Yelp has plenty of restaurant reviews and OpenTable lets you make reservations at many of those restaurants. Well, now you can make those OpenTable reservations directly from the Yelp website. A perfectly logical union. [NYT] More »
OpenTable – Food – Recreation – Dining Guides – United States
Check out the rest: Gizmodo
Facebook introduced some pretty impressive features at its f8 conference on Wednesday, including the social graph API, which will unleash a tidal wave of “like” plugins across the web, as well as a graph protocol to allow searching of status updates. All of this was predicted by many (including Om) in the lead-up to the conference. But one thing that virtually everyone expected was missing: a location-related feature for the network, or at the very least, the integration of location-based services. Location was supposed to be one of the biggest announcements made at the conference, something Facebook telegraphed in its recent privacy changes. So what happened?
Facebook hasn’t said why it changed its mind about launching location features (if it did in fact change its mind). I’ve got a request in to the company for comment, and will update this post if I hear back. But here are some of the leading possibilities:
Of all these potential explanations, the last option seems the most plausible. For one thing, Yelp was heavily featured in Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote as a partner on the new social graph API features, and it’s unlikely that he would do that if Facebook were going to turn around and eat Yelp’s lunch on some location offering. Venture fund Elevation Partners — which has reportedly acquired a stake recently in Facebook via the secondary market for employee shares — is also a financial backer of Yelp, and would likely favor a partnership (maybe that’s part of the reason Yelp walked away from a Google acquisition deal). Roger McNamee of Elevation is also said to be an important mentor of Zuckerberg’s.
Facebook may have plenty of hubris when it comes to dominating social activity on the web, but I think it’s more likely that the company will opt to federate with or integrate services from Foursquare, Gowalla and others such as Yelp, rather than trying to duplicate them. It’s true that the network could simply add location awareness through its mobile apps, the same way Twitter has added the ability to tag tweets — but it would be just as easy, and would still allow Facebook to become the one ring for location, if it allowed other services to use its social graph API and then aggregated and mined the data.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Yesterday at Facebook’s f8 conference, the company launched tools for any web site to add a social layer by bringing over Facebook friend connections. These social plugins are available to any web developer and use a simple piece of code to add a Facebook frame onto a page and instantly make that page social. So, for example, if you visit CNN.com, you could see what news stories your friends liked and shared there.
CNN doesn’t actually see that happening — to them it’s just a box they leave open on their site for Facebook to populate — but it’s presumably happy because users get a more personal experience and stick around longer. And users don’t get identified for simply visiting a site; they have to login to Facebook through a dialog box for their presence and activities to be shared with their Facebook friends.
Ta-da! It’s personal
Facebook also introduced a way for certain sites to push this further than everyone else. Three carefully chosen launch partners — Microsoft’s Docs.com, Yelp and Pandora — have access to what Facebook is calling “instant personalization.” This is a powerful, inventive and creepy tool that the company hopes to extend to other partners but is testing the waters with these three first.
Instant personalization means that if you show up to the Internet radio site Pandora for the first time, it will now be able to look directly at your Facebook profile and use public information — name, profile picture, gender and connections, plus anything else you’ve made public — to give you a personalized experience. So if I have already publicly stated through my Facebook interests page that I like a musical artist — say, The Talking Heads — the first song I hear when I go to Pandora will be a Talking Heads song or something that Pandora thinks is similar.
The idea is that Pandora is a somewhat hard concept to explain to new users — before it existed, people didn’t have their own personalized radio stations based on similarities between artists and song. Now, new users will derive value from Pandora before they even sign up. The first time they load the page it will be to their favorite music.
This new sign-up customization has the biggest privacy implications of everything Facebook did yesterday. Until now, when you browsed the web, it was safe to assume you were anonymous until you actively logged into a site. But in recent years, behavioral advertisers have started following us around as we browse, using cookies about where we’ve been to customize ad on new pages we visit. (So if I’ve been shopping on Kayak for an upcoming trip, I might get ads about similar flights and travel destinations showing up on a page I visit later that day.) In the post-f8 world, when you show up to Yelp having never been there before, the page will now show a feed of restaurants and stores that your Facebook friends have liked and reviewed using Yelp before you go there.
