Community
Yelp combines local reviews and social networking functionality to create a local online community. Adding social web functionality to user reviews creates a reputation system, whereby site visitors can see which contributing users are the most popular, respected, and prolific, how long each has been a member, and which have interests similar to theirs. Peer feedback mechanisms, and placement of popular reviews on the site and in local market Yelp newsletters help motivate contributors. Business owners can also communicate with contributors who post reviews on their page via messages or public comments. Yelp also has a "First to Review" reward system to create a competition among contributing members, further motivating the creation of reviews and adding to the site's business coverage. Yelp allows real people to contribute their own reviews. This body of social reviews creates a participatory culture where anyone can share their insight and suggestions and add to a body of “collective intelligence” on local businesses by using their personal knowledge and skill sets to post, revise, and discuss content on an ongoing basis. Essentially, this form of intelligence allows people to actively participate and share their knowledge with other users.
The company strengthens the online community through off-line events at nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and cultural venues in various cities for its most prolific and loyal contributors, named "Elite" members on the site. These members must provide a photo and their real name, be at least of legal drinking age, and not own a local business. In return these members receive a special badge on their personalized page for every year they author a specific number of reviews or contribute to the improvement of the online community. The concept is meant to indicate that the user is a trusted author of business reviews. To gain Elite status, it is often helpful to be nominated by other Elite users but recognition is bestowed when one writes useful, funny or cool reviews so members can vote on those reviews.
The site also has a forum for online socialization and to discuss local businesses and events.
A number of competitors emulating Yelp concepts have failed or were acquired.
Yelp's use of social media, through Yelp TALK and Yelp MESSAGING offers yelpers' the ability to connect on a more personal level within the virtual review community. The site is most active in the United States in larger cities but is becoming more internationally global with Europe as the most prominent Yelp hub.
Read more about this topic: Yelp, Inc., Products and Services
Famous quotes containing the word community:
“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (20th century)
“He thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than the individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate, so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from preponderating.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)