By Paul Pannone

eWedNewz coverage of review websites encourages small business owners to speak out against the extort tactics to get them to advertise or appease consumers threatening to give bad reviews. Business owners that are pushed are now starting to push back, refusing to be bullied, cave into demands from consumers or coerced into spending money with websites that create an abusive environment.

To date a steady stream of complaints against YELP has sadly given the website an extraordinary amount of attention– and power– over businesses fearing what may come if they don’t play their game by the rules. But the tide may be shifting, as business owners speak out.

 

Craig Sumsky is no stranger to fighting for his rights. He’ successfully called out the Knot, a defunct Get Married and has keen sense of many industry problems.

 

 

Craig Sumsky, owner of Cutting Edge DJs,  tells his story of dealing with the YELP system and its employees. Sumsky told eWedNewz he became disappointed and frustrated when he tried to enhance his standing with YELP and is sorry he ever got on to their radar. Recently, he publicly pleaded his case on the company blog. Sumsky’s review of the Yelp review system goes as follows:

“It was around 2009 when the review website ‘Yelp’ was first brought to my attention. I thought it looked interesting, so I signed up for an account and began to make reviews here and there. My first posts were mostly negative reviews of places where I’d had bad experiences. But, as I read more reviews posted by other people, my own reviews changed… I found myself enjoying giving praise to places where I’d had good experiences. I was beginning to enjoy Yelp, and I even started a profile for my own business. Yet, as much as I held Yelp in high regard, and as much as I saw (and still see) so much promise in the website, it took Yelp itself to ruin that experience and the promise turned to reproach.

In March of 2012 I received a call from Jill, a Yelp salesperson, offering me an ‘opportunity’ to advertise with Yelp. At first the opportunity seemed interesting to me. As the owner of a DJ Entertainment Company, I had already been advertising with WeddingWire and TheKnot for several years now. Both of those wedding-focused websites offer brides the opportunity to write reviews about their experience with our company and services. So my thought was that Yelp might be a great way to extend that same opportunity to our Bar and Bat Mitzvah, Sweet Sixteen and Corporate event clients. Even better, Yelp came up very high in the search engines for reviews; so again, it ‘seemed’ to be an interesting opportunity.

I told Jill I would need some time to think about things, and would take a closer look at Yelp over the next few weeks, and she ‘seemed’ to understand. That’s when things started to go downhill.

I did my due diligence, and researched Yelp online, and what I found was discouraging. What I found was article after article and news story after news story about how Yelp used extortion tactics to sell advertising, and all sorts of class action lawsuits against Yelp for doing so. Here are just a few…

Yelp on CBS News

Yelp on G4 (class action lawsuit)

Yelp on CBS News (again)

Yelp on CBS News (yet again)

Yelp on ABC News

Yelp Scam – a website dedicated to Yelp’s antics

To read the rest of Sumsky’s experience with YELP go to his blog

 

Discussions with Sumsky and other business owners say people are fed up with review sites; especially when the privilege to give experiences turn to threats and abuses, gaming a system that (probably) wasn’t intended to  intimate business owners.

More websites watching how some business owners react to the threats offer a place where the full story is told. Neutral places where the even exchange of both sides of a story are necessary and will eventually replace one-sided websites trying to extort– um, sell– advertising.

 

What do you think? Have review websites seen their best day?

 

 

 

 

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