Can Anybody Find Me Somebody to Yelp?

Margarita Vincent// Michelle Nguyen

Justin Tsai//Paul Yeh// Michelle Maurer

Monica Sar//Catherine Fernandez

Anthropology 128C

Tom Boellstorff

10 June 2010

Can Anybody Find Me Somebody to Yelp?

In a place where technology is constantly evolving and intertwining itself into our daily lives, the relationship between the online world and the physical world is becoming increasingly intimate and the fine line separating both domains is slowly deteriorating. A new society of online culture has emerged with many being in the form of user-generated and social networking websites. Websites that employ the tactic of allowing a space for users to network understand the saying that “birds of a feather flock together” and that “networks tend to be rather homogenous, as people are more likely to befriend those like them. Sociologists refer to the practice of connecting with like-minded individuals as ‘homophily.’”(Boyd 2010:12). These websites seek to provide content that focuses on the individual yet incorporates the ability to interact within their networks through the sharing of ideas, interests, and activities. This approach is apparent in the concept behind the business-review website, Yelp.com. Yelp is a self-proclaimed “urban city guide” that allows users to post reviews, rate, and comment on local establishments, giving consumers the power to share which businesses they love or don’t love. Yelp being like a city, an online community, functions as its own cyber world; just as stated in the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Barlow: “We are creating a world where anyone may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity” (Barlow 1996:1). The posted reviews and comments have the power to help or hurt establishments depending on their nature. By accumulating positive reviews, businesses could easily gain revenue through their online reputation. However, negative reviews, regardless of whether or not they are fabricated, could also take a toll on the business’ profits. Our research focused primarily on restaurants frequented by college students in the Irvine, CA area. A survey was distributed among consumers between the ages of 18-25 to determine the popularity and usage of Yelp. Individual interviews of the establishments in two shopping centers around UCI were also conducted in order to investigate the whether or not the businesses had heard of Yelp and were using the information posted on the website to their advantage. Through this research, we hoped to obtain insight about an establishment’s virtual space and its effect on the revenue or perception of that particular business. Additionally, our ultimate goal was to determine whether or not the existence of an online niche positively or negatively influenced the customers of the physical world establishment.

Yelp.com is a user-generated review website that implements aspects of social networking into its very interface. Yelp boasts its ability to allow “real people” to write “real reviews” about any establishment that provides consumer goods. The concept behind Yelp is taking the idea of reviews through word-of-mouth to a whole other level. It builds upon this age-old concept by providing an online community space where people can not only provide reviews and comments, but interact with each other as well. Yelp allows personal profiles to be established and the ability to acquire friends and followers, especially for those of Elite status. These connections can initiate an incredible chain reaction for customers which have been proven time and time again. The website was originally created so that locals and visiting patrons could post positive comments about their favorite store or even criticize the worst. Yelp harbors a directory of the businesses, providing each one with its own personal page which includes information on the business such as phone numbers and store hours. In the recent years, Yelp has decided to give businesses the opportunity to have a voice and choose how they are presented on the website. Each establishment is given the power to take control of their page by “unlocking” their free business page through phone confirmation. By unlocking their business page, each store is able to participate in the conversation about their business by updating their store hours, adding a menu, promoting discounts, and informing customers of special events. The business owner is also given the option to respond to user comments and find out who their customers are, where they’re from, and how they found the business in the first place. Furthermore, the businesses are provided with a graph of monthly and daily traffic to their page. Likewise, users are also given the ability to gain some recognition within the Yelp community. Recognition is given to those of popularity, where their opinion matters: “Perceptual popularity pertains to the judgments about individuals who are members of a group or class believed to be valued by its members” (Tom Tong 2008:5). “Elite” status is bestowed upon Yelpers who contribute to the site regularly and are respected in the community. Each user that is submitted for review to join the “Yelp Elite Squad” is judged based on a number of things including their ability to contribute well-written and personal reviews, create useful lists, and provide personal information such as their picture and real name in order to show that they stand by their word. These Yelp Elite members have the power to help or hurt businesses depending on the type of review they write for a business or service.

