Yelp useful or not.

I use it but try to weed through the BS. Less about the review content than to see what the search turns up, mostly restaurants. If a place pops up with really good or bad ratings I will take a look. I will posts reviews for places that deserve one good or bad but try to avoid the obvious. If a place rates 3 stars really not much to say other than yeah I was there.

As a small biz owner I feel bad about the beating some places take but I get it. I've been to restaurants that were so unbelievably bad I wonder how they stay open and I've done biz with shops in town so bad I had to serve them with a summons to get them to honor warranties. Fortunately we don't get many on-line reviews. But I do get the sales calls from those sites. Their "incentives" for subscribing are tantamount to mob protection rackets.

That said like Amazon some of the reviews are gut busting funny.

I'm not a huge Yelp fan......as you said, a lack of consistency with what I've found myself.

FWIW though, for hotels and restaurants, I LOVE Trip Advisor.

Some of the golf course reviews I've read have been high comedy. We get guys that encounter one unrepaired pitch mark that write a 1000 word harangue about a $28 local muni.

I'll use Yelp. If I'm somewhere that I'm not familiar with, I'll use it to get an idea of what's around me. I won't trust the 5 star reviews just like I won't trust the 1 star reviews. I'll compare reviews from Yelp, Amazon, Google, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Bing to try to get a balance of how a business really is... some people are impossible to please and will note it online in several paragraphs that their soup was cold or it was raining and they weren't able to sit outside because the patio was wet...

This works for me for businesses... and if I have a good experience, I'll leave a good review. If it's not so good, I'll leave that in a review and vote with my $$ and my feet and not return.

Bumping this to ask the question again but expanding it to any social media site with reviews. The reason we recently received a negative one, I own a small biz. The customer is a total nut and I'm not sure a response will make it better.

So I ask if you read an over the top negative review about a biz would you think the reviewer is an idiot or would you think there is some degree of truth to it and avoid the business. To give you some history we repaired a customers car on our dime, paid to have it towed and got everything done in less than 24 hours. The customer claims we stole, get this, his floor mats and siphoned his gas. I assure you neither happened here. His vehicle was however left on the side of the road, unlocked, key stashed in it, before we sent a tow truck.

Strangely he didn't make a fuss about it until he'd had the truck back in his possession for a day. He called and asked about it so we asked our mechanic if he'd taken the mats out to avoid getting grease on them or something. He said there were no mats in it. We actually have a stack of floor mats in the shop and offered to let him choose from those but he declined saying his mats were Denver Bronco mats and very dear to him. It's at this point I realize I am dealing with a nut so I do my best to end the conversation without a confrontation.

Not sure why I looked but must have been a gut feeling to Google us and sure enough a several paragraph rant accusing us of stealing his freakin' Bronco mats. The odd thing is he goes into detail about how we fixed his vehicle without question then gets all creepy about the mats. So what we spend $300-350 to keep a customer happy and can't control our lust for cheesy $30 team logo floor mats? Dude is mental I could have told him to pound sand and fix the truck himself, we had no obligation to help it's just how we roll. In the previous conversation he accused us of burning his gas but in the review it's escalated to he had a full tank and he accuses us of stealing that too. I have flagged it as inappropriate because not only is it frivolous but he names a few of our employees in it.

Yes, what he said. I think as social media and all this technology gets implemented that is supposed to "help" us be more efficient, we are all starting to realize that it is a huge megaphone for the disenchanted. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, and when there are incentives, you get more of that behavior.  Plus venting just makes the crazies feel good or something.

Whether or not that consoles you, I doubt it. My brother in law owns a restaurant, and he fumes over this exact thing. My most recent contractor to renovate our master bath told me the same thing. As a small business, his life is supposed to be easier with Angie's List, Yelp, etc.... Nope. It has exponentially made it worse, because now they have to devote a ton of resources into soothing the customers who are ridiculously unreasonable- sometimes not even customers. Just people who THOUGHT about using their service or go to their restaurant.

I feel for you, but I don't know the solution, other than we should all take these reviews with a grain of salt, and hope that reason wins out.

I never trust Yelp.

I don't even like looking at their review as they are all about profits.

I read them from time to time and it's so easy to spot someone who knows absolutely nothing about golf try and complain about completely normal daily business.