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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/526329
W hile not as large as TripAdvisor in terms of traffic or revenue, Yelp has come to dominate certain online review categories, including restaurant and retail, and become a standard consumer tool. According to a 2011 Harvard Business School study, a one-star change in a restaurant's Yelp rating can affect revenue by five to nine per cent, while a study by PR firm Cone Communications found 80 per cent of consumers had reported changing their minds about a business after reading a negative online review. Yet the anonymity of Yelp posts leave the site open to the same kind of trolling that has made a toxic soup out of so many online comment threads. Whatever useful consumer function it may provide, Yelp also offers a virtual whetstone for axe- grinding. "How many of these people are accredited?" asks Pino Posteraro, chef and owner of Cioppino's Enoteca and Grill in Yaletown. "How many of these people are real? Potentially if I don't like [neigh- bouring Yaletown restaurant] Blue Water I can create something fake and go slander them. I support free speech, but there has to be somebody who manages the site." Posteraro cites as an example a man who called Cioppino's from Los Angeles last spring. "He told my hostess, 'I'm in the food and wine business, I do television... I would like to have the Dom Perignon room.' The Dom Perignon room is spon- sored by Dom Perignon," he notes. "We have guidelines—you have to buy a bottle. The hostess came to me and said, 'This guy is being very pushy.' So I listened to him. I told him the rules. He said, 'You don't understand, I am so-and- so... You're very rude.' And then he hangs up." The Yelp review from Jeff L. of Los Angeles promptly appeared. "In all my years I've never been treated so rudely," Jeff wrote. One star. "This guy didn't even come to my restaurant," Posteraro says. "He's not even a paying customer. I am building my repu- tation for 16 years and you are trying to slander me because you didn't get what you want?" He says he brought the review to the attention of Yelp—arguing that they should not allow it because Jeff L. didn't eat there—but the review remains. "For them it's kosher, it's cool." According to Yelp spokesperson Katrina Hafford, if a business owner feels that a review violates the site's terms of service, he or she can flag that post for review by Yelp's operations team. * "However," she adds, "Yelp does not take sides in factual disputes, so their best bet is to use Yelp's free response tools to pub- licly address that review, stating the facts and their company policy." Like Posteraro, Vij supports the idea of consumer feedback. "I follow Yelp, Urban Spoon and TripAdvisor a lot. When I was here on the floor, every day for 15 years, I could see a problem and rectify it. Now that I'm away from it, because I've got three other establishments that I'm running, my way to find out what's happening is to talk to the managers and to go on Yelp, Urban Spoon, TripAdvisor and see what people are saying. So it gives you a tool." But he feels the tool can be used irresponsibly, as was the case with the Montreal reviewer Basdeo. "He was just doing it as a joke," Vij says. "I texted him and he emailed me, and then we spoke. I really thought he'd had a bad experience. But he told me he had last come to the restaurant in 2007, seven years earlier. I asked him what he ate, and he said he didn't remember." A number of court cases launched by American businesses have attempted to A number of court cases launched by American businesses have attempted to force Yelp to disclose the identity of negative posters, claiming that many businesses are being targeted by malicious competitors or ex-employees bcbusiness.ca july 2015 BCBusiness 53