YELPING!

YELPING! Yelp.com is a web site where one can click on a particular city, (Chicago is my favorite city in the world, but others might say Paris) and get user reviews and recommendations of restaurants, shopping, nightlife, entertainment, services, hotels and even doctors. The basic concept is a blend of need and knowledge. One consumer needs to learn about a particular business and a previous user of that business has knowledge to share. But one person’s impressions of a business might not be the same impression I would experience; so why should I care what a stranger (even though so many people claim they are my friend when I don’t even know who they are) has to say? (They were probably treated like a regular person; I always get special treatment.) I believe experts and my friends only. (I have the best group of friends!) Last week I had lunch with Joe Aguilera VP of sales of the new Elysian Hotel at 11 E. Walton. (Magnificent property and fabulous food!) I asked him about the marketing plan for the hotel and he told me that besides public relations and advertising it included being involved in all the travel web sites. I told him I would not trust either a positive review (it might have been written by an employee themselves) or a negative view (might have been written by a recently dumped lover.) He assured me that he checks on the history of the person’s past reviews of other locations and how long they had been writing reviews before he believes what they have written. Just like a Chicago ward committeeman said to a young Abner Mikva, “we don’t want nobody, nobody sent,” I don’t care about a review written by anybody that is a nobody! (I am an elitist snob!)

In the wake of that conversation (very pleasant meeting during lunch where I ate the most delicious hamburger ever!), it was interesting to learn yesterday about the recently certified class-action lawsuit against Yelp involving businesses that claim they were being pressured to advertise on the site in exchange for getting negative reviews squashed.

Two law firms, Beck & Lee ( an elite business litigation firm where all the lawyers have graduated from Harvard or Yale) from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego (founder Gregory Weston has a nice looking picture posted on their web site) have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by Yelp. The plaintiff in the suit, Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc., a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, ( head veterinarian Dr. Greg Perrault really seems to love his English Mastiff, Hamster), is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by Yelp. Later sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.

The lawsuit, Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc, essentially alleges that the heavily funded start-up runs an "extortion scheme" and has "unscrupulous sales practices" in place to generate revenue, in which the company's employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.

According to the Citizen Media Law Project, (an exciting new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help), “In particular, the complaint alleges that Yelp advertising employees systematically call business owners that are the subject of negative reviews and promise to remove or relocate negative reviews in exchange for monthly advertising deals. It further alleges that members of the class were "threatened, implicitly or expressly, that if they did not purchase advertising from Yelp, their Yelp.com pages would be detrimentally manipulated, including for example, by removing positive reviews and posting new, negative reviews." The complaint relies heavily on press accounts detailing complaints from other businesses about the alleged extortionate behavior. “

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman responded with a two-part blog post (

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/02/lady-justice-needs-a-lawsuit-filter.html vigorously disputing the allegations, saying that the plaintiff’s claims are "false" and "ignore empirical evidence in favor of conspiracy theories." In part 2 of the blog post (http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/03/additional-thoughts-on-last-weeks-lawsuit-or-how-a-conspiracy-theory-is-born-.html), Stoppelman stated that "we have never and will never extort businesses; the accusation is beyond ludicrous," and offered an explanation of why some business owners might get the wrong impression.

So whose review of the lawsuit should we believe? Both sides have given their opinions, but only one can be correct. I am going with the vet hospital and the owner of the English Mastiff. The mastiff is described as having a behavior that reflects a combination of dignity and courage. That kind of appraisal beats an evaluation of Stoppleman who was named one of San Francisco’s “Dashing Dudes” and then posted a positive review of himself on Yelp.