I spoke with Facebook platform engineering lead Mike Vernal at f8 yesterday about instant personalization after having trouble grokking the concept when CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw it in as a “one last thing” during his f8 keynote. Vernal described the goal as to create a “magical” experience for users. However, he said Facebook is well-aware that these privileges could be abused. “We’ve very cognizant of balancing building great user experiences and respecting privacy,” was how Vernal put it.
Vernal said Facebook has not finalized any plans for allowing additional sites into the instant personalization program. Users are also able to opt out entirely with a new option at the bottom of the list on their privacy settings page. And further, if they want to prevent their friends from sharing their information with an instant personalization partner, users must block that specific application individually. Multiple Facebook employees told me the company was unsure about how to label the sensitive product and which partners were launching on it until the last minute.
I made this just for you
The problem is, users aren’t accustomed to instantly personal services, and we have no idea where that personal information is coming from. Going back to the relatively benign social plugins from the beginning of this story, it probably won’t be obvious to the casual visitor to CNN.com that CNN doesn’t know anything about the story recommendations Facebook is providing. To most of us, it will look like CNN knows who we are. And further, arriving on a brand-new web site that instantly knows who you are might be ultimately useful, but the first time it happens you’re going to freak out.
Facebook’s way of addressing that is by placing an icon in every social plugin that leads back to an explanation on Facebook, and layering a big blue bar on top of the three sites — again, Microsoft’s Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp — that are getting the special treatment. So when I go to Yelp today I’m greeted right up front with: “Hi Liz. Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience. Learn More – No Thanks.” That’s fine, but the fact is, this tool is designed to help users become acquainted with sites they’ve never been to before. So the experience is necessarily going to be foreign.
I recently signed up for a new web photo service giving an email address and password. When I went to fill out my profile, there was already a picture of me staring back. Whoa. That’s useful, I guess — I didn’t have to find a headshot to upload yet again — but it weirded me out. It turned out the site was probably using Automattic’s Gravatar, to match my email with my profile pic. Clearly, Facebook’s not the only platform that wants to enable shortcuts to make my new web experiences better — expect this instant personalization to catch on, if users and privacy advocates don’t revolt and drive the company to drop the feature. We saw that happen with a cousin of this product, Facebook Beacon, three years ago.
But if my Facebook stream is any indication, some users have already caught onto this latest privacy tweak. Here’s one message making the rounds:
“Do NOT forget to OPT OUT of the new FB Instant Personalization sillyness. Under your Privacy Settings so 3rd parties cannot collect your personal data. Account–>Privacy Settings–>Applications & Websites–>@bottom is the Instant Personalization thing–>Uncheck Allow.”
But then, lots of people just hate change; every Facebook redesign, ever, has been protested. And so, like Facebook, we’ll have to wait to see how much instant personalization freaks people out.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
How Facebook Should Fix Its Privacy Problem
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Yesterday at Facebook’s f8 conference, the company launched tools (including social plugins) for any web site to add a social layer by bringing over Facebook friend connections. These tools are available to any web developer and use a simple piece of code to add a Facebook frame onto a page and instantly make that page social.So, for example, if you’re on CNN.com, you could see what news stories your friends liked and shared there.
CNN doesn’t actually see that happening — to them it’s just a box they leave open on their site for Facebook to populate — but it’s presumably happy because users get a more personal experience and stick around longer. And users don’t get identified for simply visiting a site; they have to login to Facebook through a dialog box for their presence and activities to be shared with their Facebook friends. Now if this was all, one would say all well and good. [Digg]
Ta-da! It’s personal
However, Facebook did introduce a way for certain sites to push this further than everyone else. Three carefully chosen launch partners — Microsoft’s Docs.com, Yelp and Pandora — have access to what Facebook is calling “instant personalization.” This is a powerful, inventive and creepy tool that the company hopes to extend to other partners but is testing the waters with these three first.
