Check out my interview with Glen Andrews on Blog Talk Radio. Simply click the Blog Talk Radio image below. We discussed how Salon owners can use social media and other online tools to reach more people, build relationships with customers & prospects, and drive sales. Please leave me some feedback on how you think the interview went.
During the recording, Blog Talk Radio experienced technical difficulties, so Glen couldn’t hear me at first. We aren’t able to alter the file, so you may want to listen to the 1st minute and then mute it until 2 minutes & 45 seconds in (or just wait, but definitely don’t leave the page – I do come on).
Yes, I got an email from yelp that a customer rated my services as a hairdresser at my salon. I talked about the fact that it happened to some other customers but didn’t ask them to and they rated the salon as well. I signed up to see how the service works and did write a review but it came down after awhile. I think there is a way they can tell if it is a ‘fake’ review. I have had the majority of my new customers say to me they found the salon through web searches and reading reviews. Now I am signed up as a business owner. I uploaded photos, bios, and was even able to put an offer on yelp to help bring in new customers with a cash off offer to help in these hard economic times. A nice thing about the business owner feature is that you can see how many hits you are receiving it is quite interesting to see the trends and to see that this summer was a very tough time for us as we received hardly any views to our profile. I would love to hear from others on how they use Yelp or any other sites to drive new business.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/matthew-ray-salon-burbank
James Jordan
http://www.matthewraysalon.com
Update on this…. So now ALL the reviews we recieved on YELP are now gone. I contacted their customer service department. We had about 9 reviews from customers of the salon. They are now all gone. The customer service person said that they have some software that eliminate ’suspicious’ reviews. Basically if your clients aren’t YELP addicts, then their reviews are not posted and eliminated. The sneaky part of it is that when the customer looks at their own profile it shows the review on their review list. But if you search the business it will not appear. So, on google we rank really low as a search result. But on Bing and others we rank high. We are the second salon listed for Burbank on local yahoo. But on YELP and Google we don’t even come up. Very interesting!!! Basically it comes down to paying for your listing. I did an ad on Google for a few weeks to get in the sidebar but we only got 75 clicks and no confirmed customers from it. I get better results from Linkedin, Facebook, and other directory sites.
James – I suggest you speak with @lutherlowe on Twitter. He works for Yelp and I spent some time speaking with him about Yelp and it’s policies. He explained your situation and it is unfortunate that the reviews were removed. His explanation makes sense to me, but I don’t want to misrepresent it, which is why perhaps you should speak with him. Yelp is a great tool, but there are limits with everything. I would be frustrated if legitimate reviews were removed from my profile, but I think it may be worth it to ensure spam doesn’t occur (or at least is eliminated). Let me know how it works out. Thanks for taking the time to post a comment and read the post! Happy New Year.