Can Reviews Be Trusted?

Philip Stone March 3, 2010 Follow on Twitter

If you can’t trust those with whom you do business then do you continue doing business with them? The Tiger Woods fiasco shows what can happen when loss of trust means loss of endorsements, so when a Web review site gets hit with a lawsuit claiming extortion via selling advertising contracts in exchange for removing or hiding bad reviews then what happens to the trust factor with that site?

That’s the problem now facing Yelp, a Web site devoted to reviews of business establishments by those who frequent them. It is now accused in a federal court class action civil suit of unfair business practices by offering to hide or remove bad reviews in exchange for advertising. Yelp says it ain’t so.

Yelp is big business. It turned down a Google buyout thought to have been in the $550 million range, and it recently secured a new round of financing worth some $100 million. So publicity that bad reviews might be removed or hidden in exchange for advertising hits right at the nerve of what this site is all about. And if it loses the trust of its users, then it will be gone.

The suit concerns an animal hospital that complained to Yelp about a negative customer review.  It wanted the review removed but Yelp said no. And that should have been that. But, the hospital says, it soon started getting calls from Yelp advertising reps saying that for a $300 a month ad contract that bad review and others could either be hidden where no one would really see them or even get removed.

Now it’s questionable whether such an offer is actually against California business law – the courts will decide that – but if the suit does go to trial and it shows there was such activity, even if that activity is not actually judged unlawful, then would you trust positive Yelp reviews for businesses  that also advertise on the site?

That’s the big PR problem Yelp has to resolve. CEO Jeremy Yelp is obviously worried enough about the publicity to have written a couple of blogs saying his Web site is clean. “Yelp does not remove or hide negative reviews in exchange for money and Yelp salespeople do not offer to do so,” he wrote. “Additionally, Yelp treats review content equally for advertisers and non-advertisers alike. Advertisers pay for advertising and enhanced listings, and nothing more; and businesses are not penalized for declining to advertise.”

In a second log he goes into a long description with examples of how salespeople interact with possible advertisers, and he emphasizes “No member of the sales department has the administrative capability to remove reviews.”  He goes on to talk about all the safeguards in place to prevent what the lawsuit claims but there will be suspicious minds out there who will say even if the sales person cannot pull a review maybe he/she speaks to someone who can. Perception is tough to beat.

Right now it looks like Yelp is losing the PR battle. The blogosphere leaves little doubt as to what it thinks – a typical headline from one site: “For Business’ Sake, Yelp Needs New Owners”. Whether the incident in the lawsuit never happened, or a rogue salesperson made an offer without management approval, or that’s the wink and nod way ads can be sold, Yelp is mired in a PR battle. And with 29 million monthly users it is a battle the company must win.

This is not the first time Yelp has had to handle such accusations. About a year ago a San Francisco Bay Area weekly newspaper, East Bay Express, wrote an article with several specific claims by local business people of Yelp sales people offering to buy bad reviews in exchange for advertising, and the company then denied everything.

It’s really hard to fight the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” feeling, and yet in this case a huge business must do exactly that and prove to its public it is squeaky clean.

This all makes us wonder, of course, whether removing bad reviews for ads is an acceptable media policy. We would like to think not, but in these hard economic times in particular what does get swept under the carpet? Bloggers are currently chasing after the Hollywood trade paper Variety for allegedly pulling a bad movie review for a big advertiser. They allege Variety has a $400,000 advertising deal for the movie Iron Cross, but editorial ran a negative review. Within a very short time that review disappeared from the Web site. 

A blogger asked Variety publisher Brian Gott what was going on, only to be allegedly told, “Unfortunately Variety does not comment on internal matters. I hope you understand.”  A “No” would have been far more forceful!

Most media take a “Holier Than Thou” oath when it comes to the Chinese Wall between editorial reviews and advertising. Yet how many times have you noticed in a daily or weekly that there is a positive review for a restaurant and on that very same page there is an ad for that restaurant – pure coincidence and neither advertising nor editorial knew what the other was doing?

Let’s face it, none of us want to be the subject negative reviews, especially from reviewers who can be particularly nasty. The Guardian in the UK a couple of years ago  ran some examples of clever review comments taken from UK papers  that might make us chuckle, but if you were the recipient would you think the reviewer had gone too far (we’ve removed the name of the establishment and the reviewer to protect the guilty):

• “I may not be able to call it the worst cooking in Britain, but that's only because I haven't eaten in every restaurant in the land."
• "Occasionally, you come across a restaurant that causes you to question the very nature of human existence."
• "All things considered, quite the worst restaurant in London, maybe the world ... It serves horrendous food, grudgingly, in a dining room that is a museum to Italian waiters' taste circa 1976."
• "The taste and texture of the pease pudding reminded me of occasions when I have accidentally inhaled while emptying the Dyson (vacuum cleaner)."
• It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine anyone conjuring up a restaurant where the food in its mediocrity comes so close to inedible."
• "What I only go through. How I suffer. The food is grotesque, so awful as to be almost indescribable and an absolute disgrace."
  

Restaurants do try and get their own back, often threatening lawsuits unless a there’s a second kinder review. But sometimes it does get to court and it was only three years ago that a jury in Northern Ireland fed real fear into the stomachs of UK restaurant reviewers when it awarded £25,000 to a pizza restaurant owner who had sued over an unkind review in the Irish Times.

The Court of Appeals overturned the award a few months later on a technicality saying the original trial judge had misdirected the jury, and the appeals court later refused the restaurant owner to appeal to the highest court of the land – the House of Lords. But for a while there, reviewers digested very special legal attention to what they wrote.

No doubt at Yelp, sales people have been cautioned again to be very careful in what they say, too.

See also...

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