Collaborative Activity: Ethics & Business Credibility in Business Communication

Collaborative Activity: Ethics & Business Credibility in Business Communication
Kevin Robinson
University of phoenix

In this paper I am going to be talking about yelp and an even that questioned the ethics of the company. Yelp is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops, hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd source reviews about local businesses.” While watching the video attached to the article I see that people use yelp for everything to finding a restaurant to eat but also to find places to shop in my opinion it seems pretty interesting to use. In this article yelp has basically threated companies to pay them in order to get reviews to bring customers but if business would refuse then a business would get a lot of bad reviews and lose customers and mess their business up and business are saying that the situations is like blackmailing them out of money. They have filtered reviews which means that they personally edit reviews which give them opportunity to blackmail the business pay them in order to keep the customers coming when they don’t have to.
Some evidence I found about communication to the public would be when yelp decided to use the filtered reviews that gets to the public because of the fact that people use yelp to find places to eat and shop and when a place has a bad review then people don’t shop there because it’s on a website that people would believe is reliable. It was very effective for some restaurants because some refused to pay because of the fact because yelp is free and it’s a crowd source review restaurant which means that they are people’s opinions and it was authentic. It made it so effective because people started losing customers which caused some to pay and not others. I overall think it’s pretty bad that a company that already makes a lot of money off of people already needs more money from family owned business to make their business look better when they really don’t have to pay that money.
Reference
Abc news: http://abc7news.com/business/yelp-accused-of-unethical-business-practices-in-documentary/567458/