Mike Stein

www.yelp.com
Yelp is a Web 2.0 version of citysearch – a peer reviewed method of finding interesting, or useful, things in a city. Founded as a means of getting a recommendation for local dentists in the San Francisco area, it has social interaction baked into it from the ground up. Its very purpose is to get people to talk about what they like and don’t like in a city, in order to help others navigate.

Since Yelp’s usefulness depends on members being socially active, it uses numerous methods to encourage socializing.

The most easily used, and therefore the most common, of these methods are compliment badges. When reading any review on Yelp, a user can easily leave a compliment badge for the reviewer. By clicking on the “compliment” link in a review, a small box opens up with compliment badges to choose from. These are little icons that express a sentiment about the reviewer, or the review - things like “you’re cool”, “thank you”, “good writer”, etc. Each one has a little message field where the complimenter can write their own message, or use the pre-written message.

By making it incredibly easy to leave these compliments for people (you don’t need to navigate to a separate page to do so, which doesn’t interrupt what you’re doing), users don’t have to think much about making a connection with somebody. The pre-written messages in the text boxes are generally funny enough to be used without changing, so the complimenter doesn’t need to take time to come up with their own words. From personal experience, a decently written review receives compliments quickly, which encourages more reviewing.

Another highly effective means of encouraging social interaction is the Elite Status. Prolific members of the Yelp community are rewarded with “Elite” status. Elite status carries with it 3 perks – a special “Elite” badge that is visible on the member’s profile, a Yelp Elite shirt, and invitations to Yelp Elite parties. The last is by far the most important of the rewards. Yelp takes it’s most prolific members, gives them free food and booze, and puts them in a room to socialize. At these events, members get to know each other in person. When they leave these events, they keep in touch with each other – through Yelp.

Elite status is rewarded based on a number of criteria, including how helpful the member has been to other members. This system directly rewards members who’ve reached out to contact others.

A third trick Yelp uses to encourage socializing is local fame. The best example of this is the Review Of The Day. Every day, one review is selected to be the Review of The Day. This is posted front and center on the main page of the site, and is guaranteed to attract attention and compliments to the reviewer’s profile. The potential to receive Review Of The Day, and the fame that comes with it, encourages members to write more reviews, and to write more entertaining reviews.

Local fame is also evident in the weekly newsletter emails that Yelp sends out. Each one has a theme (last weeks was “hotdogs around L.A.”, the week before was “best places to buy used clothes”). These are filled with names of members, such as “Yelper BabyFace prefers to get his hot dogs at Pinks”, so an active member may find themselves being specifically mentioned in front of the yelp community. This has the same effect as the Review Of The Day.

Yelp also has a standard message board set up, with various categories for members to post in. It’s a very active board, but the most surprising are the Unofficial Yelp Events, or UYE, postings. These are calls for Yelpers to get together in real life, but aren’t being organized by the Yelp site. This means that the socializing that has begun on the Yelp site with casual compliments has spilled over in to real life relationships.

The previously mentioned means of social encouragement are all obvious, active methods – they’re noticeable to the user as methods to encourage socializing, and they require some form of special action to use. Yelp has an incredibly powerful passive method to encourage socializing, too - It is an incredibly useful site with a self selecting community. The first means that there is a reason beyond socializing to use the site. The second means that that the reviews that people read are generally well written, and encourage people to stick around the site.

The community is self selecting because, in order to be active in Yelp, you have to be willing to write a review that is going to be publicly visible. I have yet to find a Yelp review that is mired in “L33t SP34K”. By maintaining this level of discourse, people aren’t scared away by idiosyncratic language.

If I wanted to increase the socializing aspects of yelp, I would more directly link the forums with what’s happening elsewhere on the site. Currently, the forums are completely disjoint, other than the link to them on the front page. I’ve found that I have to consciously make a decision to go there, which means that the socializing aspect isn’t as natural as it could be. To fix this, I might add a ticker tape somewhere on the yelp page, which displays headers from recent forum posts. If this were active everywhere on the site, it’d be a great invitation to jump from the review section to the talk section. To make it useful (and to not compromise the reason for the site’s existence), the ticker could be key worded to whatever review I was looking at, similar to the way gmail serves up ads based around the email contact. So, if I were looking at a review of a bar, I’d see headlines from posts like “Where’s the best place to drink on the West Side”, and so on.