Recently news broke of Yelp threatening to manipulate user reviews if business owners did not advertise on their site. For those of you who don’t know Yelp is a popular Social Networking site that offers user reviews and recommendations of restaurants, night spots and more. There is more to this story that is coming out. For now the finger pointing continues from both sides- business owners and Yelp.

Why Bad

If this story is true Yelp completely undermined the value of its platform. One of the fundamentals of Social Networking is users talking to other users via a medium with little to no moderation. What would you think if Facebook manipulated your statuses? Take it a step further and if Twitter placed content in your tweets or redirected traffic to another site from your links? You would not use that site anymore to post or to read updates because you will always question if your friend or peer posted it or if someone else was behind it.

What Can Help

To stave off this abuse business owners have used technology to their advantage by creating Anti-Yelp sites. But what should the Social Media community do, if anything? Ask for more transparency from sites like Yelp and others? Demand that the reviews are 100% user generated and 100% free from bias of the platform it is on? Not sure what the answer is but sites that want to keep users coming back for user generated reviews and content need to keep one thing in mind – THE USERS WILL MAKE OR BREAK YOU. Treat them right!

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