Many of the functionalities that Yelp provides have an amazing potential to be a highly beneficial social network and an especially helpful peer review site for businesses and their consumers. Yelp is a business peer review generated site that boasts 31 million users on average each month. It attempts to take those 31 million users and make them apply an honest review of businesses. For example, You & I Sushi, an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant located in Laguna Hills has 100 reviews from users registered to Yelp and an average of 3.5 stars out of 5. People browsing through the website (even those who are unregistered) can read comments on the service, quality of fish, atmosphere, and price of the restaurant. Those who are looking for a higher scored restaurant can stray away from this business and keep searching until they find a very well reviewed business that can meet their standards. Also, those who see a reoccurring comment such as, “Stay away from the salmon sushi!” can gain insight on what they should try or not try. Therefore, the users can benefit by reading other reviews posted by others and enjoy the benefits of observing an average review of businesses. Via the social networking aspect of Yelp, users can communicate and express their opinions as well as recommend places that specific users with similar interests can go to. For example, those who are registered can use the “Send to Friend” functionality of the website to recommend or not recommend the business to a friend. This social networking aspect of Yelp further helps both users and businesses by spreading information by word of mouth. Businesses can also benefit from this website as well. First and foremost it is arguable that the main contribution that Yelp provides businesses are its free advertising. By posting their business on the website with user reviews, businesses can enjoy the pleasure of having millions of people view what they are about, their location, quality, and reliability on Yelp. Businesses can also receive help from this website by revamping their practices to suit the needs of their consumers. Furthermore, Yelp insists that accumulating many negative reviews shouldn’t be considered adverse. On the contrary, Yelp suggests that businesses should use this information to their advantage. According to Yelp’s FAQ page, any business that wishes to be taken off the site cannot do so, explaining that, by law, “Consumers have the right to talk about what they like (and don't like)” (Yelp FAQ 2010:1). These businesses are convinced that negative comments actually benefit the establishments by displaying honesty rather than pure compliments. They are also recommended to listen to the negative comments and use them for improvement. For example, You & I Sushi gained both positive and negative feedbacks. A positive comment for You & I Sushi was posted by user phoenix a. and stated, “Fresh-tasting fish!” Information such as this will allow owners of You & I Sushi to see if their food meets their consumer’s standards. However, negative feedback such as, “Not the most alert and enthusiastic staff” from the same user helps the owners know that this is an aspect of their restaurant that they need to improve on. As a result, more satisfied consumers will correspond to higher sales. Smaller businesses that tend to struggle from bigger competition can actually benefit from this network of information. By providing insight on local businesses, good reviews on Yelp may help to minimize the power of big name brands competing against lesser known businesses. In a world where small businesses felt powerless against chain corporations, Yelp provides a safe space for honest businesses to shine though. This gives entrepreneurs some leverage in the consumer world and can even bring them straight to the top if they accumulate enough good reviews.

The timeless adage “any publicity is good publicity” unfortunately does not prevail in every situation. Yelp allows any user to post negative feedback regarding businesses if they should wish to do so. Furthermore, Yelp allows users to remain anonymous in the virtual world. Consequently, vicious internet trolls, unreasonably angry customers, and even crooked competitors have the chance to attack and discredit legitimate businesses. This problem has arisen on multiple occasions which lead to Yelp’s decision in allowing businesses to access their personal page and start responding. In retaliation, Yelp has worked to avoid this problem by implementing a review filter that aims to remove less credible reviews in order to protect businesses from fake and malicious reviewers. The algorithm is completely automated and involves searching for reviews by less established users and removing them entirely. However, computer-generated filters are not always perfect and negative feedback may still appear on an establishment’s Yelp page. The fact of the matter still remains that the negative ratings especially impact small “mom and pop” businesses who rely on almost nothing but word of mouth to promote their services and build upon their reputation. The larger, chain businesses don’t experience this problem to a great extent. Instead, they are able to fall back on the well-trusted brand names that they carry when they receive any negative remarks. Yelp’s removal of reviews is still of great concern within the online community and has caused some controversy among businesses that have been contacted by Yelp and who accuse the company of extortion. On multiple occasions, businesses have complained that Yelp sales associates have aggressively contacted their manager in order to start a partnership. If the business decided to pay for advertisement space on Yelp, in return, Yelp would move positive comments toward the top of the business’ page and suppress negative comments. However, if a business declined the opportunity to purchase the advertisement subscription, Yelp would revive negative reviews, sending them straight to the top of the page (Richards 2009:1). With careful analysis, businesses have been able to find negative comments that reappear even after over 12 months of receiving the service, which is a direct violation of Yelp’s policy of allowing reviews to be posted only within 12 months of an experience with the business. Yelp’s response has always been that the automated review filter is what causes comments to disappear. Moreover, Yelp claims that because the filter is entirely computerized, they do not have the power to manipulate any reviews that may appear on the business’ page. Overall, negative comments primarily affect smaller businesses and can potentially damage their revenue greatly. Although it is not confirmed, Yelp has the ability to coerce these powerless, small businesses into purchasing an advertisement subscription on Yelp for fear of receiving more negative reviews.

