How Business Owners Are Gaming Yelp And Costing Other Businesses Millions A Year

Recently, a business owner friend I know shared with me something his competitors are doing, basically costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

Yelp does a very poor job, unlike say Amazon, to authenticate their reviews.

Effectively allowing any soul with an IP address to damage the reputation, strategically*, of any other business.

So my friends competition is running around wildly writing reviews, using NinjaCloak to fool Yelp into thinking it is a different reviewer every time. They are even buying accounts from people who have been Yelp users for years, and using those accounts to write positive and negative reviews about businesses.

Why it is companies like Yelp are slow to innovate is simple. When I spoke with a "low level" employee yesterday, a salesman who was very helpful, I shared with him a way that the review system can be a LOCKED SYSTEM - UNGAMEABLE.

His response was, "yeah that is excellent but I would have no way to even know who to contact regarding that" I told him that if I was the CEO, I would be sitting right beside him, coaching, learning, trying to better the business using insight from everyone. Even ask the janitor about important things.

Apparently Yelp hasn't heard about DevOps - A simple philosophy that involves operations with development *burp*

Their failure in the first place to consider fixing this themselves says a lot about their company.