Instant personalization means that if you show up to the Internet radio site Pandora for the first time, it will now be able to look directly at your Facebook profile and use public information — name, profile picture, gender and connections, plus anything else you’ve made public — to give you a personalized experience. So if I have already publicly stated through my Facebook interests page that I like a musical artist — say, The Talking Heads — the first song I hear when I go to Pandora will be a Talking Heads song or something that Pandora thinks is similar.
The idea is that Pandora is a somewhat hard concept to explain to new users — before it existed, people didn’t have their own personalized radio stations based on similarities between artists and song. Now, new users will derive value from Pandora before they even sign up. The first time they load the page it will be to their favorite music.
This new sign-up customization has the biggest privacy implications of everything Facebook did yesterday. Until now, when you browsed the web, it was safe to assume you were anonymous until you actively logged into a site. But in recent years, behavioral advertisers have started following us around as we browse, using cookies about where we’ve been to customize ad on new pages we visit. (So if I’ve been shopping on Kayak for an upcoming trip, I might get ads about similar flights and travel destinations showing up on a page I visit later that day.) In the post-f8 world, when you show up to Yelp having never been there before, the page will now show a feed of restaurants and stores that your Facebook friends have liked and reviewed using Yelp before you go there.
I spoke with Facebook platform engineering lead Mike Vernal at f8 yesterday about instant personalization after having trouble grokking the concept when CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw it in as a “one last thing” during his f8 keynote. Vernal described the goal as to create a “magical” experience for users. However, he said Facebook is well-aware that these privileges could be abused. “We’ve very cognizant of balancing building great user experiences and respecting privacy,” was how Vernal put it.
Vernal said Facebook has not finalized any plans for allowing additional sites into the instant personalization program. Users are also able to opt out entirely with a new option at the bottom of the list on their privacy settings page. And further, if they want to prevent their friends from sharing their information with an instant personalization partner, users must block that specific application individually. Multiple Facebook employees told me the company was unsure about how to label the sensitive product and which partners were launching on it until the last minute.
I made this just for you
The problem is, users aren’t accustomed to instantly personal services, and we have no idea where that personal information is coming from. Going back to the relatively benign social plugins from the beginning of this story, it probably won’t be obvious to the casual visitor to CNN.com that CNN doesn’t know anything about the story recommendations Facebook is providing. To most of us, it will look like CNN knows who we are. And further, arriving on a brand-new web site that instantly knows who you are might be ultimately useful, but the first time it happens you’re going to freak out.
Facebook’s way of addressing that is by placing an icon in every social plugin that leads back to an explanation on Facebook, and layering a big blue bar on top of the three sites — again, Microsoft’s Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp — that are getting the special treatment. So when I go to Yelp today I’m greeted right up front with: “Hi Liz. Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience. Learn More – No Thanks.” That’s fine, but the fact is, this tool is designed to help users become acquainted with sites they’ve never been to before. So the experience is necessarily going to be foreign.
I recently signed up for a new web photo service giving an email address and password. When I went to fill out my profile, there was already a picture of me staring back. Whoa. That’s useful, I guess — I didn’t have to find a headshot to upload yet again — but it weirded me out. It turned out the site was probably using Automattic’s Gravatar, to match my email with my profile pic. Clearly, Facebook’s not the only platform that wants to enable shortcuts to make my new web experiences better — expect this instant personalization to catch on, if users and privacy advocates don’t revolt and drive the company to drop the feature. We saw that happen with a cousin of this product, Facebook Beacon, three years ago.
But if my Facebook stream is any indication, some users have already caught onto this latest privacy tweak. Here’s one message making the rounds:
“Do NOT forget to OPT OUT of the new FB Instant Personalization sillyness. Under your Privacy Settings so 3rd parties cannot collect your personal data. Account–>Privacy Settings–>Applications & Websites–>@bottom is the Instant Personalization thing–>Uncheck Allow.”
