commbasics

Read a  great story in the SF Chronicle  today about a restaurant that has decided to go all guerrilla on Jerry Stoppleman, why are you smiling? Yelp by rewarding customers for giving bogus one-star (i.e. "bad") reviews.  It is working so well that they've received a threatening letter from Yelp about posting false reviews and "paying customers for reviews."   The latter is forbidden by Yelp and could result in them being removed from the system, which happens to be exactly what the restaurant wants.   This strategy could backfire on an unknown and less than popular restaurant, but this place is generally packed to the walls and has a loyal and vocal clientele and it demonstrates a potential path for getting out from under the Yelp umbrella.  It's also another indication that the review company is heading into serious problems. This could turn into a new version of the  Dell Hell story  that cost the computer m...

In the past, I’ve advised several business on how to deal with negative reviews on Yelp and the damage can be fixed with proper content and engagement, but based on what I’ve seen, I can’t advise any business to engage with them. Yelp ’s recent court victory is was the worst possible outcome for the company.  I’m not sure it’s going to survive.  (Wait! But they won!  How can that be bad?)  Glad you asked.  There were three potential outcomes for this trial.  The best outcome would be the judges finding that Yelp does not, in fact, alter reviews to favor advertisers.  But that didn’t happen.  The second best would have been a finding that they actually did and were guilty of extortion for advertising.  The worst possible outcome would be what was actually ruled: that there is nothing wrong giving advertisers an edge on the site.  The court said, tacitly, that it was pretty obvious that is what was happening but there is nothing...

Last week I started a series on the importance and future of geolocal (also called geosocial) apps and outlined a few of the roadblocks to success including the lack of widespread adoption of the underlying technology (smart phones), holding the interest of the audience, and the lack of community building inherent in the current options.  Today I want to look more into that last problem and how some players are overcoming it. As I said last week, the big benefit of social media is its ability to build communities through the web.  But those communities are, for the most part, virtual.  If you are in Facebook or any other platform, you have a large group of people in your network that you have never actually met face to face.  Yet, you are in contact with them regularly no matter where they are in the world.  you know a lot about them and you have several common interests.  However, try to do that on a local level with social media and you run into a p...