Washington Post Discovers Yelp!

Michael S. Rosenwald of The Washington Post catches on to lawsuits against Yelp! today, reporting  information found previously in BusinessWeek on March 4, among other places.

But after Liu and her sister opened Scion restaurant in Dupont Circle, they saw Yelp from a different angle. Liu said Yelp's salespeople phoned repeatedly, telling her that if she advertised on the site, negative reviews would move lower on Scion's page and positive reviews would move up.

Liu decided to fight back, joining nine other businesses this month in a class-action lawsuit against Yelp alleging similar tactics -- claims that Yelp executives deny. "Yelp does not manipulate content on behalf of advertisers or penalize those who don't advertise," a spokesman said.

Much as the earlier BusinessWeek article ultimately sidestepped the legal issues in an article ostensibly about a lawsuit, Rosenwald instead writes about how PR firms work in social media.

PR companies track people who post negative comments about everything from pizza to gadgets and then offer those naysayers free products or technical support, hoping to reverse the flow of opinion about their clients' goods. Many start-ups sell online tools that scrutinize Twitter and Facebook to rank users' online influence, helping manufacturers, hoteliers, restaurateurs and PR firms figure out who can best spread messages quickly.

"It is critical for us to understand who is important," said Jonny Bentwood, an Edelman PR executive who created a Twitter scoring system called Tweet Level. "We want to understand who the key influencers are, what they are saying and what their impact is."

Bentwood, a trained communicator, is careful not to comment on the merits of the case as it could offend clients on either side.  

The rest of the article is a fairly detailed report on how various PR tactics work online, including offering bloggers free stuff, Tweeting marketing messages and the like.  It's good reading for people inside the PR bubble to see how we're perceived by laymen - but it still doesn't even try to answer any questions about the legality of Yelp's tactics, what the article is supposed to be about.

Comments

[Sean Dougherty]

Of course! I'm rooting for it.

[alan pleskow]

Hi- have you checked Zavee.com recently? Its up and operational.

[Sean Dougherty]

Thanks for checking in Ron. You were a real mentor to me and it's exciting to hear from you again after so many years.

I tried to get into the post that I mostly liked the content of the article, I just didn't like the bait-and-switch of using the lawsuit as a peg to write about how PR firms use social media.

By moving from a lede about extortion and dishonesty in how Yelp! does business and into broader PR activities links those two topics in ways that aren't helpful.

I'll check out your post as well - right now I can't seem to get your site to load.

[Zavee]

Hi Sean --

I blogged about the Washington Post story on Zavee Thinking (http://zaveethinking.com). However, my take was slightly different.

I think the objective of the article was to introduce Social Media marketing/online PR to a lay audience. This is important for practitioners because as the public becomes more aware of the existence and impact of these tools it should become easier to make them part of the marketing mix.

It's also important for companies like Zavee (http://zavee.com), which offers Social Media marketing tools to local businesses. Not surprisingly, our platform is easier to sell to merchants who are already aware of these tools, so articles that validate them can be very helpful.

Best regards,

Ron Stack
COO, Zavee