But then, lots of people just hate change; every Facebook redesign, ever, has been protested. And so, like Facebook, we’ll have to wait to see how much instant personalization freaks people out.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
How Facebook Should Fix Its Privacy Problem
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Facebook, with its open graph announcements at the f8 conference today, is digging itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. Outside developers and existing sites will now be able to hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly and persistently, keeping logs well beyond the previous limit of 24 hours.
Organizing the world’s information by powering it is clearly a direct affront to Google. Where Google observes links and relationships between web sites from a distance, Facebook aims to be the glue that connects the web itself. The implications are thrilling, but also scary — what if Facebook goes down?
The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already strong. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s director of product, at today’s keynote explained just how strong when speaking of his own struggle to grow FriendFeed, the real-time social company Facebook eventually acquired. Users who signed up for FriendFeed with Facebook Connect were four times more likely to become active than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.
But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can use Facebook’s social plugins to expose personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its “like” buttons.
Users now have the ability to express their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local restaurant — but by saying what web site represents it — say, a Yelp review page, instead of the official restaurant site. Web services would be silly not to participate.
As a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but ultimately be useful. As one Facebook engineer put it to me today, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be so sweet.”
In preparation for f8, a few Facebook employees hacked together examples of what outside developers could do given the new open graph tools. For instance, Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Say you’re one of those crazy MySpace devotees who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Great. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you want, uglify it to your heart’s content, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. You can imagine brands and small businesses might want to use this in lieu of a traditional web page.
Another demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a nice template and port in Facebook event information. Only users who are invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite (this is tricky, and wasn’t really figured out yet for the demo). If users are logged in to Facebook and have permitted access, they can RSVP, comment and see details as they would on the bland Facebook event page. The data itself is sent right back to Facebook. (Pictured above is a KlugePress skin on an older event from my own profile.)
By inviting developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling new opportunities — but also asking for an awful lot of trust.
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Facebook, as expected, launched its master plan to make the rest of the web social at its f8 conference in San Francisco today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and director of product Bret Taylor laid out three major initiatives to that effect.
The f8 launches expand on the concept of authenticating on sites using Facebook Connect — which reached 100 million users in its first 15 months — and sending back updates to the Facebook news feed. Most interestingly, Facebook will move from the idea of a transitory stream of actions to give outside sites persistent access to its users.
First, social plugins are little widgets that bring Facebook to the rest of the web. They offer “instant personalization,” said Taylor with the goal of increasing user engagement, using an iFrame and a cookie remembering the Facebook user. So when you visit a website, even if it’s new to you, you’ll which friends have also logged in there, what their activity is, and a set of recommendations based on their actions.
One action in particular will be closely tied back to Facebook: the like button. If you indicate you like an article, a band, a restaurant, really anything, a site using Facebook’s open graph protocol can create a persistent relationship with you around that content. Sites give Facebook semantic information around the thing you liked — for instance, the title, type, genre and city for a band you like on Pandora. Then that band goes straight to the favorite music section of your profile. Same thing happens if you like a movie on IMDB, another launch partner.
The objects that you like are first-order citizens on Facebook, said Taylor. So if another user hovers over that movie you liked, they see information brought from IMDB. A click goes back to the source. If a user searches for restaurants on Facebook, the top things that show up in Facebook’s own search could be restaurants your friends liked on Yelp. And the sites can communicate back directly to that specific subset of users who have liked something. So when Stanford football star Toby Gerhart gets drafted tomorrow, Bret Taylor could automatically see that information in his feed.
One application developed with this in mind is the new Docs.com from Microsoft, a web-based document editor available later today that will enable users to can see, edit and share with their Facebook friends. (This is an obvious team-up against Google Docs.)
Lastly, Facebook’s Graph API aims to make developing on its platform much simpler for the long haul. Every object on Facebook has now been given a easy to formulate unique ID. The API will allow sites to search user updates and get real-time updates every time a user adds a connection or posts on a wall. Developers, with permission, will be able to hold onto user data for more than 24 hours. And Facebook will be adopting the open authentication protocol OAuth.
Though these launches will clearly bring even more data under Facebook’s control, Zuckerberg said they signaled “for the first time a truly open graph.”
