Small Business Unified

The Goal of Small Business Unified is to allow the voices of small businesses to be heard as we take control of our companies; particularly related to customer reviews and opinions projected on popular sites such as Yelp.com. The Small Business Unified is looking for Yelp to establish reviewer guidelines while providing quality control. Yelp is a up and coming site that needs to adapt and grow with the times. We talk about cyber bullying and this is cyber bullying in it’s rarest form: affecting not just one individual, but a large group of individuals working to sustain a small business as well as their livelihood. Reviews should contain realistic valuable critiques that focus on the quality of the food, services provided, or the atmosphere. Reviews should not personally attack individual employees or owners. Reviewers should also not be able to make acquisitions of discriminatory actions. A small business should not have to pay to gain control over their Yelp account in order to monitor their reviews. Facebook business pages allow companies to monitor reviews and ban users who leave comments unrelated to the services provided. Yelp should have a quality control over reviews and provide strict guidelines. The majority of the reviews are negative and do not critique the companies' service, but are attacking the managers, employees or owners. These reviewers are slowly destroying local small businesses during an economic hardship. Especially in city where the majority of customers are from out of town and go to yelp for local retail and restaurants. Many individuals view only the business’s Yelp star ratings and if they see a low star they simply scroll by without reading the good and bad reviews. Small businesses are slowly being destroyed by individuals who merely stop in to town, have a bad experience, write a review and leave. The reviewers does not think twice about leaving a bad review, but the business is forever scarred by the individuals comments. We talk about cyber bullying, this is cyber bullying in it’s rarest form: affecting not just one individual, but employee's jobs and companies' livelihood. Yelp is becoming more popular among consumers and therefore guidelines must be established and followed. Such guidelines could be formatted to ensure that if more than 3-5 people complain about a certain service or a certain problem then it becomes published without allowing free reign to sign onto yelp and destroy the integrity of a business Reviewers should be local and have to live within a 10 mile radius of the business in order to provide an adequate review and should meet certain guideline: 1. Reviewers cannot personally attack employees, managers or owners 2. Reviewers have to live within a 10 mile radius of the business (if they are visiting there is a different section for their review). 3. Reviewers cannot make claims of discrimination 4. In order for a business to receive a star, there must be at least 3-5 individuals who complain about a similar experience, food item or atmospheric event. (numbers depend on population size of the city) 5. A Cyber bullying format and quality control should be followed. 6. Business owner's are allowed to privately contact reviewers to rectify a situation. We are not talking about large corporations, we are talking about small businesses who rely on local individuals to frequent at their locations and have a pleasant experience, but never write a review. Small businesses should not have to pay Yelp in order to monitor their reviews, especially if they have the footage to combat a poor review. These are all merely suggestions and guidelines to be furthered developed by small businesses in order to take back our companies. If you agree that Yelp needs guidelines and you want to see true changes within the yelp organization, please sign the petition. We are looking for at minimum of 150 signatures to send directly to the CEO of yelp.