Yelping for Dollars

To attract writers in new cities, the social network cum city guide is hiring freelancers to play the part of enthusiastic fans

by Burt Helm

When chemistry graduate student Lisa Green walked into her first party hosted by review site Yelp.com, she was impressed—and relieved. The scene was Oola, a restaurant and bar in San Francisco's SOMA district. Waiters circulated trays of seared tuna and truffle-soaked French fries. Hip twenty- and thirtysomethings sipped pomegranate-and-vodka cocktails and watermelon cosmopolitans. Nowhere were the Internet nerds Green secretly feared she'd find.

For four weeks, Green had been volunteering her writing services for Yelp, which draws its lifeblood from users' unvarnished reviews of local shops, eateries, and services across the country. The evening out was her just desserts, and it's one of many ways Yelp keeps users like Green engaged. "These were fun, outgoing people, definitely people I wanted to be friends with," she says. "I don't think I would have continued if they hadn't been." The efforts are paying off. Since that party in June, 2005, Green has written more than 200 reviews for the site and she's among the legions who helped turn Yelp into a San Francisco phenomenon to rival Zagat's.

Now founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons want to replicate that success across the U.S. "There's no reason this couldn't be a local destination site for every big city in America," Simmons says. And they're using a small part of the $16 million in venture capital they've raised to create a sophisticated system of compensation that could create a model for building buzz around a fledgling Web site—or test the limits of paying users to contribute online content.

Attracting Users

Here's how it works: To help get established in a new locale, Yelp recruits paid "marketing assistants," to promote the site not only through everyday interaction, but also by kicking off online discussions and adding comments to other people's reviews to encourage reviewers to keep up the good work. Essentially, they help make Yelp appear to be a vibrant and outgoing community in hopes that it will actually become one. In some cities, higher-level community managers handle some of those same tasks, but also coordinate social events.

Accountant and freelance writer Maria Christensen, 42, played that role to help get Yelp established in Seattle, working 10 to 20 hours a week for $15 an hour. "We'd watch [the user base] grow from a handful to a few hundred, to more," she says. The marketing assistants are also encouraged to write reviews, but that's not their main job. Yelp tried paying $1 a pop for reviews in new cities, but that often failed to yield quality content.

Yelp's strategy cuts to the heart of the challenge facing companies that want to harness the power of online social networks: how to attract users to a site, and once there, have them stay plugged in—and even do your work for you. When it works, armies of volunteers can create massive encyclopedias like Wikipedia or sprawling online communities like News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace. When it fails, a site can quickly fade out of view. Just ask Friendster. Yelp's task is especially daunting because it has to create that spark in every city it enters. After all, it's competing with the likes of Zagat's or IAC/InterActiveCorp's (IACI) CitySearch, which combines user reviews with those produced by professionals.

User or Used?

Some reviewers may be turned off by the notion that an ostensibly disinterested fellow user is getting paid to compliment their writing. Two marketing assistants interviewed by BusinessWeek.com said that while they would tell anyone who asked that they worked for Yelp, they didn't always disclose it when interacting with users. Owning up to working for Yelp felt "weird," says Christensen. "I don't think most people knew that I was an employee…We were mostly keeping that quiet ahead of when a full-time Yelp marketing person was hired in Seattle." Yelp Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker says to his knowledge, the site hasn't "encountered any negative user feedback about either community management or the marketing assistants in our new cities."

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