“The open graph puts people at the center of the web,” he said. “It means the web can become a series of personally and semantically meaningful connections.”
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Though Yelp steadfastly denies allegations — and now lawsuits — that its salespeople pressure local businesses to buy advertising in exchange for removing negative reviews and getting preferential treatment, the company tonight addressed them head-on. Specifically, it’s making two major product changes to become more transparent about its filtering process and give less favorable treatment to advertisers.
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in a blog post explaining the changes:
[M]ost importantly, you can see that Yelp’s review filter works just the same for advertisers and non-advertisers alike. There is not — nor ever has been — a bias. So will Yelp be easier to game now? No, our engineers remain hard at work to make sure that Yelp is the most useful and helpful online resource for everyone.
Yelp’s new transparent review filter
Yelp said it was also creating a Small Business Advisory Council, and it has already incorporated feedback from meetings with business owners, such as including advertiser videos on their profile pages (a feature that also launched today).
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
How Social Networks Could Help Yelp, Not Kill It
Check out the rest: GigaOM
It may not be the nicest-sounding phrase, but “user-generated content” has come to be the term we use for everything from Flickr photos and YouTube videos to blog comments, Twitter posts and reviews on Yelp or Amazon. Building a business that relies on content from your users sounds like a great idea, and in many cases has turned out to be exactly that — it’s usually cheaper than professionally produced content, for one thing (depending on what costs you include, of course). And many users care more deeply about the content they generate themselves than they do about the stuff that comes from the pros, which means deeper levels of engagement.
The problem with user-generated content, however, is the loss of control it involves. We’ve seen it play out in a hundred different ways, virtually everywhere that digital content appears, from the fight many news outlets are having over blog comments (which I wrote about on my personal blog this past weekend) to the issues that YouTube has had with repeated uploading of copyright-infringing videos. How do you get your users to generate the kind of content you want them to produce instead of the kind they want to produce?
Two recent examples of the downside of user-generated content come from Amazon and Yelp. The latter has been hit by repeated lawsuits from businesses alleging that negative reviews of their companies or retail outlets appeared after they turned down an offer from Yelp to advertise with the service. Yelp’s response, in part, has been that users post negative reviews for their own reasons, and that this is simply a function of how the service works (the Yelp blog has an official response to the lawsuits).
Likewise, Amazon has come under criticism recently for reviews of books that appear to have been posted by users who didn’t even read the book in question. As prominent investment writer and market strategist Barry Ritholtz described in a recent blog post, negative reviews of Michael Lewis’s latest book appeared before the book was even available on the market. “Considering the 1 star ratings/complaints about the Kindle edition were posted BEFORE THE BOOK was even released, they are utterly absurd,” he wrote. “Amazon needs to step up and delete these non-reviews of books. At the very least, they should not count in the book’s star ratings.”
In the Lewis case, the negative reviews appeared to be aimed at the publisher of the book, as retaliation for the fact that the book wasn’t released in digital format for the Kindle at the same time as the hardcover version. Ritholtz and other observers say these types of reviews routinely occur. They don’t seem to have any real purpose apart from simply registering a protest, since (as Ritholz points out) the behavior they’re criticizing is that of the publisher, not the author (though it’s the author who is harmed by a negative review).
The loss of control involved with user-generated content has its humorous side as well, of course, something that is best illustrated by another popular Amazon phenomenon: namely, the bizarrely hilarious comments that seem to spring to life on the most prosaic product reviews, including a cheesy T-shirt with a picture of three wolves on it (“unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather”) and a jug of Tuscan Whole Milk (“I always find it important to taste milk using high-quality stemware — this is milk deserving of something better than a Flintstones plastic tumbler”).