To answer our first question about the effects of an online community on their real world counterparts, we elected to administer a survey. This would allow us to quickly gather some descriptive statistics about our subjects, as well as get an idea of how the average user thinks about and uses Yelp. The online survey was given anonymously to 100 peers in the UC Irvine area, and gave us some insight to who has been using yelp and how they intended to use it. By targeting the 18-25 year old age group, we felt that we were getting a representative sample of the most active group on yelp. Collecting this data provided us with a way to measure the effects an online space has on a business. And, since Yelp is a community focused on the customers, we chose to start our research on them as well. To get a complete understanding of how businesses are getting affected though, we expanded our research to include the actual business owners as well. By interviewing several restaurant owners, we were able to get the business owner’s perspective on the effects of being reviewed online. Our study provides examination of whether the online perception of an establishment translates into the real world. To explore this phenomenon, we formulated a few hypotheses for our research. First, we assumed that there was a positive relationship between good ratings and high traffic. Second, business owners that are more active in maintaining a restaurant profile are more likely than those not concerned about it to have more customers. The survey would provide the data necessary to show that having good reviews may correlate to having a better presence even in the physical world. Also, to verify these beliefs interviews with the business owners would support our second hypothesis in a qualitative fashion.

As stated previously, our research group issued a survey to examine who is using Yelp as well as how they are using it. There were 100 participants in the survey and they were asked a series of questions pertaining to the usage of yelp. Particularly, participants were asked if they used Yelp, and if they were more likely to go to places that had a lot of positive reviews. Another item on the survey asked for the respondent's view on the statement, "even if a restaurant has low ratings or negative reviews on yelp, I would still go eat there". The responses were measured using the Likert-type scale (0 = strongly agree, 4 = strongly disagree). "Strongly Disagree" was coded as a higher score indicating a stronger relationship between yelp and business. We determined other descriptives such as gender and age to classify our sample better. 66% of our respondents were female, and they ranged from 18-25 years of age. The survey showed that 41% somewhat agreed with the statement, "I only go to restaurants that have high ratings or positive reviews on yelp." 6% strongly agreed, and 26% were neutral. Out of the 79% that knew about yelp, 59% reported using it. 35% of participants responded "somewhat disagree" to the statement about still going to a restaurant after seeing negative reviews, and 34% were neutral.

The interviews gave our group the business owners' perspectives on Yelp and carried some interesting results. We asked every person if they had heard of Yelp and if so, what they knew about the site. Also, interviewees were asked if they knew if their restaurant was on Yelp, and if so did they know who created it. We closed our interview by asking each person if they thought yelp had affected their business in any way, and if Yelp had contacted them for any reason whatsoever. Since Yelp is a user (customer) based community, we asked restaurant owners these questions to gauge their feelings towards the yelp community and its effects on their business. Our group visited five restaurants at the University Town Center (UTC), and fourteen more at Diamond Jamboree, two retail centers local to the UC Irvine area. Of the 19 restaurants interviewed, only 3 did not have a page on yelp or were not aware if one was up or not. While most of the business owners reported that knew of their presence on yelp, most of them do not actively visit or use the page themselves. The owner of Ray's Pizza, Inc., which is located in UTC said that he knows that his restaurant is on yelp, but is not on the internet very much, and that his son is the one that keeps up with the page. The owner of Le Diplomat Cafe shared a similar response, not being an avid internet user, and only knows about the reviews through her younger employee. In all of our interviews, business owners tended to respond in this way when asked about their activity online. Usually, the employees who are younger are the ones that look over the reviews and they share their findings with the owner.

Many of the owners interviewed believe that Yelp may have a positive effect on business, noting that people come in because they read good reviews. When interviewing at Ajisen Ramen, the manager of the store said that being on yelp does help the business; she even stated, “Customers even call in and say they looked at their yelp reviews.” She looks at the page and feels secure due to all of the positive reviews written that people have posted. Many businesses commented that a lot of people come in only due to the positive reviews. At Greek Islands Cuisine, the owner said that she believed that being on Yelp does affect the business because people will come due to reading the good reviews beforehand. But they were also careful to note that there is also negative feedback from Yelp as well. Some of the managers use Yelp reviews to evaluate their customer service, and bring reports of poor service to the attention of their employees. For instance, Tokyo Table has been established at Diamond Jamboree for about a year and a half. They know that their page was created in close proximity of when they had first opened. Tokyo Table, having been on yelp for a long time has seen the power of reviewers and its effects on the restaurant: “Yelp affects the business because people come due to good reviews. However negative reviews also hurt the business. A lot of negative reviews are people who don’t work in restaurants and complain about service. The manager looks at Yelp, especially the negative reviews about service, and brings it up to the workers at meetings.” When speaking about reviews that complain about service, the employee seemed very irritated. She has personally seen the power of what the negative reviews have on the business and how it allows other users to judge the restaurant very quickly without having first-hand experience. She feels that people don’t grasp how restaurants function and their many facets that need to be handled. She feels that people complain too quickly; if the diner did not have an absolute perfect experience without any minor flaws at all that is when they will write a positive review. If the diner had any issue, in regards to anything, even if it is very miniscule they will complain and affect the business’s online community on Yelp. BDC Tofu House confirmed Tokyo Table’s assessment about Yelp and its negative effects on businesses; they find that yelp does not really help because of all of the negative reviews, even in regards to minor issues, and people will still complain. The authority of users within Yelp’s online community is very powerful and they have a strong impact on businesses, whether positive or negative.

