{"id":693,"date":"2013-06-24T07:40:27","date_gmt":"2013-06-23T21:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/?p=693"},"modified":"2013-07-25T16:40:14","modified_gmt":"2013-07-25T06:40:14","slug":"yelp-in-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/features\/yelp-in-australia\/","title":{"rendered":"Yelp in Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Yelp<\/div>\n

Image courtesy of twitter.com\/YelpBNE<\/a><\/p>\n

In Australia, there’s a relatively small pocket of location review apps worth giving a damn about. If you asked me eighteen months ago to name them, I would’ve said UrbanSpoon, Foursquare and\u00a0maybe<\/i>\u00a0Google Maps. Recently, an app has out-shone all of them for informed opinion & reviews in Brisbane.<\/p>\n

It’s Yelp<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You read that right; Yelp in Australia.<\/p>\n

That’s actually a fairly controversial statement. Lots of people I know don’t regard Yelp’s efforts in Australia to be\u00a0aggressive\u00a0enough. Their pool of data is too limited. Their choice to\u00a0disable reviews via mobile<\/a>\u00a0is archaic.<\/p>\n

I happen to disagree.\u00a0I think Yelp is playing a very different game than the other players in this space, and I think they’re doing it very well.<\/p>\n

Look at a Yelp review; what do you see? Smart people. Funny people. People who truly know their shit. Yet, they launched much later in Australia than everyone else. How in the hell did they pull that off?<\/p>\n

Well, there’s a story in that.<\/p>\n

\"Comparision<\/div>\n

Less, but better<\/h1>\n

Let’s take a look at a typical Brisbane sample.\u00a0This is\u00a0Carolina Kitchen<\/a>, a fairly small American-style diner not too far from where I live. The food is typically pretty good, but they definitely have their off-nights too. With that in mind, what kind of results do we get?<\/p>\n

Well, it’s a classic Goldilocks situation:\u00a0Foursquare<\/a> has tiny tidbits of info, but it’s all too short. UrbanSpoon<\/a>\u00a0has\u00a0way<\/em>\u00a0too much information to process, and covers the gamut from lengthy tirades to the succinct but unhelpful “WHAT HE SAID.”<\/p>\n

Yelp<\/a>\u00a0is somewhere in the middle; it has denser info than Foursquare, but less digital cruft than UrbanSpoon. The reviews are also much more readable, insightful & useful. I urge you to go\u00a0read them for yourselves.<\/p>\n

This is a pretty typical result when I analyse Brisbane locations through these services.\u00a0So I started asking myself; how exactly does Yelp get it’s users to write\u00a0better<\/i>\u00a0reviews?<\/p>\n

Well, turns out it’s the same way you get almost anyone to do almost anything. You\u00a0incentivize<\/em>\u00a0them!<\/p>\n

\"A<\/div>\n

Yelp’s Ground Game<\/h1>\n

Yelp launched in Brisbane around a year ago. They launch within a city in quite a unique way; by appointing a local Community Manager who works full-time on developing the scene in that city. That task boils down to working hard at a few main things:<\/p>\n