For companies like Amazon and Yelp (and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and plenty of others), user-generated content has created the mother of all catch-22s: It causes them untold amounts of misery and headaches on a daily basis, and yet without those users and the content they produce, many of these companies would be severely diminished — and in some cases wouldn’t exist at all. For better or worse, they are married to their users, and divorce is not an option.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user James Cridland
Check out the rest: GigaOM
I don’t trust Yelp any more. And that’s not a conscious decision. I’ve largely ignored the well-publicized allegations of how the ad side manipulated ratings and reviews to drive sales, instead continuing to turn to the site for recommendations on everything from restaurants to plumbers to airport parking. But they’ve nonetheless seeped into my subconscious and tarred my view of the service. Indeed, Yelp is learning that trust is a hard thing to win, but amazingly easy to lose. And that’s why it needs to be protected with the corporate equivalent of the Praetorian Guard.
Here’s what happened: The other day I was looking for a decent long-term lot at San Jose Airport; Yelp’s recommendation page was near the top of Google, so I clicked over to check it out. As usual, I scanned the top 3-4 results, then read through the reviews of the most likely suspects. Quick Park SJC, ranked No. 1, seemed to have everything I needed -– a rating of over 3, pretty decent reviews and a nearby location.
But then I started looking more closely at those reviews -– and noticed an interesting pattern: There were a few from the last month or so, then nothing for nearly a year. And the last of that group was complaining about how the lot had recently raised prices and had a bit of a surly shuttle driver problem.
So why the gap? I didn’t know, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure this was such a great place to park. So I clicked over to TripAdvisor to look for airport parking information there. Since I couldn’t find any — and I was admittedly in a hurry — I ended up selecting Quik Park SJC after all. But I was far less sanguine about my choice. Yelp, alas, was no longer in my inner circle of trust.
Which leads me to three key trust rules:
Got a Problem? Deal With It Quickly: I learned that the hard way during my early years running the test lab at PC Week in the 90s. We had a columnist, Will Zachman, who was an ardent proponent of an early Windows competitor from IBM called OS/2. Microsoft, in those days, advertised incessantly in tech magazines, and Zachman felt that his editor was shaping his OS/2 diatribes to please Microsoft. So he publicly declared independence from the magazine on July 4th, accusing members of the business side of leaping over the “wall” and smacking down the EIC until he censored Zachman’s opinions to appease their biggest advertiser. Zachman had been kvetching about his supposed “censoring” for some time leading up to his Independence Day action, but the editorial team just ignored him — until it was too late.
Notably, I never saw any evidence supporting his accusations. Which leads me to my second tip:
Manage Not Just the Facts, But the Perception: Lack of evidence aside, just the merest whiff of perceived bias was enough to tar us with a wide brush. It took us a long time to cast off that perception. And that’s why, about a year later, I immediately fired a junior lab staffer who falsified test results, and not for money or influence, but because he was being run ragged by an overbearing manager. He was young. Impressionable. He probably only deserved a warning. But he violated a trust, one that, had it become public, would have been harmed us even more. I had to take quick action to preserve the trust that our readers had in our reviews.
Trust has to be carefully nurtured and ruthlessly defended. It’s why TechCrunch fired the intern who asked for a MacBook in exchange for covering a new company. It’s why IDG moved quickly to cut off any association with Randall Kennedy and why Facebook has such a big problem on its hands with the hacking allegations against CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. It’s because:
If You Trade in Trust, Everything You Do or Say Is Relevant: At our live Diggnation show last weekend at SXSW in Austin, the wacky folks at URDB.Com convinced the crowd of 3,000-plus people to perpetrate a huge hoax — that Conan O’Brien was onstage and coming over to Revision3. Hundreds of partygoers tweeted out the “news,” and it quickly became the biggest Twitter hoax ever.
It was all fun and games, up to a point. Some pretty influential and trusted people tweeted and retweeted the hoax to their followers. Unfortunately, more than a few journalists saw tweets from people they had come to trust and were subsequently convinced that they had to be true. And once they discovered they’d been punk’d, they lashed out. In the end, more than one social media “expert” damaged their credibility by engaging in a little bit of pranksterism.
In Yelp’s case, that delicate tissue of trust has already been perforated — perhaps fatally. For even those of us that have willfully ignored the allegations against the site are ready to go elsewhere.
