There’s nothing wrong with Yelp in theory – it’s a good place to test the waters a bit regarding places you’ve never been – but sometimes the site’s loyalists can get out of control, assuming that the world of food service revolves around their assessments. I’ve heard stories locally of Yelpers threatening restaurant owners that they’ll write a nasty review online if they don’t get some sort of special treatment, which probably doesn’t happen often, but still is a symptom of a userbase that overestimates its influence.
However, it turns out that Yelp might be more of a hivemind than anything else, since only a small percentage of restaurant decisions are made because of online information and only a fraction of those are influenced by review sites:
But at this point, online marketing influences only 6 percent of restaurant choices, the survey found. That’s for all types of online marketing.
On the one hand, that’s a small piece of the overall dining-out pie. On the other hand, that 6 percent translates into 926 million restaurant visits. That’s a lot of restaurant seats filled from online marketing efforts.
Within this relatively small realm of online-marketing influence, what gets diners excited and into the car to go eat out? The top decider: Good old-fashioned deals and special offers, which drove more than one-third of the decisions on where to eat out, NPD found….
What happened with online reviews and recommendations? They turn up a distant fourth, influencing only 14 percent of diners who saw online marketing campaigns, nearly tied with simple information on a restaurant’s location, which helped 13 percent of diners decide where to go.
This article appears in Jul 12-18, 2012.
And, if you’re a business owner who gets a bad review published by someone who lies about what happens…even if you rebutt it, you can’t do anything about it. Yelp seizes the opportunity to sell you advertising. “If you buy, we can help you out with the bad reviews” is what a friend and business owner was told.
What percentage is influenced by restaurant reviews and Noshing Around in The Weekly? I’d imagine it’s not much more than that 14%… and so what? For some people (myself included), if it’s more than 0, it’s worth doing.
There are very useful reviews on Yelp. But when someone recounts every detail of the restaurant and every word exchanged between them and the hired help, and goes on to pick apart every last detail of every visual, olfactory, tactile, auditory and gustatory stimulus, I tend to think the reviewer has more wrong with them than the restaurant does.
Newsflash; no one cares that no one cares. No one cares that you don’t care. No one cares. Period.