After my adoptive mum died in 2011, I joined Yelp and started contributing. I made such a splash that the Community Manager bumped me up to Elite status.
I've spent time making truthful reviews. I don't like surprises the first time I visit a restaurant or store, so I would rather avoid places that have a negative experience attached.
A few times when I've written a review, I've been threatened. It's a little surprising because I didn't cause the business to treat me poorly or serve me bad food. It happened for whatever reason, and I was just telling about my experience.
Yelp had some heavy-handed tactics about advertising and I found that when I moved to my current location. The furniture store where I bought some furniture was marked Closed. My review suggested that they were quite open. My spending a few hundred dollars confirmed that.
The other day, some local friends, an elderly couple and I went to an Italian restaurant. I've been wanting Italian food since I left Philadelphia, where there are probably 150 mom-and-pop Italian restaurants. It didn't quite work out.
I wrote my review and tried my best to be nice. The restaurant got 8202 views since my review, and 2659 views since my three photos were uploaded. How did I have that much of an impact? I have a handful of Yelp friends and a few more Followers but none in the thousands. Only one of my Yelp friends even noticed it enough to respond.
I have around 1800 reviews all over the country and around 2300 photos, none of which has gotten more than a few responses. Maybe, it's a calculation error, 10 times what really happened.
I'll continue to write reviews. Who knows what will happen?
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