The Yelp Drama Continues

I’ve written several times about Yelp – a San Francisco based website that collects and publishes reviews about local small businesses in many cities across the country.  Naturally, restaurants are one of the most commonly reviewed businesses on the site. Over the past year a ...

Restaurant Marketing: Your Focus Shouldn’t Be On Social Media

I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin last week to do a restaurant marketing workshop for Sysco and was looking for a place to eat. Obviously in a strange town and no one around to make recommendations, I pulled out my trusty iPhone and downloaded the Yelp app.   Immediately, I got hundreds of restaurants with thousands of reviews. I searched for...

10 iPhone Apps Your Customers Are Using

iPhone apps are all the rage right now, and already there is an app for just about anything you can think of under the sun.  This includes the restaurant industry, and these 10 apps are affecting how consumers make their decisions on where and when to go out to eat, which directly affects your business. Here’s the top 10 ways people are getting...

Yelp Has Restaurant Owners Suspicious

The online restaurant review site Yelp has become increasingly suspicious to the small business owners who the site supposedly supports.  The website is based in San Francisco, where it is also the most popular, although Yelp does post reviews about restaurants in 24 cities across the United States. Restaurant and small business owners in San...

Is Yelp Helping or Hurting You?

If you responded to this question with a confused look and the response “What is Yelp?” then you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.  Forces have been at work that you didn’t even know about, and that can be a scary thing. Yelp is an online review site for restaurants, bars, retail stores, and spas.  Users post their reviews of these businesses, and many...