“ SAY NO TO YELP!”

E-Z Movers Says “ SAY NO TO YELP!”

E-Z Movers, a Chicago-based moving company, is disappointed to announce they have canceled their agreement with Yelp!, a San Francisco Web 2.0 company that operates a social networking, user review, and local search web site of the same name.

E-Z Movers is always looking to grow and create prominent relationships. The sponsorship with Yelp! Inc. was believed to help the business attract new customers and communicate with their past customers. E-Z Movers in return would provide excellent customer and moving services. Believed that Yelp! was supposed to simply help give you a path to communicate with your consumers which would improve your business but it did exactly opposite! Here is a letter from Yelp to E-Z Movers regarding the reviews on Yelp.


Dear Mr. Steiner,

Thanks for contacting us about the reviews of your client, E-Z Movers (Skokie, IL) on Yelp. As your client 's Yelp account manager may have mentioned to your client previously, we can all agree that some reviewers are more credible than others. For the most part, users can decide for themselves which reviewers they trust the most. We remove some of the guesswork by screening out reviews that are written by less established users. The process is entirely automated to avoid human bias, and it affects both positive and negative reviews. Since users can become more or less established over time, their reviews can disappear and reappear over time, as well.

Either way, we never actually delete these reviews, and they can still be found on the reviewer’s personal profile page. With regards to your request to reinstate reviews, because the review filter is completely automated, we unfortunately
don't have the ability to evaluate or reinstate specific reviews. We recognize that this system proves frustrating for some because it sometimes affects perfectly legitimate reviews. The flip side is that it helps protect against fake reviews from malicious competitors and disgruntled former employees. We also wanted to point out that the Communications Decency Act bars "lawsuits seeking to hold a service provider
liable for its exercise of a publisher's traditional editorial functions - such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone, or alter content." Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327, 330 (4th Cir. 1997).

Ultimately, the actions that Yelp takes with respect to the reviews on the site are specifically designed to help consumers, and we repeatedly see that the most successful businesses on our site (advertisers or not) embrace it and use it as a means to communicate with their customers and improve their businesses.

Regards,
Pam
Yelp User Support
San Francisco, California


Becoming a sponsor of Yelp! was supposed to be a very effective and great experience. Advertisers, called "Sponsors" on the site, are supposed to be allowed to highlight a specific review and communicate with reviewers.
E-Z Movers has worked with them for some time now and becoming a Yelp sponsor didn’t work for them like they thought it would.

The suppression of a great many favorable reviews of E-Z Movers and posting of the few bad reviews has been misleading of the service, negatively rather than positively. The screening of reviews is misleading and is plain out not nice. Maybe Yelp! should just post all reviews and let the consumers decide for themselves! So, E-Z Movers says “Say No to Yelp!” it’s misleading and can hurt your business.
Yelp has been disapproved of over the unfairness of bad reviews on the site. Yelp says that it will not censor user comments, yet it removes good and bad reviews that are considered "suspicious". What is “suspicious”?