Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Yelp blew it with video

Yelp recently announced that it would add the ability for it's users to upload videos. Yelp blew it for multiple reasons in my opinion.

First, understand that Smartphones are already a thorn in the side of many businesses.  In Yelp's main playground (restaurants), not only do they cause tremendous delay in the whole customer experience (people put wait staff on hold while they take selfies, etc), but more importantly for Yelp - Restaurants (and other small businesses) HATE Yelp. Now a business may or may not have a legitimate gripe with their online reviews, that's a different issue.  But for Yelp the issue is that businesses that should be advertising and embracing Yelp disdain it. 

Instead, Yelp should have made the ability to upload videos available to the business, not the consumer.  Yelp wins two ways.  Yelp has now thrown businesses a peace offering, a tool if you will to make their product or service appear better on the Yelp platform.  Yelp then also has the ability to sell yet another product offering to their businesses - their real bread and butter customers.

Maybe Foursquare will take the ball and run with it.  What do you think?


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