The Facts About Yelp for Small Businesses

Yelp tends to be the primary go-to site for people wanting reviews on businesses. Whether your business is on Yelp as a form of online reputation management or simply because that’s where your customers/potential customers hang out, it’s important to understand the facts about Yelp.

So, it’s time to get the facts straight:

1. Most of its traffic is from its homepage
2. Restaurants aren’t the biggest category
3. Encouraging customers to post reviews is a bad idea
4. Those “People Love Us on Yelp” stickers? You’ve gotta earn them
5. Yelp provides free signage via Flickr
6. Yelp has paid for reviews in the past
7. Customer service appears to have a strong effect on reviews
8. Every star in a review leads to a 5-9% jump in revenues
9. Yelp tends to favor independent businesses over chains
10. Business owners can dispute reviews on Yelp
11. Legal threats for bad reviews can trigger “The Streisand Effect”

To read more details, check out this post on Mashable.

There are two points on this list that I found surprising. One being that restaurants aren’t the biggest category but that shopping is. The second point that I found surprising was that encouraging reviews is considered a bad idea. Yelp actually discourages against this practice. Rather than consumers potentially feeling as though they are being used in a promotional means, Yelps prefers the reviews happen organically and not because of any form of coercion.

What Yelp fact were you not aware of?

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5 Tips for Reputation Management

Whether or not you’ll admit it, chances are you’ve Googled yourself in the past year or two. Maybe you did it out of vanity, or maybe you were just curious to see what’s being said on the web about you. No matter the reason, it’s a good idea to know how your personal brand shows up online to others – especially for active job seekers. By the same token, it’s just as important, if not more, to know where your corporate brand ranks online. This is called reputation management.

Sure, there was a similar service offered back in the golden olden days (actually not so long ago) where public relations firms would provide clippings from publications that ran stories, features and advertising about your brand. In the digital age, getting started with reputation management can be done simply by entering your company name or variations into your favorite search engine and seeing what comes up.  

Reputation Management can help you identify issues you may not have known about otherwise, such as complaints on customer review sites like Yelp.com and forum discussions on consumer watchdog sites. While you can’t necessarily remove these types of negative posts, you can address the issues that sparked them, and take proactive steps to push down the negative results and ensure that you control the first two pages of Google.

      Here are five tips for online reputation management:

1. Determine what keywords resonate with consumers and focus on those terms.
2. Decide if you are going to address the negative reviews and how to respond.
3. Create great web content, such as active social media networks, informative websites and popular blogs.
4. Take steps to improve the problems that sparked the negativity in the first place and ask customers to leave a review when they’ve had a positive experience.
5. Measure the results against a baseline and work toward a goal.   

Don’t let this short list fool you – reputation management can be challenging, especially when someone high up in your company also has a reputation management issue, which can happen all too often. The key is to be proactive and monitor the search engines regularly. If you do have a problem with reputation management, you may even want to consider hiring a professional or agency to help you with a strategy and execution. Consorte Marketing recently put together this infographic on reputation management that includes additional tips.  

Consorte Marketing Infographic on Reputation Management

Has your company experienced backlash from negative reviews online? How did you deal with it?

FTC To Monitor Bloggers And Compensation For Their Posts

More and more customers are going online before making a purchase and some are just looking for price, but more have been looking for consumer reviews of products and services. Sometimes, these comments can be skewed in favor of the brand you are researching. Bloggers could be paid or compensated for each positive post about the brand you may be looking for.

According to the Associated Press, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reviewing practices to monitor these bloggers and the gifts they receive. The FTC is in talks to developed new guidelines to go after bloggers for any false claims or failure to disclose any conflicts of interest.

"If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk," said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC's division of advertising practices. "Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and ... they have an economic motive for what they're saying, that's information a consumer should know."

These mandatory disclosures could change how reviews are perceived because users may never know that bloggers are being compensated for their posts.