Yelp Collaboration in Social Media

YELP

Collaboration in social media

Participation: Writing a review on Yelp

For my social media assignment, I decided to participate on Yelp. Yelp is an online review website through which members can write reviews, using a star-based rating system as well as making comments. The comments are meant to contextualize the reviews, given that what is perceived as worth four stars to one person may not be valued as four stars to another person. Although the reviews are anonymous in the sense that reviewers can create an online persona, there is a certain amount of accountability, given that a reader can access the reviewer's past reviews, to see if he or she has a self-serving bias. For example, if someone writes a glowingly positive review of a restaurant with two stars from everyone else and the reviewer has no other reviews on Yelp, it is likely that the reviewer may be a 'shill' -- either the restaurant owner or the friend of the restaurant owner who specifically wrote a positive review to draw real life traffic.

It should be noted that Yelp is an extremely controversial review site because of a number of features. Some owners complain that a disgruntled customer without a legitimate complaint can bring down the ratings of an otherwise stellar business. For example, a diner may come to a restaurant without a reservation during a busy time and then fault the restaurant because he had to wait for a table. Also, people who merely look at the stars do not always read the reviews to go along with them. Someone who is a vegetarian might rate a restaurant poorly because it had no vegetarian entrees. However, if the reader is not a vegetarian, this criticism is meaningless to him or her.

Before posting on the site, I also noticed that there was often a wide variation in terms of the number of stars different establishments received. For example, Hotel Chantelle in New York City had an odd mix of five star reviews and one and no star reviews. The bad reviews revolved around the difficulty of finding a table at the establishment, the difficulty of redeeming coupons, and the loudness and trendiness of the place. However, the positive reviews praised the food and the posters seemed to enjoy the 'scene' the restaurant offered. To gain a useful perception of an establishment via Yelp, in other words, requires a great deal of care in terms of how one reads the reviews.