Afraid Yelp Will Hurt Your Business? It Doesn't Have To.

" What if the competition deliberately writes negative reviews?"

 That was the big push-back I got a couple of weeks ago when  I was facilitating a workshop on using social media to build your business  at Incubator . The audience was  a group of laid-off workers who have decided to become entrepreneurs instead of looking for a job.

When the conversion came to YELP, these  soon to be entrepreneurs skeptical -- afraid that their competitors would be up to mischief and deliberately fill the pages of YELP with unwarranted negative reviews.

At the time I pointed out that a competitor who wanted to be up to mischief would do that, YELP or not. And, I shared,  that having the negative comments out in public was better than having a whisper campaign  in your neighborhood where you could not do anything about it. On YELP I said, you can encourage happy customers to share their positive experiences.

 If only the story of  San Francisco's Pizzeria Delfina had been published then. I'd have been able to say:

 

Just Put it on a T-shirt.

Rather than wringing their hands over Internet sourpusses who give them one-star Yelp ratings, they've printed up tees with excerpts from the most scathing reviews ("This place sucks") and given them to the staff to wear. Instead of simply bitching about Yelp, they've made Yelp their bitch and taken quotes from one-star reviews posted on Yelp about the pizzeria and made them into T-shirts for their staff to wear. (They also have one that simply says, "This place sucks," a quote from yet another typically eloquent and insightful Yelp review.)

 

to MortarBlog for The Post About The Post About The Shirt About The Post.