Yelp has a very different affect on larger corporate businesses, being franchises, opposed to smaller privately owned restaurants. Two well known franchises that were interviewed were Yogurtland and Lollicup in Diamond Jamboree. When speaking with an employee at Lollicup, they said that yelp does help their business. The manager of that location will bring up yelp at every monthly employee’s meetings and will bring up the reviews on yelp and what they should do to change certain aspects of their service. However, they noted that Lollicup is a chain drink based restaurant and they find that they only focus on yelp for that particular location and not Lollicup’s entire presence on yelp. It is more difficult to analyze Lollicup’s online presence as a whole. People may review one Lollicup location more harshly than another. Additionally, Yogurtland also has a very large online community. They are a very large chain corporate store so they have hundreds of reviews at multiple locations. People may not only go to one location of Yogurtland, but multiple locations. Their vast amount of reviews may not affect their business directly; due to the large numbers, it may be difficult for a user of yelp to discern an opinion. The manager believed that Yogurtland is more about personal experience than online reviews; the manager stated, “People will like it or they won’t. Everyone will have a different experience.” That Yogurtland location is too new, so the manager believed that people will go there because they like Yogurtland overall and not go based off of yelp reviews. Yelp has a different impact on franchises and corporate chains disregard yelp due to its many stores and locations.

Overall, we found that Yelp reviews positively affect restaurants and their patrons. The relationship between the online community and the physical world is mutualistic. There is this perception of online authority that is established on Yelp. From the survey, 43%, the largest percentage, stated that they had somewhat agreed that they only go to restaurants that have high or positive ratings and 35%, being also the largest percentage, stated that they had somewhat disagreed that even if a restaurant has low and/or negative ratings, they would still go. This data asserted the online authority of the Yelp community and how it has great impact on people’s decisions about checking out certain restaurants. Those who use Yelp rely on it for positive affirmations about venues they’ll actually visit and try. People do not often read the reviews casually. If a restaurant has negative reviews, active readers of the reviews will listen to the reviewing, placing a large amount of clout on the reviewer. Before our actual research, we believed that business owners who were more involved with their Yelp page would be more successful in the physical world, seeing the affects of positive online activity; if owners kept up with their profiles, they would have positive correlation with their business. However, we found that not a lot of business owners were very active with their page on Yelp. A lot of restaurants maintained that world of mouth was better for their business. This may be due to the fact that people will trust other people they directly know and are more willing to try out places from recommendations from people very close to them. Business owners either love Yelp or hate it. They are greatly affected by negative reviews because of Yelp’s influence on people. Yet, many do not choose to actively partake in the online community as of yet. With Yelp’s increasing power, owners may have to adjust to this change; it is a new way of looking at their business. Information is spreading fast than ever, changing from reviews in print format in articles and magazines to online forums. As stated in The Victorian Internet: “Is more information always a good thing? Certainly in business, the more you know the better, and the more information you have access to, the greater your advantage over your competitors” (Standage 1998:164). Owners, part of an enculturation process, will need to learn how to adjust their business to this new kind of pace of being online and seeing what information about their business is out there for the public to see. They need to learn quick as their business is greatly affected. Owners are making a step towards this by looking at the feedback on Yelp and bringing it up with their workers. But another step needs to be taken or technology will get ahead and may even bring down a business. There is this overall theme of the relationship between social networking sites and the physical world. Culture encompasses many components and is not just separate domains. Categories are not compartmentalized but are more fluid as different aspects of culture interlink. Here especially, online communities being an aspect of technology, is cross affecting the physical world, being the economics of businesses. Culture is constantly evolving and interconnecting many domains together.

Works Cited

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Boyd, Danah. “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.” 2009.

Richards, Kathleen. "Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 | Feature." East Bay Express. 18 Feb. 2009. Web. 6 June 2010. .

Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet. New York: Walker and Company, 1998.

Tom Tong, Stephanie, Van Der Heide, Brandon, Langwell, Lindsey, Walther, Joseph B. “Too Much of a Good Thing? The Relationship Between Number of Friends and Interpersonal Impressions on Facebook.”Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(3):531–49, 2008.

"Yelp FAQ." Yelp.com. 4 June 2010. .