We work very closely with our customers, and reviews are a huge part of our strategy. We list all of the places customers can review us here. Yelp is the bain of review strategies. They are regarded as the most legitimate review company, but they also make it harder to leave reviews than any other site. Then, after all that, they call you and offer you advertising so that you can get more reviews that will be flagged by their spam filter. I do truly believe that they have de-coupled reviews from their ad sales, just as they claim they do, but I've also never seen a more aggressive ad sales team than Yelp, and it creates a huge amount of suspicion for those who aren't sure what Yelp is all about.
Anyhow, there are a few ways to get reviews to stick. We actually ask our users not to post on our Yelp page anymore unless they specifically tell us they have a Yelp account in good standing whose reviews stick. As you can see, that's very few people. Our page has 2 reviews (just as a point of fact, the 1-star review you see filtered was left by one of our competitors and we were very glad it got filtered, though it is upsetting that Yelp shows the negative reviews first in filtered section. That said, we have just as few Angie's List reviews, and the only reason it's less upsetting is because Angie's List is a bit of a walled garden. So, our expectation is that it's hard to get a review there. Just like Yelp, we only ask for an Angie's List review if someone indicates that they have an account on Angie's List. We also run the check against Angie's List accounts from time to time. The other, kind of odd strategy, that I have employed in the past for customers whom have a very good relationship with us, is I send them an email every 2 months asking them to basically use their Yelp account. Yelp's review filter works until Yelp decides the account as legitimate. This is done a lot of ways, but mainly, you need to convince the person to use the account. When I was doing agency, I had good results with that strategy.
