Thinking Out Loud: Yelp Helps Those Way Beyond Lawrence Welk
What We’re Seeing: If AngiesList.com is the homeowner’s new friend for finding trustworthy service help, then Yelp is its hip, younger sister – an opinionated, often outrageous guide to everything outside those four walls. Get out of the house, condo, or apartment, and there’s a city just asking to be enjoyed in all its urban glory. And Yelp helps you make the most of it.
Yelp began in San Francisco in 2004 and now is spreading like wildfire, its users providing the entertaining fuel with their opinions, rankings, comments, and tall tales. Yelp first looked most like a hip CitySearch, a restaurant review site that could provide a range of opinions on the food, the setting, the wait staff, and whether too much gum was accumulating on the sidewalk outside. Spurred by and somewhat directed by its users, it’s growing into vast city guides and now counts 24 cities, eight of them in California. Yes, it’s got L.A., but it has also has Santa Monica. Yes, it has San Francisco, but it also has Palo Alto. Yes, it’s got NYC, but it also has Brooklyn. Its users have a keen sense of place, and we all benefit from it. Its categories are all built around going out and doing things, including "fitness and instruction, parks, golf, amusement parks, bowling, bike rentals, amateur sports team, boating, zoos, skating rinks," and lots more.
Yelp knows its audience. Six out of 10 are age 26-35, with lots of disposable income. Yelp picked up $5 million in funding from Bessemer Ventures last fall and is now getting serious about advertising. It is reaching a critical mass, with more than 100,000 user-generated reviews overall. Read through the listings and you can see enough comments about local restaurants, rinks, and roller coasters that you get a good sense of whether they are for you. And that is what Yelp is about. It’s for certain kinds of "people like me," self-defined, but able to be corralled into categories that advertisers will love.
Heather Maddan’s June piece in the San Francisco Chronicle offers an in-depth sense of the site’s organic beginnings and trust-the-community sensibilities.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Yelp is a mash-up of beginning success. It literally mashes up Google Maps – creating Yelp Map-Tastic! – an indispensable, fun guide to your city experience. It also takes the mashing notion further, making it a disruptive force to "professional" reviewers of all kinds, from Consumer Reports to Ebert and Roeper to your local newspaper restaurant critic. In empowering users and creating community, it brings together social networking and community guide sensibilities and services in a new way.
The message for professionals is this: what you do is good and useful, but no longer enough. Outsell believes that professional reviewing has a place – at least for certain demographics at certain times – but that all Web users will want wider opinions. The views of "people like us," whoever we are, have always been important. Word-of-mouth has always been our best friend. Now the Web has revolutionized and perfected word-of-mouth.
The messages for publishers are clear:
- Ignore the power of the informed amateur at great peril.
- Move faster on incorporating user-generated content into your own sites.
- Loosen up. Look up Yelp. It has rules of user engagement, but they are not so tight as to turn users away. Learning how to hold loose reins is key as new products hit the road.
- If your core differentiator is local, put Ajax mapping, like Yelp’s, front and center and connect all your own relevant information to it.