I’m noticing that a good 25% of my new patients each week are being referred to my clinic via a website called Yelp.com.

Yelp.com is a business review site where a person can sign up as a “yelper” and write reviews on businesses he/she patronized, such as restaurants, doctors offices, and beauty salons.  Yelp is available in most metropolitan regions (Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, etc.).  It is VERY popular in San Francisco where many people integrate hi tech into their lifestyles.

I believe that Yelp uses the phone directory to populate its database of businesses.  It has a search box where the visitor types in the Type of service he is looking for, and an adjacent box for the Location:

After creating a profile, a yelper can look up a business he recently tried out, and write a review.  He can give it anywhere from zero to 5 stars, with 5 being the best.

At first, no one really paid attention to Yelp, but as it grew in popularity, businesses took notice.  You see, if 50% of San Francisco residents consult Yelp when they look for businesses to try out, it all of a sudden assumes a big role in the success of a business.  The more positive reviews you accumulate, the higher you’ll rank for your business category when someone looks up your services.  If your competitor has 25 positive reviews and you have five, including a bad one, you are going to lose business to your competitor.

Yelp is good in the sense that it uses a “democratic” system to evalute businesses.   This is a far cry from the old Yellow Page ads that have no review information whatsoever.   The reviews are like votes, and the website has a way of compelling businesses to provide better service or risk getting a bad review on their profile.    Yelp has made businesses “more transparent”, so, if you are a business owner, especially a service business like chiropractic, there’s a good chance that many of your patients are Yelpers, so…. just be aware of the possiblities.

A few months back, a local chiropractor received a bad review from one of his patients.  Apparently, there was some miscommunication regarding billing policy, and the patient felt like the doctor was being dishonest.  The chiropractor sued the patient for false accusation and the case was settled out of court, but not before the lawsuit got a lot of publicity.  The chiropractor prevailed, but had to deal with some rather embarrassing and unwanted publicity.

This is a valuable lesson on the power and reach the internet has over businesses.  If you’re a consumer, such social media sites like Yelp.com are helpful in finding a good business; if you’re a business owner, it makes your business more transparent, which can be good, but also bad.    There will always be “difficult” customers/patients  you’ll run into every so often who you will not be able to satisfy no matter how well you treat them.  With Yelp, these individuals can now unfairly cause damage to your business by writing a bad review for others to read.  And in most cases, Yelp will NOT remove bad reviews upon request, unless there is substantial evidence that the writer is not being truthful.

One last thing, we’re talking internet here.  The other bad  effect of negative press online is that pages get indexed in Google’s database for all eternity.  So if you get bad publicity online, and a prospective customer decides to Google your name to see what comes up, guess what she’ll see?….

Dan P.