I’m tired of hearing about the economy being the cause for poor merchant sales. The economy may be part of the reason for decreased revenue, but only a part.
On her blog yesterday, Becky McCray shared two social networking sites that already provide business owners a one-two punch of free online advertisements and voluntary customer reviews and ratings, but how many companies know about them?
With its motto, Real People, Real Reviews, Yelp promotes economic development by providing people the ability to create a free account and rate and review businesses of all sizes and genres, though focusing on restaurants and retailers. Residents of my city, Newburyport, and the surrounding region, routinely rate and review the best and worst places in a crowd-sourcing effort to advise and warn future patrons.
From a tourism angle, TripAdvisor is best known for enabling the rating and reviewing of lodging accommodations, restaurants, and other cultural heritage landmarks. It’s not used so much by residents as by tourists. The infrequency of dates for recent reviews, in contrast to the popularity of its cousin Yelp, is partially indicative of ignorance by business owners.
Case in point: The Purple Onion
Known by its trademark purple onions added to salads, sandwiches, wraps, and soups, this Newburyport location on the pedestrian-only Inn Street is busy during lunch hours. When I used to work at City Hall, I walked to the Onion several times a week for scrumptious meals served at reasonable prices.
Yelpers reviewed the Purple Onion 12 times between December 2006 and January 2009. I wrote a mini-review and gave it five stars in February 2008.
Because I attach my real name to everything I do online, I found myself surprised a few weeks later when the Purple Onion manager recognized my name and offered me a complimentary side order of chips and salsa. He didn’t have to offer me anything, but he wanted to thank me for my review. I appreciated that.
TripAdvisor provides a different perspective, indicating the organic food eatery is ranked 17th out of 67 Newburyport restaurants in their database. You can see there are two reviews from last year.
I don’t know how sales are faring at the Purple Onion, but imagine if the restaurant owner (who already has a website that is frequently updated) also claims the Yelp and TripAdvisor entries? By claiming it, photos and videos can be uploaded for free.
Why assume someone will use a search engine to find a restaurant? What if someone is a tourist–or a resident looking for a new place to eat–and uses one of these (or some other social networking) sites? Shouldn’t the goal of business be to cater to the customer?
Yes, the economy is causing frustrations for business owners, but by implementing some high-level internet strategies, suffering revenues have a greater chance of increasing. Especially if people are already talking, rating, and reviewing.
Photo credit: anataman
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Related posts:
- Sneak Peek of Business Comments on Yelp
- When Personal Branding Fails
- How I’ll Help the Kindred Spirits in Newburyport
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 6 comments }
Ari, excellent article! I’m proud that my little bit provided some inspiration.
Love both of these sites. People aren’t eating out as often right now, which means the restaurant/bar industry (like many others) is taking a hit. It’s always been a competitive business, and now more than ever. As always, the businesses with strong, loyal (and now vocal and social online) customers will reign.
Jen Wilbur´s last blog post..pig pile on lily
I have almost similar experience with Yelp (I also use Yelp every time before I visit a new restaurant). I review (almost) every restaurant, store, and other businesses I patronize. I give great reviews, where they are due, but I also leave fiery detailed ones for places that fail to do a good job. I know for a fact that some restaurants make changes to their service based on those reviews.
Tripadvisor is the place my wife frequents a lot.
In my opinion, organizations should pay great attention to those kind of sites, because it is one of the cheapest ways for them to see what their customers really think.
Yelp may be the best or worst thing to happen to local restaurants depending on their quality. People like basic reviews, and while zagat and other forms will always be huge with PR, yelp is great for more local joints. That’s so cool the owner recognized you and offered a free side. Really cool on his part and smart as well, keeps you going back. Restaurants owners should be active with yelp, can help a lot. May not have a huge boost, but a little affect that can help is always good.
While I have only posted a couple of reviews, I always consult Yelp before visiting a new retaurant, and rely significantly on the recomendations. I think Yelp is a great tool to remind restaurant owners of critical things like customer service, and to get valuable feedback that will in turn help them stay profitable.
An example – There is a restaurant near me with incredible food, but the service was horrendous. The owner acted as though patrons should be grateful he was serving them. His 30+ Yelp reviews reflected that. I can’t say for sure if that was the eye-opener, but recently the servers have been incredibly nice and friendly – customer service is now much better.
I am a big user of both Yelp and TripAdvisor – although I probably read the reviews more often than I post them (testimony to more planning than doing?). Several times I have gone on trips and reviewed restaurants on TripAdvisor afterwards to try and “make it more complete” (i.e. useful to me and my fellow travelers). I experienced the same thing as Ari (limited number of reviews). I reviewed several locally popular New Orleans restaurants after a trip and was surprised to see how differently they were ranked even though many had the same number of reviews (which was one or two) – weird. One thing that Yelp does “right” is allow URL’s and other info to be put in on a business. That is a huge time-saver for me the consumer/user/content creator. Trip Advisor drives me crazy because of the lack of URLs (which I presume is due to their business model – I am guessing that businesses have to pay and many choose not to do so). To Ari’s point, it would be good for the businesses to recognize the value of Trip Advisor. It would also be good for Trip Advisor to recognize how it fails the consumers on whom it depends for growth of the site by making it hard for them to get this info. I routinely have multiple browser windows open to go check out the website of boutique hotels or the boutique dogsled vendor in Iceland. (I think that is the problem – TripAdvisor works well for the big chains – for the boutique and smaller hotels and guesthouses, it may work for the savvy business, but not the others). I have found great info in the TripAdvisor Forums that has sent me off site to do more research. In terms of businesses being able to comment on reviews, that is a feature that TripAdvisor uses that I find helpful. It will be good for Yelp businesses to be able to comment.
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