With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/526329
56 BCBusiness july 2015 bottom of it, find out what was wrong," he says. "I had one situation where [Vancouver Sun food critic] Mia Stainsby said, 'I feel the truffle pasta is too expen- sive.' I called her and said, 'Mia, I'm paying $7,000 a kilo this year for truffles.' And she accepted that. She wrote me up again, because this is what professional people do. With these people in Yelp, it's not redeemable." Vij feels Yelp has supplanted the more appropriate response for the aggrieved customer. "The thing to do is go to the manager and say, 'I was treated with dis- respect,'" Vij says. "If it falls on deaf ears, O ne sure way to guaran- tee someone will say something nice about you on yelp: buy an ad and say it yourself. advertising sales have made the site an online titan. but yelp advertis- ing has also been a consistent wellspring of controversy. last year alan boyco, official optometrist of the Vancouver canucks, publicly accused yelp of extortion, claiming that after he stopped advertising, he was pressured by yelp salespeople and that more negative reviews began appearing on his page while positive reviews were filtered out. it's a charge that has been made many times, including in a 2010 u.s. class action lawsuit that accused yelp of extortion, claiming bad reviews were posted for businesses that failed to buy advertising. accusations that yelp favours advertisers often focus on the site's filtering system through which yelp selects which reviews will be approved and become part of the business's official rating. "The recommendation software is engineered to weed out possible fakes," says yelp spokesperson Katrina Hafford, including reviews generated by the same iP address. reviews from less-active users are more likely to be marginalized, as they are considered more likely to be partisan. "While i can't speak to a specific situation or provide exact details on how or why reviews may or may not get recom- mended," Hafford says, "i can tell you that whether a business advertises or not has no impact on the automated software." she cites a 2013 Harvard business school study that found no con- nection between negative yelp reviews and advertising. The u.s. class action case was dismissed in september 2014 by the ninth u.s. circuit court of appeals. but the court did not pronounce the allegations to be false. instead, it ruled that even if yelp did what the plain- tiffs alleged–manipulate reviews to favour advertisers–it did not qualify as extortion. Vancouver's boyco says the court decision is what ultimately convinced him not to launch his own lawsuit. in a Los Angeles Times article published on march 31, transplanted canadian jeweller rick Fonger claimed that after he stopped advertising with yelp, a competitor's ads began appear- ing above his yelp listing. a yelp salesperson called and suggested that those ads would go away if Fonger resumed advertising. according to the yelp spokes- person quoted in the story, Vince sollitto, the intended message was that if Fonger bought the ad space on his own page, his ads would replace those of his competitor. This year a Kickstarter campaign was launched to fund Billion Dollar Bully, a proposed anti-yelp documentary. in the film's trailer, restaurateurs allege shakedowns by yelp salespeople and sudden spikes in bad reviews after restaurants decline to buy ads; one lawyer is quoted comparing yelp to the mafia. in a statement, yelp responded that the proposed film's allegations have been "repeatedly dismissed by courts of law, investigated by government regulators includ- ing the FTc, and disproven by academic study." On april 20, the filmmakers announced they had raised just over $90,000–150 per cent of their target. They planned to start filming in may. –S.B. * ★ ★ ★ ★ Money for nothing? ★ ★ ★ ★ the person can then go online and say, 'Look, I even told the manager what happened to me and nothing was done about it.'" Posteraro agrees. "If someone calls me, I am the first one to check up and say, 'Guys, what happened last night?'" he says. "Give me the chance to explain myself, to remedy the mistake." But while Posteraro has given up on engaging with Yelp— "Until this last review [from Jeff L.], I was very responsive," he says—Vij insists that Yelp feedback can be constructive. And he feels it's still necessary for restaurateurs to engage. "You have to care," he says. "I do take pride in talking to the customers." Of course, you're never going to please everyone. A Customer T. visited My Shanti and found Vij too attentive. "I don't enjoy feeling forced to eat my food because the owner is checking up on me every two minutes," read her Yelp review. One star. ■