Metz, The Social Concept

Today's Meeting With Yelp

March 20, 2009

I generally sit down with all major social web brands every 2-3 months (Facebook, Google, Ning, Yelp, etc.), and try to obtain some level of a forecast about what’s going to be happening on their platforms (web, mobile, etc.) in the near future. I do this so that I can make accurate predictions and devise solid strategy for my clients. Since I work with a lot of lifestyle brands, I’m paying a little more attention to the use cases and scenarios for consumer-related review sites like Yelp and Amazon.

I’ve always been a little intrigued by my conversations with Yelp, and I feel that they’re always as transparent with me as possible, in terms of detailing plans for their API and their growing international expansion (U.K. & Canada). The utility that users in more remote locales are deriving from the property is also consistently increasing (think: medium-sized cities like Madison, Wisconsin or Raleigh, NC).

Although many of my East Coast and MidWest clients downplay the size and scope of Yelp’s influence, the site’s largely consistent growth over the last few years doesn’t dissuade me from taking the company very seriously (it’s looking like it’s now scraping the bottom of the Top 50 on the web, and about 3-4x the size of Twitter’s total traffic). Yelp’s notoriety rose locally in the last few weeks, as a recent East Bay Express story, Yelp and the Business Of Extortion 2.0 , cast a very mixed light on the brand. I was pretty impressed by the company’s response, both in the story, and afterward.

So, here’s what I’d like to focus on in today’s meeting:

1. Figuring out ways that Yelp advertisers can embed complex apps and and video in their profile pages

2. Figuring out ways that Yelp users can create more interactive content (i.e. linking it out to other social graph APIs)

3. Figuring out how “licensed partners” can fully leverage the Yelp API to create content mash-ups, without restriction

If you have any other ideas for items that I should add to the agenda when my contact from Yelp drops by the office, add them as comments from the list.

To read directly from the Yelp blog, direct your browser over here . One of my favorite posts is 9 Myths About Yelp , which dispels much of the BS and brouhaha that I’ve heard over the last three years.

Although the brand is still yet to show a profit, they still wield a powerful influence for medium and large metro customers of lifestyle brands, and I look forward to a long and interesting relationship with this company. They know their audience, they know their niche, and they do a great job delivering awesome content to consumers and the brands that serve them.

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