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Posts Tagged ‘Yelp’

How Good Groupon Leads to Bad Yelp

A paper by Georgios Zervas, John Byers, and Michael Mitzenmacher explores the relationship between a Groupon surge (like when a small bakery has to make 100,000 cupcakes) and a drop in Yelp ratings. Tim Worstall at Forbes explains:

Imagine that you are an enthusiastic and regular consumer of the finest chimichangas that you can find. You’ll likely have scoped out your neighbourhood, tested the chimichangas on offer and zeroed in on those places that make excellent ones. You might even provide reviews on Yelp pointing other enthusiasts for the comestible so as to guide them to the good places.


Not the Kind of Customer Review You Read Every Day

You never know what you’ll run across while reading Yelp. While sussing out Philadelphia hotels, I came across this review:

First of all, let me just say that, if you can get a room, this is an excellent hotel. Don’t let the fact that a transgendered prostitute was arrested for killing an occupant here and tried setting fire to his room in November 2010. As with any hotel, you should be careful who you let into your room anyway.

The reviewer gave the hotel four stars out of five. It wasn’t the murder (which, though I was skeptical, was for real) that led him to deduct a star, but rather the low water pressure and bad hours at the fitness center.
And you wonder why companies are still nervous about the whole customer-review concept?