Good Grape Wine Company

July 2 2007

Yelping with the Wisdom of Crowds

I did a post late last week for the Inertia Beverage Group blog that got caught in the middle of three or four other worthwhile posts.  At the same time, I read the San Francisco Chronicle article online in which Chef Mario Batali rebukes irresponsible bloggers.  The Yelp.com post I did for my employ and the nature of blogging and online conversations, vis a vis the Batali rant, kind of go hand in hand, so I’m doing pretty much a full cross-post here of my post from last week.  I’ve annotated and edited the entry that was previously meant for wineries, for relevance here. 

There are some intractable truths in life:

1)  Mario Batali is the only Food Network chef with still intact day-to-day in the restaurant cooking chops

2)  Word of mouth marketing can drive business (or a restaurant)

3)  If an article is published in USA Today, you can be certain that the topic of the article has reached a critical mass

So it was a couple of weeks ago when I read an article in the June 13th issue of the USA Today that highlighted the online user review site Yelp.com.  Last week, I read this tasty nugget from a blog post Chef Mario Batali wrote on the restaurant blog site Eater.  Batali says, in part:

blogs live by different rules. Many of the anonymous authors who vent on blogs rant their snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the web. This allows them a peculiar and nasty vocabulary that seems to be taken as truth by virtue of the fact that it has been printed somewhere.

This is germane because of a new user-generated review site called Yelp.com.

Yelp is bringing the Amazon.com concept of user-generated reviews to the local business market.  Now, Bob’s Dry Cleaning, Joe’s Auto Repair, a restaurant or a tasting room can be exhorted or skewered for everybody to see in a democratizing populist kind of way. 

According to the article, “Yelpers” as the users are known, have written more than 1 million reviews since the site launched in 2004.  And, more importantly, 500,000 reviews have been written in the past four months—indicating critical mass.

In addition, according to the article, the Yelp’s audience has grown 124% from May to May, according to Nielsen/NetRatings and monthly visitors have increased to over 1M

I did a quick search on the traffic rankings at http://www.alexa.com and Yelp is the 1,777 highest-trafficked web site on the web.  This is encroaching elite site status.

Not sure what to expect, I went to Yelp.com to do a search on “wine” for Napa, Healdsburg, and Paso Robles, CA.

You better believe that people are talking about restaurants and winery tasting rooms, their visit and their experience at Yelp.com—many, many people are doing so.

Just as most if not all of the readers of this blog who have purchased a book from Amazon.com have been dissuaded from purchasing a book that got a lousy consumer review, so too are people reading Yelp before they plan their dining excursions or their tasting trip to Napa Valley, Sonoma or the Central Coast.

I won’t name names, but your own search will yield some of the same reviews that I saw regarding winery tasting rooms.  Just for reference I checked New York, NY and Batali’s lead restaurant, Babbo, where the restaurant received 4.5 out of 5 stars in aggregate.

Overall, I think Batali might be over-reacting.  Online word of mouth is the same as regular word of mouth, except you can now be privy to it—kind of the way Simon Cowell gives the medicine straight, with no chaser on American Idol.  Most everybody has a tender sensibility in some form.

For a completely different take on Batali trying to cut-out an online disintermediation play, read this current Business 2.0 article.

What do you think about user-generated reviews?  Do they influence your decision-making?  Would they stop you going from a winery tasting room, a restaurant?

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