Today, our minds automatically go to facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. when someone uses the words "social network." The Rudin/Sorkin/Fincher team made a movie about Mark "I-violate-your-constitutional-rights" Zuckerberg and used those words as a title!
And it's absolutely ridiculous, because establishing and maintaining connections with friends and "the right people" have been vital for the human species since, like, forever. Folks have always built their settlements, villages, towns, and cities with designated places for meetings. Back in the day (and I don't mean the 1980s), households accepted visitors on certain days of the week; and even on a random day one could come by and leave a calling card with the family's help. And who can deny that, ever since the first Industrial Revolution, the patterns of commercial and financial developments were determined by the who-knows-who principle. It's just that the outreach was far more limited.
Of course, the magnitude of Internet networking is breathtaking. In the early 1990s, when the Internet has connected all seven continents, the miracle of instant world-wide access to knowledge, culture, entertainment, or people was the most important and alluring aspect of this new technology for me. I still experience a thrill every time I look at this blog's dashboard and see that during the last 24 hours my posts have been read not just at home, but also in Denmark, Canada, Germany, South Africa, UK, Vietnam, Australia, Portugal, Spain, India, France, and Taiwan. I love it.
Yet, I hate facebook and Twitter. Okay, push your eyebrows back down and let me explain. I don't hate social networking per se: It's convenient to receive updates on your favorite artists and it's important for business: I've been on LinkedIn since the times it operated exclusively on the basis of professional invitations. But I abhor the contemporary "social network" phenomenon and what it represents: the unrestrained hunger for attention, the vile combination of pathological exhibitionism and a sickly kind of voyeurism; the violation of privacy and the desire to be violated. I cannot stand the stalking by exes, the spying by employers, the snooping by the government agencies – all that shit.
That said, there are some companies with one or another form of social networking at their cores, which I consider not only healthy, but also greatly important due to their positive impact on the commercial environment, especially the consumer sector. I'm not naive and I don't think that any of the entrepreneurs behind these businesses consciously elected to influence the quality of goods and services. Most likely they simply shaped their business models utilizing the exploding patterns of collective participation in the Internet experience, but in the process they unwittingly created an influential force that has a power of strengthening and weakening businesses.
In 1979, Tim and Nina Zagat started imploring their friends into scoring restaurants they visited, eventually turning their social pastime into a ranking business, which was bought by Google in 2011 for a reported $151 million. Being an old-fashioned medium from the start, however, it remained the same under the new high-tech ownership: It's still unclear how the rankings are formulated.
It was Pierre Omidyar's hobby-project turned international conglomerate with an annual revenue of $14 billion, aka eBay that pioneered the concept of building market-place reputations based on the fully-disclosed opinions of the "community members," i.e. users of the eBay services. While everyone was screaming (understandably so) that people will cheat, lie and steal, eBay founders stuck to the most fundamental of the commercial principles: in order to succeed you need to keep your ratings high, because one unresolved accusation of unsavory practices may kill your future transactions for good. It's like what G.W. Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."
Today, thanks to rating algorithms utilized by various online businesses, we came to rely on communal ratings and individual opinions whenever we buy electronics, computers, household appliances, books, or select entertainment on Netflix, or order food delivery on Seamless, or pick a hotel on TripAdvisor, or make decisions about telecommunications providers. Many of us not only peruse the viewpoints of others, but also actively participate in the polling process by sharing our own thoughts about this or that product, service, establishment, thus affecting a new system of commercial quality control.
It is safe to say, in my opinion, that Yelp has become a flagship of the communal marketing model. Again, not because the ideas of commercial quality control and merit-based rewards are so important to them, but for the sake of the advertising income ($138 million in 2012). Nevertheless, assessing performance and assigning rewards (aka ratings) is exactly what "yelpers" (members expressing their opinions) do.
A few unique traits place Yelp, Inc. in the avant-garde of this movement. They encompass a wide spectrum of consumer services. Right now you can find referrals on businesses in 20 main categories – from restaurants to religious organizations, further subdivided into specialties. In less than 10 years they have achieved an international magnitude. The listings are essentially combined efforts: detailed information about the business is provided by the commercial participants themselves (for a fee) and consumers supply their reviews, photos, and ratings. The search engine is geographically oriented allowing users to find what's around them on the map.
Also, Yelp, Inc. claims that they use an "aggressive" reviews filter, which rejects posts that are suspected to be biased or false. As a result, according to their public releases, about 25% of entries are being dismissed. And I can appreciate that. Like I said, rendering communal judgments on commercial establishments is a serious matter: ultimately it has a power of affecting the livelihood of individual businessmen. So, the filtering is great as long as Yelp conducts their selections, rejections, and other manipulations fairly and without prejudice.
Unfortunately, as with everything touched by greed, the communal quality control as executed by Yelp, Inc. may be seriously misused. While I was writing this piece, TypePad's "related-posts" function has presented me with a few reports (including the one attached below) accusing Yelp of manipulating reviews in exchange for business clients' participation in the site's advertising programs (you can also read about it on Wikipedia). And that's criminal. Not only because it's nothing short of blackmail, but also because, by using individual consumers' personal and freely expressed opinions in this unsavory process, Yelp corrupts the participants' intellectual property and constitutional rights. I sure as hell hope that these accusations are not true. If they are, yelpers should file a class-action suit to bar Yelp, Inc. from using their reviews as the means of racketeering.
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