ad:tech New York Speaker Interview:
Yelp Builds Reviews, Traffic: 6 Practical Tactics

With social sites, local sponsored search listings, local classified listings and a host of business review sites all competing for eyeballs, Yelp is attracting the important 25- to 35-year-old crowd by taking a bit of Zagat and adding a dash of MySpace.

Members combine personal profiles with their reviews of all types of businesses in their cities … everything from plumbers to nail salons (and restaurants and bars, too). "Some of the purely social network sites have appealed to the younger person, [whereas] this is going to appeal to someone who has a disposable income," says COO Geoff Donaker.

The 2-year-old site focused on building membership and reviews in San Francisco before expanding to other cities about a year ago. Last October, the site had 100,000 unique visitors; it's now up to 1.5 million unique visitors as of August.

Donaker shares his team's six strategies for success:

Strategy #1: Make the experience about the user

Members are extremely active on the Yelp site because they're made to feel important. "They really take pride in writing, so we turn the spotlight back on those users," Donaker says.

Users can customize their profiles and add photos, friends, business reviews and lists. This way the member pages are their own content, "rather than Yelp-controlled marketing vehicles," Donaker says.

Everything from Yelp's site design to its marketing is set up in a way that allows members to share their views but not forced to share them by incentives or rules. As a result, the reviews are very personal -- a member recently rated the women's restrooms at Nordstrom's in San Francisco as the best restrooms downtown -- as opposed to stoic business reviews on other sites and directories.

"This is not a site where you're trying to figure out what is the highest rated fine dining establishment. Instead, for the 20 people who reviewed this restaurant, what was their experience?" Donaker says.

Two tactics his team used to build the user experience:

•	To entice reviewers to keep reviewing, they added a rolling count of the number of reviews each member has done as well as counting the number of page views each profile gets from other Yelpers and non-registered visitors (to make them feel like stars). They also give special notice for being the first person to review a location.
•	To focus users' attention, they kept the interface specific on one task so they're either "Looking for a [type of business] near [location X] or "Recommending {name of business] located at [location Y}."

Strategy #2. Get bloggers actively involved

Word of mouth and search engine optimization is how the site has received most of its traffic. But Donaker's team also turned to the blogger community to drive traffic by letting the site's interface provide a small map that bloggers can embed showing locations they've recently reviewed.

The tactic worked: Yelp now has 1.28 million links from 14,372 blogs, according to Technorati.

Strategy #3. Go mobile

Yelp partnered with Palm Treo to create a mobile version to deliver local news, content and maps on the Treo or any Web-enabled phone. Mirroring Yelp's Web site, Yelp Mobile lets members download information on a business as they drive by.

The search lets users browse businesses by category or neighborhood. It also offers standard directory information, a map of the business's location and the surrounding five-block radius, Yelp's star rating, reviews from others in the Yelp community and images of reviewers and business photos (available only on Treo phones).

Strategy #4. Focus on local

Instead of branching out nationally, Yelp is building local communities city by city. After San Francisco, Donaker's team expanded reviews and local communities to include Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York, although users can post and read reviews in other cities, too.

Building critical mass helps form a more complete city guide, which generates more reviews.

The passive philosophy is paying off. Users have posted 150,000 reviews on San Francisco businesses and about 5,000 on each its other core communities. The average business has more than three reviews, although some of the most popular businesses have more than 100.

Strategy #5. Be choosey about your partners

Six months ago, Donaker's team added sponsored ad listings -- similar to Google's sponsored listings -- in the San Francisco market. But, they only accept ones from "highly reviewed" businesses. Qualifying businesses must have three stars or better. "We don't think it helps to promote someone with bad reviews for them or for us."

After adding sponsored listings, Yelp is "marginally profitable" in San Francisco, Donaker says.

Strategy #6. Parties and the Yelp Elite Squad

In an unusual marketing move, Yelp also hosts parties to introduce prospective new members to the site. They also put together the Yelp Elite Squad, which seeks out top reviewers, influencers and trendsetters, to keep the community going.

Press has also helped spread the word: numerous technical magazines as well Forbes and other national publications have covered Yelp and its founders.

Note: Geoff Donaker is speaking ad November's ad:tech in New York. For information, visit www.ad-tech.com.