of our last Yelp reviews was from someone who had written a number of reviews. So I hoped it might be one of the ones that "stuck." But it was gone the next day. I recognized the customer based on her review. She definitely wasn't "astro-turfing." I agree that Yelp should notify users before deleting a review or at least provide an e-mail explaining the cause of the deletion. As a business owner, I get notified when I get a review so why don't I get notified of a deletion?

I see more businesses are getting online and protesting with their keyboard. I am on board with the class action law suit but it won't prevail. We receive weekly phone calls from Yelp asking us to pay them money monthly. Since the phone calls, positive reviews go missing within one day. Before the phone calls, the reviews would stay for several weeks. I suspect they will keep up with the extortion until someone stops them. (Got a little dramatic with my earlier posts out of frustration.)

Actually, I just checked my listing. The 5 star positive review posted by a client yesterday has been removed and they double listed the "Elite Yelper" negative review. So, I have three reviews - one positive (first to review) and two of the same one-star review. Such a lovely site!

vERY SIMPLE, THE ORGINAL BUSINESS PLAN DIDN'T WORK..NOW IT ID LIKE THE OLD MAFIA PROTECTION GAME...GO TO WWW.YELPSCAM .COM AND READ THE STORIES FROM NEWSPAPER, TV AND MAGAZINES ALL OVER THE COUNTRY..STOPELLMAN IS A CROOK.