Jim Louderback is CEO of Revision3. He was previously vice president of Ziff Davis Media and Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine and PCMag.com.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
I don’t trust Yelp any more. And that’s not a conscious decision. I’ve largely ignored the well-publicized allegations of how the ad side manipulated ratings and reviews to drive sales, instead continuing to turn to the site for recommendations on everything from restaurants to plumbers to airport parking. But they’ve nonetheless seeped into my subconscious and tarred my view of the service. Indeed, Yelp is learning that trust is a hard thing to win, but amazingly easy to lose. And that’s why it needs to be protected with the corporate equivalent of the Praetorian Guard.
Here’s what happened: The other day I was looking for a decent long-term lot at San Jose Airport; Yelp’s recommendation page was near the top of Google, so I clicked over to check it out. As usual, I scanned the top 3-4 results, then read through the reviews of the most likely suspects. Quick Park SJC, ranked No. 1, seemed to have everything I needed -– a rating of over 3, pretty decent reviews and a nearby location.
But then I started looking more closely at those reviews -– and noticed an interesting pattern: There were a few from the last month or so, then nothing for nearly a year. And the last of that group was complaining about how the lot had recently raised prices and had a bit of a surly shuttle driver problem.
So why the gap? I didn’t know, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure this was such a great place to park. So I clicked over to TripAdvisor to look for airport parking information there. Since I couldn’t find any — and I was admittedly in a hurry — I ended up selecting Quik Park SJC after all. But I was far less sanguine about my choice. Yelp, alas, was no longer in my inner circle of trust.
Which leads me to three key trust rules:
Got a Problem? Deal With It Quickly: I learned that the hard way during my early years running the test lab at PC Week in the 90s. We had a columnist, Will Zachman, who was an ardent proponent of an early Windows competitor from IBM called OS/2. Microsoft, in those days, advertised incessantly in tech magazines, and Zachman felt that his editor was shaping his OS/2 diatribes to please Microsoft. So he publicly declared independence from the magazine on July 4th, accusing members of the business side of leaping over the “wall” and smacking down the EIC until he censored Zachman’s opinions to appease their biggest advertiser. Zachman had been kvetching about his supposed “censoring” for some time leading up to his Independence Day action, but the editorial team just ignored him — until it was too late.
Notably, I never saw any evidence supporting his accusations. Which leads me to my second tip:
Manage Not Just the Facts, But the Perception: Lack of evidence aside, just the merest whiff of perceived bias was enough to tar us with a wide brush. It took us a long time to cast off that perception. And that’s why, about a year later, I immediately fired a junior lab staffer who falsified test results, and not for money or influence, but because he was being run ragged by an overbearing manager. He was young. Impressionable. He probably only deserved a warning. But he violated a trust, one that, had it become public, would have been harmed us even more. I had to take quick action to preserve the trust that our readers had in our reviews.
Trust has to be carefully nurtured and ruthlessly defended. It’s why TechCrunch fired the intern who asked for a MacBook in exchange for covering a new company. It’s why IDG moved quickly to cut off any association with Randall Kennedy and why Facebook has such a big problem on its hands with the hacking allegations against CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. It’s because:
If You Trade in Trust, Everything You Do or Say Is Relevant: At our live Diggnation show last weekend at SXSW in Austin, the wacky folks at URDB.Com convinced the crowd of 3,000-plus people to perpetrate a huge hoax — that Conan O’Brien was onstage and coming over to Revision3. Hundreds of partygoers tweeted out the “news,” and it quickly became the biggest Twitter hoax ever.
It was all fun and games, up to a point. Some pretty influential and trusted people tweeted and retweeted the hoax to their followers. Unfortunately, more than a few journalists saw tweets from people they had come to trust and were subsequently convinced that they had to be true. And once they discovered they’d been punk’d, they lashed out. In the end, more than one social media “expert” damaged their credibility by engaging in a little bit of pranksterism.
In Yelp’s case, that delicate tissue of trust has already been perforated — perhaps fatally. For even those of us that have willfully ignored the allegations against the site are ready to go elsewhere.
Jim Louderback is CEO of Revision3. He was previously vice president of Ziff Davis Media and Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine and PCMag.com.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
