No question that Yelp’s content network is incredibly robust and that the hive generally does a good job of giving you a decent picture of what you can expect from a business.
But Yelp is not without its problems. In fact, you might actually read an entire review or series of reviews from people word for word and get burned for not doing enough analysis. I call this the “Hamburger Sushi Problem”.
Say you want sushi and that you are a person with a very discerning sushi palette. Well, what if your read reviews about a place that made amazing sushi, got a 4 stars in aggregate and had very positive reviews and stories from most reviewers. You would go there with confidence.
But what happens when it turns out that this place does not live up to your expectations and the sushi, in spite of the descriptions by the people who reviewed the restaurant was in fact terrible.
If you are me, you would dig a little deeper and try and figure out what happened. At this particular restaurant, I discovered that the people who gave the reviews were not at all qualified to review sushi. In fact, all of their other reviews were for hamburgers, burritos and other fast food. This was the fast food lover’s sushi joint. (Most of it was tempura-fied which they failed to even mention)
No question that Yelp has robust content. Here are a few ways that Yelp could help us be even more confident in their reviews from a segmentation perspective.
- Frequency Segment: We need a way to be able to tell if a person has been there more than one time. Checkins may not be reliable enough unless Yelp is willing to pull in Gowalla, foursquare and other checkin systems.
- Cuisine Segment: Segmenting users by the kinds of food they review and love would be extremely helpful. This would tell me how reliable they are in a particular kind of cuisine.
- Influencer Model: The “Whrrl” influencer model would be excellent here. Simply +1-ing a tip or a recommendation can tell people what kind of reviewer this is. You could tell me that people who like sushi like the person’s reviews. I could also tell if this person resonates more with the hamburger or burrito bunch. Not that that’s a bad thing, just that it is true.
What would you do to improve Yelp?
