BrandsAmongMany

On my quick, first-thing-in-the-morning perusal of Twitter, one of the tweets that caught my eye was from @notcot:

Of course, you throw “extortion/mafia” in front of anything social web related and you’re going to have mouths running and attention gathering. Twitter converstaion about Yelp!, the SF-based user-review company, has skyrocketed this morning in the wake of an article published in the East Bay Express. In the article, author Kathleen Richards (who you can email here) blasts Yelp! for actions that make it something of a web-based mafia family, eliciting payment for the removal of poor reviews and bullish tactics around advertising sales…

when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: “We can move them. Well, for $299 a month.”

As expected, the article prompted a quick response from Yelp! CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. Jeremy goes out of his way to refute the claims by citing an advertiser who’s profile includes a bad review. He also questions the validity of Richards’ sources, claiming the value of anonymous sources is suspect in general.

(Whew! Now the scene is set…) So what can we take from all of this (without hopping on the finger-pointing bandwagon)? A couple of things…

The situation does bring to light an interesting question around the power of a successful “2.0″ company like Yelp!. The power of those companies is the expectation of visitors that the information they’ll find there is truly generated from others like themselves. Start to break down that system, and you’ve muddied the waters. The idea of a “web 2.0″ mafia - a site or collection of sites that have enough power to actually threaten or change the value of what we find in a socially connected digital world - is downright scary.

Perhaps this is the reason behind the talks of Google being taken apart for monopolistic practices. A friend made a very good point about Google’s future as one of the most powerful media companies in the world, especially over the next decade as data becomes both the currency and analytic tool of choice. Not that I’m making any claims about supporting the plan - at least not without a lot more research.

The other question at hand is one of those “how would you have handled it?” moments. I can’t say that I’m particularly impressed by Jeremy’s statements. His blog post comes off as extremely defensive and, worse-yet, not particularly well thought out. (I don’t personally see the point he’s trying to make by calling out this advertiser unless it’s simply that even paid advertisers can garner poor reviews.) All it seems to do is add confusion and fuel to the fire rather than make me believe in Yelp! as a business. Which is a shame, given that Yelp! is one of the older social sites out there. One would think that they’d be in a position to set the bar for the way companies handle trying times.